Skip to main content

Fisk

Robert Fisk has a magnum opus out and it has been reviewed to my liking in this week's DAWN. The title is The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (ISBN 1-84115-007-X). Some of the excerpts from the review point towards the nature of the content and I must say they are interesting enough to make the book reach my wishlist.
...As a war correspondent, Fisk has covered every war during the last 30 years in the Middle East and on its periphery from Afghanistan, Algeria and Nagorno-Karabakh to the Islamic heartland between the Gulf and the Mediterranean, a land drenched with blood: the countless Israeli raids into Lebanon, including the 1982 invasion, the Lebanese civil war, Hafez al Assads crackdown on Muslim Brothers in Hama, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Kuwait war, Hizbollahs resistance to Israel in south Lebanon and the Iraq war. It is a personal account of the wars juxtaposed with history...
...Fisks magnum opus is more than a history of modern Middle East, as his powerful pen churns out page after page of what looks like a gripping novel, with war, diplomacy, espionage, adventure, history and drama all rolled into one...
...The theme he returns to time and again is the moral bankruptcy of the Wests policy toward the Muslim world since the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the deceit inherent in the incompatibility between the Sykes-Picot pact and the Balfour declaration on the one hand and the promises made to the Hashemites on the other. That duplicity, he avers, has continued till this day and is to be seen in Americas blind support to Israel and the attack on Iraq...

Some corrections need to be made
...There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet is not the first sentence of the Koran (p 758). In fact, such a verse is not to be found anywhere in the holy book. The nearest verse is in Sura 48 (Fathh), which says Muhammad is Allahs prophet (verse 29). Also the name of the Arab general at Qadsiya was not Ibn Ali Waqas but Ibn Abi Waqas (p 251). Pakistans poet-philosopher Allama Mohammad Iqbal was born at Sialkot not Surkhot (p 1062), it should be foreign not home secretary (p 1147); the year should be 1917 not 1918 (p 1193), the name Abu Zaher (p 351) needs to be checked. It could be Abu Dhar...

You can read the full review here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning Arduino 1

This holiday season I decided to gift myself some basic electrical components in the form of a Arduino UNO set from Elegoo. I have always had a desire to tinker with electronics and in gifting myself this basic set I am now starting on a journey to quench my inner electrical workman's thirst. I hope to develop this hobby as I move forward and will, from time to time, post about it here on the blog. As the journey moves forward I am sure to run into trouble and issues. But as they say you can not master anything without first being a fool at it, so I have decided to remain a fool at it until I am a little good at it. To start with, I do possess some elementary knowledge in electronics and electronic circuits. I intend to further my knowledge using the world wide web and following some very useful video channels on youtube. I will first start with some very basic projects to familiarize myself with Arduino and basic electronic circuits and techniques such as soldering. Then graduall...
Post a Comment
Read more

XBOX ONE controller

I have been using the new xbox for many days now. The most important part of the console is obviously it's controller as this is the part we interact with most. In comparison to the xbox 360 controller the build quality of this controller seems slightly compromised. There is little counter weight in the wings of this controller and therefore it does not feel quite as sturdy in hand as the old one. However the shape has been elongated a bit and this actually probably compensates for the weight issue. All the buttons are within reach of my fingers which is good. One thing I have liked about the xbox controller is the snug fit in my hands. This is unlike sony's six axis controller. Those are obviously made for smaller hands. The sony controllers are much sturdier as I have learnt over the years I have had the play station. They took a lot of beating but came out winning. I don't think I expect same quality from the xbox controllers.  Also I have been getting a taste of Microso...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tax skirting by hospital systems?

The issue of avoiding federal taxes is in the news these days with Apple being in the spotlight.  Most of the times big companies avoid paying US taxes by skirting their profits to tax havens.  Healthcare giants can do the same theoretically.  Imagine if there were a health care giant that opens up shop in tax haven islands and then uses the same technique that commercial entities use to skirt their profits out of the country, thereby avoiding taxes.  This is very much possible.  The of shore clinics can be potentially used to complicate the tax return filing system here in US.  I could never understand why a completely US hospital system would like to open up a clinic in Bahamas.  These clinics are portrayed as the global reach of the entity but who do they actually serve.  We never hear about them in press or public.  These clinics are apparently manned by some doctors we never hear about.  How does this system work?  I really do...
1 comment
Read more