#Robert Fisk

[deadpresidents]

I'm a long time follower so I know you get sent a bazillion books by publishers in case you decide to review them but I'm curious how often you buy books, when was the last time and what did you get??

Oh God, I buy books constantly. I was just at a used bookstore on Wednesday and bought like two dozen books. I had to make two trips to my car to load them after paying for them.

Even though I'm fortunate and do get a ton of books from publishers to potentially review or suggest to my readers, there are many times where I'll still buy copies of those books when they are officially released. Sometimes it's because I'm a fan and just want to support the author, but a lot of times it's because the review copies are often uncorrected proofs. So it'll be an advance copy of what will eventually be released as a hardcover, but it will come to me in paperback form (or, on rare occasions, a folder of loose-leaf pages that aren't even bound) and they'll often be missing the table of contents, the index, footnotes, or even the entire back matter. I'm a book collector, so I like to have the finished product, so I'll frequently buy the book once it's actually released.

I won't give a rundown of all the used books I bought the other day, but I'll share the last two brand-new books that I purchased in order to make sure I received them on their release date. I pre-ordered the late Robert Fisk's final book, Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), which I got this past Tuesday when it came out. And I made sure to buy Bob Woodward's new book, War (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), so that it'll be delivered on release day, October 15th. I can't wait to read that one.

[sowhatifiliveinfukuoka]

Robert Fisk (1946-2020)

[david-sankey]

Robert Fisk lecture 11/11/2018

Robert was traduced after his sad death in 2020 by bad actors and paid trolls, because his genu9inely humanitarian message was against the interest of arms exporters and their paid-for politicians An Irish and UK citizen, he famously took part of a rocket that had killed refugees back to the US arms company that supplied it

[drsonnet]

Bosnia War Crimes:

Bosnia War Crimes: 'The rapes went on day and night': Robert Fisk, in Mostar, gathers detailed evidence of the systematic sexual assaults on Muslim women by Serbian 'White Eagle' gunmen

Robert Fisk

Monday 08 February 1993 

Bosnia War Crimes: 'The rapes went on day and night': Robert Fisk, in Mostar, gathers detailed evidence of the systematic sexual assaults on Muslim women by Serbian 'White Eagle' gunmen | The Independent | The Independent

[affascinailtuocuore]

S. Abulhawa-MORNINGS IN JENIN. Un viaggio umano e poetico tra i profughi di Palestina. Essere Ebrei, essere Palestinesi

A Thea Khamis che mi ha consigliato questo intenso romanzo. La storia “Palestine 1941. In the small village of Ein Hod a father leads a procession of his family and workers through the olive groves. As they move through the trees the green fruits drop onto the orchard floor; the ancient cycle of the seasons providing another bountiful harvest. Palestine 1948. The Abulheja family are forcibly…

[nellarw95]

Happy Birthday Vincent 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

Vincent Phillip D'Onofrio

June 30,1959

Buon Compleanno 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

30 Giugno 1959

[notnursenightingale]

He had the courage of a lion, and the cunning of a rat; and if he’s not in hell today, there’s no such place. I know but one good point to the man—that he was fond of his wife, and kind to her.

|| Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Beach of Falesa”

[chrism02]

what are the main love languages of the characters below based on the 5 love languages (Words of affirmation, Quality time, Physical touch, Acts of service, Receiving gifts)?

Characters: Maxim Horvath, Comic!Otto Octavius, Gabriel Duvall, your version of Oswald Cobblepot, Harding Hooten, Mark Rothko, Hank Spallone, Robert Aldrich, Wilson Fisk, Hannibal Lecter

Maxim Horvath: all in different variations but the main one is quality time

Comic!Otto Octavius: physical touch

Gabriel Duvall: acts of service especially if it assists his autism

My version of Oswald Cobblepot: the things he always lacked growing up - words of affirmation, quality time, and physical touch

Harding Hooten: with his busy schedule he greatly appreciates quality time and acts of service

Mark Rothko: receiving gifts especially if they are handmade

Hank Spallone: physical touch

Robert Aldrich: words of affirmation especially after meetings with Warner

Wilson Fisk: quality time

Hannibal Lecter: all in different variations but the main one is physical touch

[alien-formed-on-earth]

JOE FIXIT/ JOE TIRA-TEIMA (2023) PT-BR N° 1

essa é uma tradução independente (NÃO é a da panini)

[velvetbronte]

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Dir. Martin Scorsese

[heckcareoxytwit]

A meeting and a showdown between Kingpin and Joe Fixit (along with Rhino, Electro and Spider-Man)

Kingpin has a meeting with his syndicate and he has supervillains - Electro and Rhino as his protection squad. Then, the meeting is interrupted by Joe Fixit who brings Spider-Man into the room as a "hostage" bargain. When Electro tries to unmask Spider-Man as ordered by Kingpin, it turns out that Peter Parker's face and hair were covered with face paint which allows him to "mask" his identity and it makes him look like he's wearing another mask. Peter Parker as Spider-Man had pretended to be a hostage so that he could find out what Kingpin is up to. Before Electro could do anything, Spider-Man punches him across the room, making the supervillain land onto Rhino.

Angered from being fooled again, Kingpin tries to spray the mind-altering chemical on Joe Fixit but this time, it doesn't work because Joe is wearing the nose filters. Then, chaos ensues when the two groups start fighting in the room. Joe Fixit, Kingpin and Rhino get into a major brawl while Spider-Man outwits Electro with fire sprinklers.

Joe Fixit #4, 2023

[kitchenisking]

I just found out that Vincent D’Onofrio that’s plays Bobby Goren

Also plays… wait for it …. Just blew my mind… plays Wilson Fisk on daredevil

😱🤯

its shocked me so much! plus he's suck an amazing actor as is!

[bstroobery]

Warning: fake blood

MORE!

-🩶👻

[gameofthunder66]

'Eraserhead' (1977) film

-watched 4/14/2023- 1 star- on Max

I don't know why this movie got pretty decent reviews- I like David Lynch's far-fetched, comical, horrific, artistic work, but when some of it doesn't make a lick of sense to me, I'm aggravated with myself for having sit there through the entire thing!

82% Rotten Tomatoes

[komsomolka]

Nasrallah was killed because he was unrelenting in his support for Palestine. Unlike every other Arab leader, Nasrallah had led the fight against Israel twice, which led to its defeat: first, when Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 and second when Israel could not vanquish Hezbollah in 2006. The man who defeated Israel was finally killed on September 27, 2024, along with thousands of his fellow Lebanese. [...]

In the Lebanese coastal city of Sur (Tyre), unknown people bombed a number of restaurants that serve alcohol in late 2012. I went down to talk to some of the owners of these restaurants and of a brewery, all of whom told me that they had been visited by people from Hezbollah who offered to pay for the damages even though the attacks were not by their members. Nasrallah had said that though he opposed the consumption of alcohol, he did not believe that Lebanese society must conform to the social views of any group but should learn to tolerate the mores of each other.

For all the talk of Nasrallah and antisemitism, it would be worth considering that it was Hezbollah under Nasrallah that helped the reconstruction of Beirut’s Maghen Abraham Synagogue. “[It] is a religious place of worship,” Nasrallah said, “and its restoration is welcome,” stated Arab News. It is this attitude that partly led to Nasrallah telling Julian Assange during a discussion about Palestine in 2012 that “the only solution is the establishment of one state—one state on the land on Palestine in which the Muslims and the Jews and the Christians live in peace in a democratic state. Any other solution will simply not be viable, and it won’t be sustained.”

When Israel, with US support, began its bombardment of Lebanon in 2006, it appeared certain that Hezbollah would be demolished. But it withstood the attack and counterattacked Israel. Years earlier, friends in the Arab states would ask me, “Why can’t we produce a Hugo Chávez?” meaning why could they not have a leader who would stand up against the interference of the West and the occupation of the Palestinians by Israel. During the 2006 war, these same people began to say that Nasrallah was their Chávez, that he was the incarnation of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The fact that Hezbollah was not destroyed and was able to stand up for itself proved to large sections of the Arab world that Israel lost that war.

The victory is partly attributed to Nasrallah’s ability to convert Hezbollah from a military force into an integral part of the “resistance society” (mujtama’ al-muqawama) in large parts of Lebanon; this resistance society shaped the worldview of the villages of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, where they committed themselves to the long-term struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Israeli interventions in southern Lebanon. It is this resistance community that defines Hezbollah’s endurance rather than the thousands of missiles it has hidden away in tunnels across Lebanon’s southern region. The Israelis tried to kill Nasrallah many times during and after 2006 but did not succeed. He would often talk about how one of his speeches was his last since it was unclear when the Israelis might succeed.

The assassination of Nasrallah produced a sense of shock across Lebanon because a view had been growing that he could not be killed. But Nasrallah was a man, and human beings die one way or the other. Robert Fisk asked him to explain what it meant to prepare for martyrdom, according to a 2001 article by him. “Imagine you are in a sauna,” Nasrallah said. “It is very hot but you know that in the next room there is air conditioning, an armchair, classical music, and a cocktail.” That would have been his attitude when the Israeli bombs landed.

[hussyknee]

This article hits a lot of my discomfort around comparing the LTTE to Hamas, or any of the Palestinian resistance.

Do I believe in Tamil self-determination? Yes. Should they have a sovereign state? Yes. Should they have won the North instead of the SL military? Absolutely. Does any indigenous Tamil or Muslim person in the North and East have the right to armed resistance against majoritarian rule? Also yes. Was the LTTE rank and file fighters resisting annihilation and the SL military to a man was committing murder? Yes.

Do I believe the LTTE as an organisation and Prabhakaran as its head actually stood for anything but replacing the Sinhalese ethnostate with a Tamil one of their own choosing? Fucking no.

Navaratnam, after splitting away from the Federal Party, also published a newspaper, Viduthalai. I read the paper in the 1970s, when it often compared Tamils and Jews in terms of cultural character—including a supposed predisposition for intelligence and entrepreneurship—and argued that they were similar. (This line of thinking survives to this day: I know of Tamil nationalists in the diaspora who invoke the establishment of Israel as an example for their own goals, and see similarities in the Tamil and Jewish struggles.) Viduthalai also serialised Exodus, a popular 1958 novel by the American Jewish writer Leon Uris, which was translated by Navaratnam and published in Tamil as Namakkoru Naadu—A Country of Our Own.

Exodus presents a factually inaccurate but heroic account of the Zionist project to establish Israel as a Jewish nation state, and follows a group of Jewish arrivals in Palestine after the Second World War. It makes no mention of the mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionist forces in 1948. Edward Said, the Palestinian activist and intellectual, has highlighted how the novel dehumanises Arabs. Said has also argued that, when it comes to Israel, “the main narrative model that dominates American thinking still seems to be Leon Uris’ 1958 novel Exodus.” The British journalist Robert Fisk once described the novel as a “racist fictional account of the birth of Israel” in which Arabs are “rarely mentioned without the adjectives ‘dirty’ and ‘stinking’.”

Velupillai Prabhakaran, who established the LTTE in 1976, was a supporter of the Self-Rule Party as a young man. He would also have been a Viduthalai reader, and was inspired by Exodus. I was informed by a former LTTE member that the organisation also separately translated Exodus in full in the mid-1980s, and that it was widely distributed among LTTE cadres and supporters. Two prominent members of the organisation told me separately that the film adaptation of Exodus was also screened to LTTE cadres at camps in both Sri Lanka and the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Following long-term disillusionment with the LTTE, and seeing no democratic space to raise my concerns with the organisation’s autocratic leader, Prabhakaran, I quit the LTTE for good in April 1984. Many others also left, both before and after me, with the same concerns – among them the one-man leadership and complete intolerance for political discussion or difference. Some of them were murdered by the LTTE for leaving. One tragic example is Patkunam, one of the group’s founding members, who was murdered by Prabhakaran sometime in or around 1977 with the agreement of the appointed central committee of the LTTE. Prabhakaran suspected that Patkunam had been influenced by EROS’s leftist ideas and wanted to leave the LTTE. The LTTE had a policy that those who wanted to leave and join another group or establish another organisation would face capital punishment.

...

As it increasingly gained control of the North and East of Sri Lanka, the LTTE arbitrarily declared itself the “sole representative” of the Sri Lankan Tamil people. On this basis, it targeted Tamil activists from leftist and progressive organisations, killing or otherwise silencing them. The leadership of the TULF, the Tamil parliamentary party, was also wiped out. From as far back as the mid 1980s, the LTTE also suppressed other Tamil militant organisations such as TELO, PLOTE and the EPRLF. Eventually this meant targeted killings and massacres of both cadres and leaders from rival groups. Sections of EROS were forcibly absorbed into LTTE ranks. The LTTE also killed numerous EPRLF and PLOTE cadres who had received training from the PFLP in Syria.

...

In 1990, the LTTE executed a plan to ethnically cleanse Muslims from territories under its control in the North of Sri Lanka. The entire Muslim population of the Jaffna, Vavuniya, Mullaitivu, Mannar and Kilinochchi districts, numbering approximately 75,000 people, was evicted at gunpoint. This demonstrated the LTTE’s desire to establish an ethnically exclusive Tamil state, much like the Jewish state of Israel envisioned by the Zionists. The LTTE’s entire ideology was based on exclusive Tamil nationalism; its idea of a homeland and a nation meant treating Muslims and other minority communities in Tamil-dominated areas as second-class citizens at best. In this, it had uncomfortable similarities with the Zionist outlook on Palestinians and Muslims.

...

The LTTE was a right-wing organisation, with a statist approach to popular struggles. Prabhakaran made it clear that the LTTE would not interfere with “domestic issues” in other countries. I know this because, while I was with the organisation, he did not want to have any links with Marxist-Leninist parties in India as he did not want to antagonise the Indian state. The LTTE’s international network consistently aligned with Western governments and lobbied for their support. Although the LTTE was deemed a terrorist organisation and proscribed by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, these governments’ notices stated clearly that the LTTE had no intention of targeting Western interests.

The LTTE leadership was a corrupt bunch of autocrats that ethnically cleansed and killed anyone that got in their way, including their own people, having solidarity with no one and led by a personality cult not so different from MR's. Nurturing Karuna and Pillayan at their breast while they massacred Muslims, conscripted children and killed and disappeared Tamil activists and journalists, and then crying foul when they defected to get away with their loot? Nah son. Just like the SL government, the LTTE didn't care what they were doing as long as they didn't do it to them. Because in their ego-driven ideology, Tamil self-determination began and ended with them. Even now, it continues to obstruct the Tamil struggle because, since the LTTE made itself and its own nationalist project the sole representative of Tamil freedom, their defeat in 2009 makes the Tamil resistance itself look like it's dead in the water. Tamil Eelam's generational legacy of varied ideologies, factions, alternative enterprises and coalitions that preceded them all erased by this one failed cadre.

Hamas is far from perfect, but there's a continuity to its evolution, a devolution of power within their ranks, a willingness to work as a coalition with other resistance groups, and a generational network of anti-imperialist, anti-colonial solidarity and diplomacy behind them. The LTTE was just cut from the same post-colonial ethnonationalist cloth as the Sinhalese majoritarian state. Freire spoke truly when he said that the oppressed see their model of manhood in their oppressor. As long as we continue to identify with the powerful instead of the powerless, we will never be anything but pawns in the imperial project of coloniality.

*I do wish the author hadn't just...glossed over the horror that was the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Those freaks somehow managed to commit worse massacres and rapes than the Sri Lankan military. Absolutely heartbreaking because so many Tamil people believed they would be their allies. It says a lot that both the government and LTTE had enough of their shit within two years that they came together to kick them out. This alliance also came in useful because it allowed the government to crush the JVP's Marxist insurrection in the South without having to fight a war on two fronts. By that I mean Premadasa was grand chums with the LTTE while his forces killed over 60,000 innocent people in the rest of the country. At least right up until the LTTE killed him. Lol. The late '80s was their trollface era.