Fisked Off by Pro-Israel Orgs

Robert Fisk

In his latest column in The Independent, Robert Fisk bemoans receiving abusive emails:

Here we go again. This libellous and racist quotation comes from an email sent to The Independent by “Bernadette”, a member of a pro-Israeli lobby group in Australia. …

I don’t care about the vicious personal abuse – that’s what you get from pro-Israeli lobby outfits when they don’t like you.

It’s safe to assume that Fisk counts HonestReporting as one of the aforementioned “pro-Israeli lobby outfits”. However, “vicious personal abuse” is not something that we indulge in and it’s certainly not something that we encourage our subscribers to include in their emails.

“Bernadette”, as misguided in her use of language as she was, would have written her email as an individual, in the same way as HR asks its readers to do. We also have no time for such obnoxious and frankly unhelpful emails of that sort.

But what about all the other hundreds of emails that The Independent undoubtedly receives concerning Fisk’s anti-Israel screeds? Does he dismiss the measured and sensible ones just because they may have been generated as a result of an HonestReporting communique?

For more effective letter-writing tips, see parts one, two and three and four of Things Your Media Watchdog Wants You to Know About Letters to the Editor.