Why?

Woke this morning to the news of the latest Bali bombings. Apart from reporting the casualities the media, understandably in the circumstances, is asking "who did it?".

Last night, thanks to a friend, I was able to get a ticket to Robert Fisk's Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Adelaide University. Anyone who knows anything about Fisk will be aware of his reputation as a controversial journalist, especially for his support for the Palestinian cause.

I thought the lecture was an eloquently delivered piece of moderate advocacy for the Palestinian cause. Fisk interleafed his talk with footage from a 1993 Discovery Channel program he'd made which showed the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs in stark detail. Not surprisingly, complaints from certain quarters (any guesses which?) resulted in the program being banned from further screenings.

In the lecture Fisk didn't propose any solutions, but when asked during question time he suggested that any settlement had to be based on UN Resolution 242
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/59210ce6d04aef61852560c3005da209?OpenDocument. He did acknowledge that the resolution was a starting (or re-starting) not a finishing point but didn't elaborate in any detail.

He also didn't say much about Iraq until question time, when he stressed the importance of always asking why things happened, not just how they did and who was responsible . He quoted statements made around the end of WW1 by politicians such as Lloyd George, the then British PM, which are still chillingly relevant today.

I don't think the lecture has yet been published but it deserves to be. In the meantime to find out more about Robert Fisk and to read some of his other work see http://www.robert-fisk.com/ .

There's plenty of material about Resolution 242 : for a summary see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Security_Council_Resolution_242 .