Gold fisks Fisk

Here's an interesting review of two recently published books: The Great Ear for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by none other than Robert Fisk, and The Long War For Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East by Barry Rubin.
The reviewer, Alan Gold, proceeds to fisk Fisk:

...he cannot see beyond his prejudices. To compound matters, his book contains serious errors of fact. To describe King Faisal of Syria (later he was made king of Iraq) and his brother King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan as members of a Gulf tribe denies them their birth as Hashemites in the Kingdom of the Hejaz, which is the other side of the peninsula; the Iraqi monarchy wasn't ousted in 1962 but four years earlier; and the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 in 1967, just after the Six-Day War, not in 1968 ... and so on.

Minor points, perhaps, but it shows that Fisk's ungovernable rage gets in the way of his need to check facts.

...

...instead of looking ahead, Fisk dwells alongside his Arab victims on the past.

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Rubin, on the other hand, believes that every Arab country as well as Iran has been led by dictators who have failed to deliver any promise or substantive benefit to their people. They have succeeded by repression, corruption, the use of anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric and playing ethnic politics.

Radical Islamists who share this world view are today challenging these dictators and want to substitute Islamism for Arab nationalism. But, according to Rubin, a small band of liberals in these despotic societies has begun to emerge as a weak yet important alternative.

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Rubin believes these liberal voices, rather than an imposed democracy of the West with its sometimes anti-democratic outcomes, will provide a long-term solution to the dangers of Islamism. He is confident Arabia will be democratic within the next 50 years, but not within the next 10.