The reporter named Fisk has such a lousy reputation for accuracy that his name has become a verb - Fisking. That's when someone takes apart what Fisk (or anyone else) has written sentence by sentence to expose the errors. I don't know whether this article is an example of him suddenly finding a clue or if it falls into the "blind pig finding an acorn" category, but the article is a refreshing change.

And "Cameraman Number Two", while profane, tells it straight.

Quite apart from the irredeemable nature of the "mainstream" press – The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest are far too busy carrying more Iraqi horror stories from "intelligence sources" than reporting the American anti-war movement – the lady's desire to "bridge-build" with fellow "activists" was all too familiar a theme.



The people with whom these liberal academics should be building bridges are the truck-drivers and bell-hops and Amtrak crews, the poor blacks and the cops whose families provide the cannon fodder for America's overseas military adventures. But that, of course, would force intellectuals to emerge from the sheltered, tenured world of seminars and sit-ins and deal directly with those whose opinions they wish to change.

When I made this very point at Harvard and several other universities, I was told, rather patronisingly, that these people – the phrase was almost identical – had "so little information" or are "not very informed". This is, in fact, untrue. I have heard as much sense about the Middle East from a train crew en route from Washington to Georgia and from a waiter in a St Louis diner as I have from the good folks of North Carolina.

Black Americans, for example, are uninhibited in their sympathy for Palestinians under occupation. But when I told a lecturer in Austin that I had asked hotel staff and air crews to turn up to my lectures on the Middle East and America – and that all had come – I was treated with a kind of weird amazement, puzzlement that I should bother to ask such unpromising material to think about the Arab-Israel conflict mixed with faint pity that I should ever expect them to understand.

Sometimes I rather suspect that the anti-war left in America likes being in a permanent minority. I mean no disrespect to the Noam Chomskys and Daniel Ellsbergs and Dennis Bernsteins; they fight, amid abuse and threats, to make their voices heard. Yet I have an uneasy feeling that many on the intellectual left are fearful that America will lose its next war amid massive casualties – but are even more fearful that America may win with minimal casualties.

Perhaps this is unfair. But as long as America's anti-war movement talks to itself rather than to others, it is going to go on being surprised when the Gregg Aykinses emerge from the darkness with their hatred and venom intact to support George Bush's forthcoming war in Iraq.