Robert Fisk's recent Articles
Last Updated: 11 June, 2006
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What is the term 'brown-skinned' doing on the front page of a major Canadian daily?
10 June 2006
This has been a good week to be in Canada — or an awful week, depending on your point of view - to understand just how irretrievably biased and potentially racist the Canadian press has become. For, after the arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on “terrorism” charges, the Toronto Globe and Mail and, to a slightly lesser extent, the National Post, have indulged in an orgy of finger-pointing that must reduce the chances of any fair trial and, at the same time, sow fear in the hearts of the country’s more than 700,000 Muslims. In fact, if I were a Canadian Muslim right now, I’d already be checking the airline timetables for a flight out of town. Or is that the purpose of this press campaign?
Zarqawi's end is not a famous victory, nor will it bring Iraq any nearer to peace
09 June 2006
So, it's another "mission accomplished". The man immortalised by the Americans as the most dangerous terrorist since the last most dangerous terrorist, is killed - by the Americans. A Jordanian corner-boy who could not even lock and load a machine gun is blown up by the US Air Force - and Messrs Bush and Blair see fit to boast of his demise. To this have our leaders descended. And how short are our memories.
Robert Fisk penetrates the world of the Palestinian 'martyrs' flooding over the border to fuel the insurgency
06 June 2006
"The last time I saw Hassan, he was standing in the gateway you've just walked through." Labiba Oweydah points at the garden door behind me with its shroud of bougainvillea. "I thought he was going to go and that I might not see him again and I said 'come back'. But he said to me: 'Leaving is not like returning. It is not important for me to return'." With those words, Hassan Jamal Sulieman Oweydah left the muck and rubble of the Mieh Mieh refugee camp in Lebanon to become a suicide bomber. In December 2004, he rammed his explosive-laden car into an American military convoy at Tal Afar, the first Palestinian "martyr" in the war against the United States' occupation of Iraq.
The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq
Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave? The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America's army of the slums go further?
03 June 2006
I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."
Vision of an imaginary memory lane
Antoine fondly imagines these stations must lie in the sleepy folds of rural England
03 June 2006
Something was strangely familiar when my Beirut optician put me through my latest eye test. Antoine Bechir is a Chaldean - yes, as in "Ur" of the Chaldees, that ancient Mesopotamian race - and he must be the only Chaldean I know. His family business was started by his dad, Alphonse, and it was he who initiated the family eye test album.
Modern Syria through Saladin's eyes
Massoud is a popular actor whose politics are as fierce as those of Saladin
27 May 2006
I met Gareth Peirce more than six years ago but am still embarrassed by our first meeting. I had arranged to meet this redoubtable lawyer – brilliantly played by Emma Thompson in the film In the Name of the Father – in the Sheraton Belgravia Hotel, the smallest, the cosiest and, I feel certain, the most expensive Sheraton in the whole world.
You're talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador
All the while, new diplomatic archives are opening to reveal the smell of death - Armenian death
20 May 2006
A letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the Court of Saint James arrived for me a few days ago, one of those missives that send a shudder through the human soul. "You allege that an 'Armenian genocide' took place in Eastern Anatolia in 1915," His Excellency Mr Akin Alptuna told me. "I believe you have some misconceptions about those events ..."
The long shadow of the United States
America set up military bases in the north of Brazil without waiting for authorisation
13 May 2006
Strange things happen when a reporter strays off his beat. Vast regions of the earth turn out to have different priorities. The latest conspiracy theory for the murder of ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri - that criminals involved in a bankrupt Beirut bank may have been involved - doesn't make it into the New Zealand Dominion Post.
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
I grew up with 'Dixon of Dock Green'. After 'Z Cars', I tuned out. Too much realism
06 May 2006
A frightening, inspiring film has just come from Germany. Sophie Scholl – the Final Days, directed by Marc Rothemund, recounts the last day of freedom – and the few short days before her guillotining – of the 21-year-old Munich University student who in 1943, together with her brother Hans, decided – as part of a tiny undergraduate movement called the White Rose – to start a student revolution against the Nazis.
Beating about the Bush? Not with Hersh
He is about all we have left to frighten the most powerful man in the world
29 April 2006
Sy Hersh is an ornery, cussed sort of guy, not one to suffer fools gladly. As the man who broke the My Lai story and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, I reckon he has a right to be ornery from time to time - and cussed. He's dealing with powerful folk in Washington, including one - George W Bush - who would like to cut him down.
Seen through a Syrian lens, 'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq
28 April 2006
In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
When two of America's most distinguished academics dared to suggest that US foreign policy was being driven by a powerful 'Israel Lobby' whose influence was incompatible with their nation's own interests, they knew they would face allegations of anti-Semitism. But the episode has prompted America's Jewish liberals to confront their own complacency. Might the tide be turning?
27 April 2006
Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is of no interest to him.
All change in the Temple of Truth
Amid quotes from Blake, he would explain Baathist teachings with a roll of the eyes
22 April 2006
We used to call it the Temple of Truth. The 10-storey cube of brown and cream marble on the Mezze Boulevard in Damascus had vast, sand-covered windows that were never cleaned, a set of four battered silver elevators that took up to 15 minutes to reach the dreaded top floor and a bust of President Hafez el-Assad which appeared to be made of dark yellow margarine.
Traitors, martyrs or just brave men?
The leaders of the Easter Rising suffered Western Front punishment
15 April 2006
More than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of Ypres with an Irish friend. She was from a good Fine Gael family which nursed a healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom draped around Padraig Pearse's neck for the militarily hopeless but politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916.
Silent for too long, the witnesses to evil
If you want to spill the beans while in office, you have to do it in 'a personal capacity'
08 April 2006
A quote from the cops. I was in Oslo when I received the SMS on my Lebanese mobile phone from the country’s Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s paramilitary ISF. “Dear citizen,” it began – and I have to admit, I liked the assumption of Lebanese citizenship. “Starting March 15th, the Internal Security Forces will be dealing strictly with traffic contraventions. Be co-operative for your safety. The ISF.”
07 April 2006
If I were an Israeli I would have built a wall, but not as a way of stealing land
02 April 2006
We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned. West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year.
A lesson from the Holocaust for us all
This account fills one with rage that anyone could deny the reality of the Jewish genocide
01 April 2006
At a second-hand book stall in the Rue Monsieur le Prince in Paris a few days ago, I came across the second volume of Victor Klemperer's diaries. The first volume, recounting his relentless, horrifying degradation as a German Jew in the first eight years of Hitler's rule--from 1933 to 1941--I had bought in Pakistan just before America's 2001 bombardment of Afghanistan.
Lessons from the ghosts of Gallipoli
Ataturk's words were the most compassionate ever uttered by a Muslim leader
25 March 2006
Wellington reminds me of Maidstone, Kent, when I was a little boy; the 1912 façades of so many New Zealand shops, the narrow streets, the trolley buses, the giant coins, the slightly old-fashioned English, the demand for doughnuts and hot-cross buns. Everyone in Maidstone used to call each other "mate" - yes, I know this is an Australian expression as well - and older men in Wellington wear ties, just as my Dad did back in the 1950s.
The Iraq War: Three Years On - The march of folly, that has led to a bloodbath
20 March 2006
It is the march of folly. In 1914, the British, French, and Germans though they would be home by Christmas. On the 9th of April 2003, corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment - the very first American to enter Baghdad - borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. "Hi you guys, I'm in Baghdad," he told his mother. "I'm ringing to say 'Hi, I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys.' The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon."
The farcical end of the American dream
The US press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war
18 March 2006
It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the American press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US" deserves to be read. Or does it?
Algerian under a death sentence fights deportation
15 March 2006
Ahmed Zaoui, Algerian cleric and university professor, member of the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), sits back opposite a cluster of statues of the Virgin, a painting of Christ's crucifixion and three Catholic priests. In St Benedict's Dominican Priory in Auckland, deportation hangs heavily over a man who has been condemned to death in absentia in his own country and merits a clutch of doubtful convictions in Europe, as well as an unpleasant and largely secret document from New Zealand's security services who are trying to over-rule the local refugee authorities' decision that he can remain in the country.
It was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the freedom of the wrong people
11 March 2006
You've got to fight. It's the only conclusion I can draw as I see the renewed erosion of our freedom to discuss the Middle East. The most recent example - and the most shameful - is the cowardly decision of the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel the Royal Court's splendid production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
Fisk paints a Middle East in crisis - talking to abc.net.au
06 March 2006
Lebanese put pressure on pro-Syrian President
05 March 2006
Who will rid us of this troublesome President? That is what most of Lebanon's cabinet and MPs - and Saad Hariri, the son of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri - have been asking these past months, for pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud is the last public vestige of Damascus' power in Beirut.
Dead heroes and living memories
Dumas's tomb is the same as that of Jean Moulin. And Zola. And André Malraux
04 March 2006
Let us now praise famous men. I'm talking about the dead variety, of course, because I suspect we are defined as a people by the way we honour our dead as much as the way we treat the living. My dad, old Bill Fisk, used to force me to walk round the aisles of All Saints Church in Maidstone to look at the inscriptions, pointing to the moth-eaten battle honours of the Royal West Kent Regiment over our heads.
Setback for inquiry into Hariri assassination
03 March 2006
Once upon a time it all looked so simple. UN investigators would find out who assassinated the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February last year, arrest the suspects and – with the help of the Lebanese judiciary – put them on trial.
Robert Fisk shares his Middle East knowledge - on abc.net.au - Lateline
02 March 2006
Yeah, I listened to Bush. It made me doubt myself when I heard him say that. I still go along and say what I said before - Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society.
Defeat is victory. Death is life
As torture in Iraq was being exposed, Rumsfeld grovelled before Saddam
26 February 2006
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Is the problem weather, or is it war?
Something more serious is happening to our planet which we are not being told about
25 February 2006
Back in the Sixties, a great movie was released called The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Leo McKern, I recall, played a Daily Express reporter along with the then real-life editor of the paper, Arthur Christiansen. What the Express discovered was that the British government was erecting showers in Hyde Park to keep people cool when in fact it was still winter. Investigative reporting eventually revealed - and this, remember, was fiction - that the US and Soviet powers had, without knowing of the other's activities, tested nuclear weapons at exactly the same moment at opposite sides of the earth.
By such little things is a man betrayed
On 14 February, the anniversary of his assassination, I remember Hariri and the promises we made
11 February 2006
A year ago, I watched an old friend burning on the pavement beside me. No, let us be true, many millions of Lebanese regarded Rafiq Hariri as an old friend. But he was a friend to me, calling me after I was badly beaten on the Afghan border in 2001, offering to fly me home to Beirut on his private jet -”Musharraf is my friend,” he had shouted, accurately if somewhat slyly – over the phone line to Quetta.
Religious fury threatens to wrest control from secular governments
06 February 2006
After Syria, the fires fanned by Denmark's anti-Prophet cartoons spread to Lebanon yesterday with sectarian intensity. Anger flashing through the Muslim world over the weekend saw protesters burn Danish flags and attack buildings from Lahore to Gaza. The Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the main insurgent groups, made a blood-curdling call yesterday for violence against citizens of countries where caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed have been published.
Don't be fooled, this isn't an issue of Islam versus secularism
'The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet but millions of Muslims do'
04 February 2006
So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilisations.
And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power
28 January 2006
Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn't we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn't they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!
My challenge for Steven Spielberg
'Munich' suggests for the first time on the big screen that Israel's policy is immoral
21 January 2006
Steven Spielberg's Munich is absolutely brilliant. I can hear readers groaning already. It won't open in Britain until next Friday. But in the United States, Arabs have condemned the movie about the Israeli assassination of Palestinians after the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics as an anti-Arab diatribe that dehumanizes an entire people suffering dispossession and occupation.
Osama bin Laden: Is it him? Almost certainly.
20 January 2006
So why only on audio? Why no video tape? Is he sick? Yes, say the usual American "intelligence sources". It's the same old story: Osama bin Laden talks to us from the mouth of a cave, from within a cave, from a basement perhaps, from a tape almost certainly recorded down a telephone line from far away. Yesterday's message, broadcast as ever by al-Jazeera television, was a reminder that security - not sickness - decides his method of communication.
06 January 2006
Israel's Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues Robert Fisk. President George Bush acclaims Ariel Sharon as 'a man of peace', yet the blood that was shed at Sabra and Chatila remains a stain on the conscience of the Zionist nation. As Sharon lies stricken in his hospital bed, his political career over, how will history judge him?
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