Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk
Robert Fiskis an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. He has been Middle East correspondent intermittently since 1976 for various media; since 1989 he is correspondent for The Independent, primarily based in Beirut. Fisk holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent and has been voted British International Journalist of the Year seven times. He has published a number of books and reported on several wars and armed conflicts...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth12 July 1946
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.
In Palestine, the Israelis claim they found a land without people,' a Syrian officer explained to us. 'Now they will take southern Lebanon and claim they have found another land without people if these refugees do not return.
Saudi Arabia is the most fragile of all Arab states, though we're not saying so. And, unfortunately, bin Laden puts his finger on the other longstanding injustices in the Arab world: the continued occupation of Palestinian land by the Israelis; the enormous, constant Arab anger with the tens of thousands of Iraqi children who are dying under sanctions; the feelings of humiliation of millions of Arabs living under petty dictators, almost all of whom are propped up by the West.
After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career—in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad—watching the people within those borders burn.
Oh, it's nothing to do with Iraq. It is evil ideology. They are against our society. They are against our democracy. They are against our freedoms.
There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect.
Epitaph on a Tyrant" is about Stalin, but is perfect for Saddam Hussein.
Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.
The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.
One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.
American power in the Middle East is collapsing. It doesn't need much more than a shove, and it will - and that's not going to be a good thing.
We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.
I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.
The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.