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By Bill and Nancy Boyarsky
$101.88
By Tom Kemper
$18.76
$19
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geyergus (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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“In any normal society,” writes a skeptical Robert Fisk of the media and government blowup over the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, “the red lights would now be flashing.”
Posted on May 1, 2013
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Larisa Epatko / News Hour
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By Robert Fisk — All at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest.
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AP / Hussein Malla
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By Robert Fisk — It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gadhafi).
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By Robert Fisk — History comes full circle in Syria. In February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad’s army stormed into the ancient cities to end an Islamist uprising.
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By Robert Fisk — By chance, I arrived in Dublin this week on the day that the Saville report on Bloody Sunday was published.
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Wikimedia Commons / Justin McIntosh
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By Robert Fisk — The greatest problem of writing historically about the Middle East is that the story has not ended. The war goes on. And both “sides”—actually, there are rather a lot of sides—produce conflicting narratives.
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AP / Amr Nabil
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By Robert Fisk — What keeps old men in power in Egypt? And what keeps middle-aged men wanting power in a country whose crippled society, increasing sectarianism, brutal police force and endemic corruption are only compounded by an electoral system widely regarded as a fraud?
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AP / Muhammed Muheisen
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By Robert Fisk — The story of the Protestant "settlements" in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day "settlements" in the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on fighting the world’s last colonial war with the assistance of that great anti-colonial nation known as the United States.
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AP / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Robert Fisk — We like to believe—and newspapers and television like us to believe—that the battle for Iran is being fought on the streets of Tehran, of Isfahan, of Najafabad. Untrue. The future of the nation is being decided in Qom, among the clerical leaders of Iranian Shia Islam; and one of the most influential of them—perhaps the closest of all the ayatollahs to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—is silent.
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AP / Joerg Sarbach
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By Robert Fisk — Music and Islam have a dodgy relationship. I guess it’s really all to do with that most jealously guarded commodity, the human soul, over which music exerts such passion.
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AP / Evert Elzinga
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By Robert Fisk — “This young woman who upsets people ...” was the headline in Lebanon’s L’Orient Littáraire yesterday. The teenager was Anne Frank, who died of typhoid at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 after being betrayed to the Nazi authorities, along with her family, in her Amsterdam “safe house.”
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AP / Kamran Jebreili
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By Robert Fisk — There are two basic truths about Dubai which, predictably, have not found their way into market speculation or newspaper analysis. The first is that Dubai may soon find itself a satellite not of its Abu Dhabi capital but of India.
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AP / Ahmad Masood, pool
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By Robert Fisk — Could there be a more accurate description of the Barack Obama-Gordon Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? Now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly.
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AP / Darko Bandic
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By Robert Fisk — For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the Internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?
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Flickr/Amir Farshad Ebrahimi
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By Robert Fisk — Israeli investigations of the Gaza war, its government officials announced, were “a thousand times” fairer than the Goldstone investigation—a preposterous claim, given Israel’s constant inability to conduct fair inquiries of its own—and that his mission “gave legitimacy to the Hamas terrorist organization.”
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By Robert Fisk — Everyone trusted Salah Ezzedine. A billionaire Shiite Muslim businessman and financier from southern Lebanon, he organized pilgrimages to Mecca, ran a major Beirut publishing house and a children’s television station, held major investments in east European oil and iron conglomerates and—much more to the point—was a close personal friend of very senior leaders of Hezbollah.
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sant.ox.ac.uk
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By Robert Fisk — Let us now praise famous men and their fathers that begat them. The famous man—he should be much more famous—is the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim whose wonderful “reappraisals, revisions and refutations” is coming out in September under the simple title: “Israel and Palestine.”
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AP photo / Musadeq Sadeq
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By Robert Fisk — Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as “human shields” by the Taliban and we shall say that we “deeply regret” innocent lives that were lost.
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AP pool photo / Kirsty Wigglesworth
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By Robert Fisk — “We acknowledge,” the letter says, “that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous.”
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telegraph.co.uk
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By Robert Fisk — Tom Hurndall was one of a bunch of “human shields” who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because Hurndall’s journals show a remarkable man of remarkable principle.
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secint50.un.org
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By Robert Fisk — Dr Salim el-Hoss is 80 now but remains a staunch defender of human rights and democracy, an opponent of the death penalty and an outspoken supporter of Palestinians. When I recommended to him a long article on American torture, he read it right through to the end and then put the paper down with a slap on his knee. “Terrible, terrible,” he muttered.
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AP photo / Alessandra Tarantino
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By Robert Fisk — Now a lot of folk will go along with the line that the Holy Father is so stupid—so utterly out of touch with Planet Earth—that he has no idea how disastrously his actions are received. Hmmm. Well, I wonder.
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AP photo / Sven Kaestner
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By Robert Fisk — The organized persecution of a group is despicable whether the victims are the Jews of World War II or today’s Gazans.
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AP photo / Fadi Adwan
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By Robert Fisk — I wonder if we are “normalizing” war. It’s not just that Israel has yet again gotten away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza.
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AP photo / Roberto Pfeil
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By Robert Fisk — I have long raged against any comparisons with the Second World War—whether of the Arafat-is-Hitler variety once deployed by Menachem Begin or of the anti-war- demonstrators-are- 1930s-appeasers, most recently used by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara.
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AP photo / Elizabeth Dalziel
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By Robert Fisk — It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel’s propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies—we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes—don’t realize the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza.
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AP photo / Rahmat Gul
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By Robert Fisk — The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands—all but a square mile at the centre of the city—and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul.
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independent.co.uk
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By Robert Fisk — Incredibly, as Afghanistan sinks back into the anarchy which became its natural state these past 29 years, Afghan film-makers are producing movies of international quality, turning out pictures which prove—even amid war—that a country’s tragedy can be imaginatively recreated for its people.
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AP photo / Rafiq Maqbool
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By Robert Fisk — Back in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war, but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Fisk — How is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the U.S. itself?
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Wikimedia/Gryffindor
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By Robert Fisk — Let us now praise famous men. And after yet another U.S. presidential candidates’ debate of awesome sterility I’m referring principally to one of the first journalists to understand war and, so far as he could, to check his sources: Thucydides.
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AP photo / Fraidoon Pooyaa
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By Robert Fisk — When U.S. troops massacre Iraqi civilians in Haditha because their buddy has been murdered, what is the difference between their revenge and that of Saddam?
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By Robert Fisk — By grotesque mischance, $700 billion—the cost of George Bush’s Wall Street rescue plan—is about the same figure the president has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently “won” thanks to the “surge.”
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By Robert Fisk — I’m not sure of this, but I think—I suspect and feel—that the Great War, the war of 1914-1918, is beginning to dominate our lives even more than the terrible and infinitely more costly conflict of 1939-1945. The Second World War may haunt our lives. The First World War, it seems to me, imprisons us all.
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AP photo / Darko Bandic
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By Robert Fisk — Yesterday [July 16] was the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war, the final chapter of Israel’s folly and Hizbollah’s hubris, a grisly day of corpse-swapping and refrigerated body parts and coffin after bleak wooden coffin on trucks crossing the Israeli border, which left old Ali Ahmed al-Sfeir and his wife, Wahde, stooped and broken with grief.
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By Robert Fisk — “You in the West have a moral duty in Europe to educate the United States more about the Middle East. If they don’t listen to you, they will not listen to us. They will continue with their mistakes.” I don’t think they’re going to listen, I mutter.
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independent.co.uk
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By Robert Fisk — Three bodies lie beside a Baghdad street on a blindingly hot day. The one on the right is dressed in a white shirt and bright green trousers, his hands tied behind his back. Two others on the left lie shoeless, both dressed in check shirts, dumped—how easily we use that word of Baghdad’s corpses—on a yard of dirt and bags of garbage. They, too, of course, are now garbage.
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By Robert Fisk — So they are at it again, the great and the good of American democracy, groveling and fawning to the Israeli lobbyists of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), repeatedly allying themselves to the cause of another country and one that is continuing to steal Arab land. Will this ever end?
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By Robert Fisk — Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that the elected government of Lebanon has lost.
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By Robert Fisk — The first time I saw one, my first instinct was to pick it up. It shone in the sunlight, bright green, something new and fresh amid the dry grass of the south Lebanon hills. The little cluster bomblet seemed to have been made to hold in the hand. No wonder the little children died.
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By Robert Fisk — Not only is The Independent reporter Fisk, like many others in Beirut, no longer shocked by a murder of yet another member of parliament, but he also is no longer affected by viewing the remains of the dead. Such is life in Lebanon today. Here, Fisk relates how Lebanese officials are learning to exist in a perpetual fog of fear.
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By Robert Fisk — True, the U.S. may be able to “spread democracy” to other nations throughout the world, but, as The Independent’s Robert Fisk points out, that doesn’t mean that the U.S. can control how those nations exercise their democratic rights. Take Lebanon, for example, where, Fisk wryly notes, “The Arabs have, once more, followed democracy and voted for the wrong man.”
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By Robert Fisk — The seasoned Mideast reporter for the British paper The Independent returns home to his flat in Beirut to find his landlord reinforcing his building with an iron door. After considering the state of affairs in Lebanon—not to mention in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Gaza—Fisk gets behind his landlord’s security plan.
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By Robert Fisk — Nearly 80 years ago, Lt. Col. Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, composed a prescient Encyclopedia Britannica entry for the term guerrilla, which foreign correspondent Robert Fisk calls “a chilling read ... because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.” This article originally appeared in Britain’s The Independent.
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By Robert Fisk — Tony Blair has moved out of 10 Downing Street and is moving on to a position as Britain’s Middle East envoy—which strikes reporter Robert Fisk as astonishing news, since, as he puts it in this article from Britain’s The Independent, Blair “is a politician who has failed in everything he has ever tried to do in the Middle East.”
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By Robert Fisk — The Independent’s Middle East correspondent looks into the current state of “Palestine” and the West’s complicated—and contradictory—relations with the region and its leaders.
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