ROBERT FISK GIVES TALK BEFORE PACKED HOUSE IN NYC; DISCUSSES WAR, IMPERIALISM, AND THE MEDIA
By Lucine Kasbarian
NYC Independent Media Center, NY
April 17 2006
Coverage of Robert Fisk’s passionate speech in New Year on war,
politics and journalism.
In his nearly three-hour presentation, Fisk spoke frankly, expressively
and with sardonic wit about Western intervention in the Middle East,
war as enterprise, the horrors of war, the dearth of US journalists
willing to question authority, and the challenges of war reporting
in an age when official news reports are orchestrated by the US
government.
On Friday, April 7, Robert Fisk¬ — the award-winning, chief Middle
East correspondent for the British newspaper, the Independent —
flew in from Lebanon to address a crowd of more than one thousand
on the topic of War, the Middle East, and Journalism at New York
City’s Ethical Culture Society auditorium. Fisk was invited by the
Nation Institute and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation to kick
off a weekend conference called Armenians & the Left, and to discuss
his latest book, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the
Middle East (Knopf).
This intrepid investigative journalist, who, in his more than 30 years
of war reporting, has seen enough carnage to last several lifetimes,
addressed global issues such as U.S. imperialism in the Mid-East and
Transcaucasus, and the implications for small, struggling nations
like Armenia. As his publishers rightly describe, Fisk has earned the
reputation for “being passionate in his concerns about the Middle East,
and relentless in his pursuit of the truth — traits that have enabled
him to enter the world of the Middle East and the lives of its people
as few other journalists have.” He is a seven-time recipient of the
British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year Award and
the author of Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (Nation Books).
In his introductory remarks, Antranig Kasbarian of the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation called Fisk “a man of integrity who has
put himself in the line of fire in countless wars and invasions,
including those in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq.” The capacity crowd
gave Fisk a standing ovation as they were told that Fisk “deserves
our appreciation — even before he utters a word — for continuing to
show a high level of courage in his factual, unflinching war reportage
at a time when it is considered unfashionable, if not prohibiting,
to criticize U.S. foreign policy.”
In his nearly three-hour presentation, Fisk spoke frankly, expressively
and with sardonic wit about Western intervention in the Middle East,
war as enterprise, the horrors of war, the dearth of US journalists
willing to question authority, and the challenges of war reporting
in an age when official news reports are orchestrated by the US
government. Known for injecting historical context and trenchant
analysis into his reporting and for advocating that it is the duty
of war correspondents to report from the perspective of the victims,
Fisk recommended that journalists and officials alike carry history
books with them to better understand the regions they are assigned to
cover; perhaps as a statement about collective ignorance and amnesia
toward empires who tend to repeat odious crimes of the past.
As a young man, Fisk was inspired to become a foreign correspondent
after watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie by the same name. “This sounds
like a bloody good job,” he said at the time. He got at least one
adjective right. In describing his mission as a reporter, Fisk quoted
Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who said it is “to monitor power and the
centers of power.” By contrast and to underscore the repressive climate
in which today’s American journalists work, Fisk spoke of how those
writers with the temerity to report truthfully about the facts on the
ground are painted as unpatriotic and therefore subversive. He charged
that mainstream newspapers such as the NY Times should be re-dubbed
“American Officials Say,” as a nod to the unfair and unbalanced way
in which today’s journalists rely upon state-sponsored sources to
convey information to the masses.
Fisk underscored how war correspondents do more than deliver the news
when he described how the longer journalists stay in regions embroiled
in war, the fewer civilians invaders can exterminate. He recalled how
military occupiers evacuated journalists from West Beirut so that the
reporters could not speak of the horrors they would have witnessed,
and saw this technique repeat itself in Iraq.
Fisk is one of few journalists who covered the Iraq war from the
field. He is a harsh critic of embedded journalism, which he calls
“hotel journalism,” to explain a manner of isolation and skittishness
with which correspondents report from confined quarters. Charging that
journalists who are embedded do the profession a great disservice,
Fisk questioned the purpose of war reporting in Iraq: “Reporting
for what story?” he asked. “When journalists report from within the
heavily-guarded Green Zone, they may as well be filing from Minnesota,”
he said.
Fisk spoke frequently and forcefully about the Armenian Genocide
of 1915 — a premeditated, governmental campaign to annihilate
the Armenian people and drive them from their ancestral lands,
now within the borders of Turkey. He expressed disgust that the
Armenian Genocide is today denied by not only the descendants of
the perpetrating regime in Turkey, but by the United States and
Israel, as well. Nevertheless, Fisk expressed certainty that Genocide
recognition is on the horizon. And to emphasize his hope for future
reconciliation, Fisk read passages from his book about an Armenian
Genocide survivor he’d met who, in his twilight years, prayed for
Turks who suffered in the recent Turkish earthquake. Fisk observed
how progressive Turkish intellectuals such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif
Shafak are struggling to unsheathe the long-suppressed truth about
the Armenian Genocide, and said that today more than ever before,
“the door is open…if Armenians can walk through it and encourage
the Turkish people to walk through it, as well.”
One comment by Fisk that was questioned by this writer pertains
to Fisk’s remarks that there were do-gooders during World War I,
such as missionaries, who campaigned for indigenous rights and even
a unified Arab confederacy. What Fisk failed to mention was that
even missionaries are not without motive, considering that they are
often brought in by colonial occupiers to provide the only sources
of food, shelter and education and hence, be in a position to subdue
and indoctrinate native populations.
Fisk’s talk at the Ethical Culture Society auditorium was conceived as
an opener for the Armenians & the Left Conference — which brought
together scholars, activists and opinion makers to examine how
progressive activists could build coalitions with other dispossessed
groups and progressive movements, explore strategies beyond the
dominant, conventional ones currently pursued by Armenian-American
organizations, and seek alternative ways of understanding Armenia’s
predicament besides the usual state-centered approaches. The Armenians
& the Left Conference, held at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan,
featured panels about Globalization and the Politics of Empire;
Reparations as Justice; Human Rights in the Caucasus; Armeno-Turkish
Dialogue; Women & Political Power; and Armenian Political Identity. The
NYC-leg of the conference culminated with a plenary lecture on War,
Media and Propaganda which featured Fisk, Alternative Radio’s David
Barsamian and moderator Dr. Levon Chorbajian, Prof. of Sociology at
UMass Lowell. Fisk then traveled to Boston where he and leading critic
of U.S. foreign policy, Prof. Noam Chomsky spoke of War, Geopolitics
and History: Conflict in the Middle East to a spillover crowd at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To hear Fisk and Chomsky online, visit:
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