WAR JUNKIE
By Ben Naparstek
Jerusalem Post
26404786886&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowF ull
Nov 20 2008
The Age of the Warrior
By Robert Fisk
Nation Books
544 pages; $28.95
‘A lot of journalists want to be close to power – governments,
politicians. I don’t’
‘Beirut is a bit like Vienna after World War II – everybody is
here. Iranian agents and – I’m sure – the CIA are here. If you want
to meet someone from Somalia or Sudan, they’re here’
Soon after September 11, 2001, Robert Fisk was attacked by a crowd
of Afghan refugees near the Pakistani border. Only the 11th-hour
intervention of a Muslim cleric, who called an end, saved the veteran
foreign correspondent from death. But Fisk, who has lived in Beirut
for 33 years – reporting first for London’s The Times and then,
since 1988, for The Independent – felt no rage toward his assailants:
only at himself for fighting back.
"What had I done?" he wrote after recovering. "I had been punching
and attacking Afghan refugees… the very dispossessed, mutilated
people whom my own country – among others – was killing."
He referred to one assailant as "truly innocent of any crime except
that of being the victim of the world" and saw the mob’s brutality as
"entirely the product of others, of us." If he were an Afghan refugee,
Fisk wrote, he would have responded to the presence of a Westerner
with equal bloodlust.
In an age of carefully impartial media coverage of the Middle East,
Fisk’s empathy with the Muslim world and moral indignation have
won him an avid global following. But some see his treatment of
Arabs as patronizing – even while trying to kill him, they can do
no wrong. His critics charge him with promoting a Manichean vision
in which the West is the Great Satan and the Arabs are mere victims
of its imperial designs. But even they often grudgingly admire his
courage and experience.
Named British International Journalist of the Year seven times,
Fisk has provided dispatches from 11 major Middle Eastern wars and
innumerable insurgencies and massacres. While many fellow commentators
unleash opinions from London or New York, being spoon-fed by Washington
think tanks and recycling news agency reports, Fisk testifies from
the ground and gives a voice to the people affected by Western
foreign policy.
He avoids working with other Western journalists to stay immune from
what he sees as their pack mentality. "A lot of journalists want to
be close to power – governments, politicians," says the 62-year-old
reporter, before stressing: "I don’t."
Even so, he has interviewed most of the region’s major power brokers –
including, on three occasions, Osama bin Laden. In The Great War for
Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005) – a 1,300-page
memoir of three decades as a Middle Eastern correspondent – Fisk
recounts how bin Laden, who has praised his "neutral" reporting,
tried to recruit him. The al-Qaida leader told Fisk that a "brother"
had a dream in which "you came to us one day on a horse, that you had
a beard and were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. That
means you are a true Muslim."
Terrified, Fisk replied: "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim, and the job
of a journalist is to tell the truth." To which the satisfied jihadist
remarked: "If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim."
FISK MAKES no apologies for favoring the downtrodden, asserting that
"we should be unbiased on the side of injustice." He explains, "It’s
not a football match, where you give 50 percent to each side. At the
liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you wouldn’t give equal time
to the SS."
His outrage at the duplicity of Western politicians – and the
media’s complicity with their lies – burns throughout his new book,
The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings, a collection of columns
from five years.
To Fisk, the "balance"-fixated objectivity of the press masks its
collaboration with oppression, as competing views of well-documented
facts are weighed with weasel clauses like "opinions differ among
Middle East experts."
"I find The New York Times’s coverage of the Middle East
incomprehensible," he opines, "because it’s so careful to make sure
that everybody is able to criticize everybody else. People reading
newspapers want to know what the bloody reporter is thinking or knows."
On average, Fisk receives about 250 readers’ letters every week,
and he notes "how much more eloquent the language of readers is than
the language of journalists." Nowhere does he identify more skewed
semantics than in press treatment of Israel-Palestine. Israeli-occupied
territories are recast as "disputed territories," Jewish settlements
become "Jewish neighborhoods," assassinations of Palestinian militants
are termed "targeted killings" and the separation wall is described
as a "security barrier."
His prognosis for Israel-Palestine? "Eternal war, unless we go back
to UN Security Council Resolution 242 – withdrawal of security forces
from territories occupied in the ’67 war." But, he hastens to add:
"I see no eagerness for it. If you keep on building settlements for
Jews and Jews only on land that belongs to Arabs and they’re illegal,
that’s a terrible cause of war."
The actor John Malkovich, aggrieved by Fisk’s stance on Israel,
remarked to the Cambridge Union in 2002 that he wanted to shoot
him. Soon images of the journalist covered in blood were posted
on-line by bloggers threatening to beat Malkovich to the job. The
verb "to fisk" has entered the language of the blogosphere; "fisking"
involves copying an article onto a Web page and debunking it point by
point – a practice favored by his detractors. Little wonder, then,
that Fisk doesn’t use e-mail or the Internet, which he derides as
"trash" and a "web of hate."
"There’s no sense of responsibility," he says. "It’s not something
you can sue over. It’s caused huge numbers of inaccuracies in stories."
Fisk rejects the allegation that his work reflects a pro-Arab bias,
noting: "I’ve been excoriating in my views of Arab dictators."
A controversial figure in Turkey, he was once expelled for
reporting that its troops looted supplies intended to relieve
Kurdish refugees. His Istanbul publishers insisted on releasing the
Turkish-language edition The Great War for Civilization quietly,
without publicity, fearing legal action over the chapter "The
First Holocaust," in which Fisk documents the killing of 1.5 million
Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. Yet his fan base in the Arab world
is such that in 2000, when it was rumored falsely that The Independent
might sack him under pressure from the "Zionist lobby," the newspaper
received 3,000 e-mails from Muslims in five days protesting. Recently,
he learned of a counterfeit biography of Saddam Hussein, titled
>From Birth to Martyrdom, doing a brisk trade in Cairo. The author:
"Robert Fisk."
DIVORCED FROM the svelte Irish Times foreign correspondent Lara
Marlowe, Fisk has admitted to knowing "quite a few young ladies." But
he now stonewalls personal questions.
Photo: Courtesy He was born in Kent, southeast England, the only child
of Bill Fisk, who served as a lieutenant in World War I. It’s not
lost on Fisk that he’s devoted his life to chronicling the failures
of the states created artificially by his father’s generation, when
Britain carved up the Middle East after 1918 – "the reason why this
place is so screwed up and why I’m here now."
Bill was an authoritarian father who called blacks "niggers" and
hated the Irish. By the time he died in 1992, aged 93, his racism had
become intolerable to his son, who refused to visit him in his final
days. In The Great War for Civilization, Fisk devotes a chapter to
his father’s wartime experiences, partly as an attempt "to apologize
to him for not going to see him."
Despite their differences, Bill supported his son’s choice of
career. When the Israeli government warned journalists to leave
Lebanon during its siege of Beirut in 1982, Fisk’s mother, Peggy,
called to say she and Bill came to the same conclusion as he had –
that he should stay put, since it was merely an attempt by the Israeli
government to stop reporting of civilian casualties.
The only Western male journalist who stayed in Beirut throughout the
’80s, Fisk survived two kidnap attempts. "I’d end up spending 90
percent of my time trying to avoid being kidnapped and 10 percent
working for the paper. We Westerners love routine and kidnappers know
that. You have to completely break up your Western thinking and think
like them." So he drove to the airport through Hizbullah areas where
the terrorists would never suspect he might travel.
Fisk was 29 when The Times "offered" him the Middle East, after a
few years covering the conflict in Northern Ireland. In his memoir,
he recalls anticipating what his foreign editor promised would be "a
great adventure with lots of sunshine": "I wondered how King Faisal
felt when he was ‘offered’ Iraq or how his brother Abdullah reacted
to Winston Churchill’s ‘offer’ of Transjordan."
The romance soon vanished, however. "Once I was with the Iraqi army
in the front line and the Iranians in the trenches, and watching
people get killed around me, the Hollywood excitement wore off. It’s
not been a happy time." Nevertheless, he displays the excitement at
danger that once led William Dalrymple to christen him a "war junkie."
"If I rush to southern Lebanon and manage to get back safely and
file my story, I can go out to dinner at a French restaurant and
say, ‘I made it, I made it!’" Fisk exclaims. Preferring the term
"foreign correspondent" to "war reporter," he suggests "people who
call themselves ‘war correspondents’ are promoting themselves as
romantic figureheads."
SEEING ALFRED Hitchcock’s film Foreign Correspondent (1940) at 12
sparked Fisk’s desire to become a journalist, and he muses about
the possibility of retiring to write feature films about the Middle
East. Now collaborating on his first screenplay, he says: "I’m keener
to write screenplays for movies than anything else at the moment. I
think that cinema – I don’t mean DVDs or TV – is probably the most
persuasive medium that exists."
His next book – titled Night of Power, in reference to the evening
of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven – will center on the Bosnian War of
the early ’90s. The indifference of Western powers to Serb ethnic
cleansing of Bosnian Muslims galvanized the Arab world’s resentment
toward the West, he says: "Looking back, I should have been much more
alert at the Middle Eastern end of the Bosnian story than I was."
The Middle East has never looked so bleak to Fisk: "Every morning
I wake in bed here and ask myself, ‘Where is the explosion going to
be today?’" From his apartment in Beirut’s fabled Corniche, he heard
the blast that killed the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri
in 2005. Fisk didn’t recognize the burning body of his friend, who
was the second person to phone after his mobbing in Afghanistan. "I
thought it was a man who sold bread," he says.
Next to his front door is a postcard reproduction of a photograph
showing the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his
wife leaving a town hall in Sarajevo, five minutes before they were
assassinated. It’s there to remind him that "you never know what will
happen when you leave the front door."
Fisk stresses that he has lasted for more than three decades in the
Middle East because of fear, not the lack of it: "If you’re not afraid
of danger, you’ll die. I want to live to at least 93, my father’s age."