OUTRAGE IN INK: BRITISH JOURNALIST ROBERT FISK ARRIVES IN MONTREAL TO LAMENT THE CURRENT STATE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE PRESS AND THE WEST’S MILITARY ADVENTURES
By Christopher Hazou
Montreal Mirror
Feb 19 2009
Canada
Over more than three decades spent living and working in the Middle
East, British author and journalist Robert Fisk has covered wars,
revolutions, uprisings and a seemingly endless string of "peace"
processes. He’s rubbed shoulders with kings and presidents, guerrillas
and "terrorists." Again and again, he’s seen up close the horrors of
war and chronicled them with eloquence and passion.
His two massive, best-selling tomes on the Middle East, Pity
the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (1990) and The Great War for
Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005), bear witness not
only to the seismic upheavals that have shaped the region over the
past century, but also to the career of a remarkable journalist who
combines the skill of a great novelist with the moral outrage of a man
who has seen more than his share of injustice. His latest, The Age of
the Warrior, is a selection of articles written between 1998 and 2008.
Currently a correspondent for the U.K. daily The Independent, Fisk
stops by Montreal this week to hold forth on Western media coverage
of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the new
administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. The Mirror reached
him in Toronto.
Mirror: How would you rate Canadian and other Western press coverage
of the Middle East?
Robert Fisk: Everything is according to perspective. If you compare
the coverage in the English-speaking press to, say, European coverage,
it can be pretty lamentable. I think the French Québécois press
is pretty good. The Devoir’s coverage of Gaza, for example, was very
good. It made clear that there was something terrible going on.
[But] I think English-language journalism is failing its readers. The
way in which, by and large, the international press went along with the
outrageous, humiliating treatment that they were given by the Israelis
[during the war in Gaza] told you all you needed to know. They sat on
a hill in shame with flak jackets on and reported things they knew
nothing about from a vast distance. I mean, why were they wearing
these silly flak jackets? I don’t wear a flak jacket in a battle,
let alone two miles away.
I had an American editor at a small town daily, who shall remain
nameless, complaining to me that readership is going down, that they’re
going to have to revamp. I said it’s not a question of reshaping the
front page or making the paper bigger or smaller, or adding living
sections or eating sections. The problem with the paper is that it’s
no good. There’s no decent writing in it, you’re not telling the truth
about the Middle East, there’s nothing interesting in it. But these
associations of editors in the U.S. and Canada go on bemoaning the
state of the newspaper industry, the higher cost of newsprint, the
intrusions of the Internet. People aren’t reading their newspapers
because they’re no good. It’s as simple as that.
War on words M: Why do you think that so much of the reporting from
the Middle East is so bad?
RF: It’s not that there is a conspiracy or a plot. There are
pressures [on journalists] out there that are outrageous and we
should acknowledge them. But I think what happens is that things
become normal, they become usual. [Journalists] don’t want to rock
the boat, they don’t want to become controversial, they don’t want
to have letters of complaint to the editor. [So] the language which
is least offensive to people, or will kick up less of a fuss, is used.
Murders by the Israelis are called "targeted killings." The
wall is a "fence" or a "security barrier," occupied territory is
"disputed" territory. A colony becomes a "settlement" becomes a
"neighbourhood." All matched up with "terrorist, terrorist, terrorist,
terrorist [to describe Arabs and Muslims]."
The Globe and Mail stole a story of mine about the Armenian genocide
and turned "genocide" into "tragedy." They had to pay a fine to us
because it turned out they hadn’t sought permission to use the article.
A huge number of people are going to the Internet because newspapers
have failed them. The irony for me is that, although I’m a hater
of the Internet, I have a huge readership in North America because
they’re reading The Independent on the Internet [available at
independent.co.uk]. You can’t buy The Independent in Nevada. I wish
you could, but you can’t.
M: U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed a "surge" of troops for
Afghanistan, where more than 100 Canadians have been killed fighting
the Taliban. What impact do you think more U.S. soldiers will have
on the situation there?
RF: Look, go back to 1842, 1886, 1919, the Russians. Huge, huge
expenses of treasury and men have gone from the West into Afghanistan,
and they’ve all come to grief. Alexander the Great didn’t get away
with it. Even Genghis Khan had problems in Afghanistan. Who knows,
maybe it will work for the first time in history.
I was in Kandahar a few weeks ago. I went all over the city, and it’s
totally controlled by the Taliban except for the square mile where
Karzai’s drug dealing brother is governor. I went to a hospital,
and it’s just pitiful. You find a dying Taliban with a wound in his
abdomen in one bed and two beds away there’s this little girl who’s
had acid splashed in her face. Over and over again, these families
arrived with these stick-like children, looking like Ethiopian famine
victims. They said that out in the villages they have no money and no
food. There’s a famine. I didn’t read about a famine in the newspapers.
We say that we’re there to give them democracy, bridges, pre-natal
clinics and so on. But we haven’t really succeeded in doing that. I
think we went there to bash the Taliban and kill al-Qaeda. Just as
we went there originally [in the 1980s] to try and destroy the Soviet
empire, which we did quite well with the help of Osama bin Laden.
The only thing you can do is to get the tribal leaders to understand
that they must run their country. However they run it is up to
them. There’s no point setting up warlords, paying off warlords,
adding surges, subtracting surges, supporting corrupt government
officials. It doesn’t work and it’s not going to work.
Nothing solved yet M: In The Great War, you recounted how, during
the mid- to late-1990s, you began to foresee an "explosion" emanating
from the Middle East, which turned out to be the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001. More recently, you wrote a piece about the Israeli assault
on Gaza entitled "Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask,"
in which you talked about the "unrestrained fury" and "incendiary,
blind anger" being provoked in the region. Do you see another explosion
on the scale of the 9/11 attacks coming?
RF: Look, I don’t think it’s over. What we have not realized is
that the days when we could go abroad and have foreign adventures
free of charge are over. From 9/11 onwards we know that there’s no
point in thinking we’re safe. They can come to us. Whether they do,
I have no idea. Muslims throughout the world feel that they are
oppressed by the West. And there are very good military, factual and
political reasons to prove that this is basically a correct political
assumption. Whether it’s their fault or our fault or nobody’s fault
is not the point. We must change the way that we look at the rest
of the world. Until we start talking about justice and fairness,
we’re going to have to watch out.