Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk: How Ireland exorcised the ghost of empire
On the 92nd anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, our Middle East correspondent sees numerous parallels between the bloody, intractable conflicts in Ireland and Israel – and says that the war in Iraq has shown us the true value of neutrality.
Inside Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk: Where is our man for all seasons?
Saturday, 29 March 2008
I suppose it was inevitable that when that glorious Shakespearean actor Paul Scofield died last week, we would reflect on his role in the finest film ever made in the history of the world. I am, of course, talking about A Man for All Seasons , whose magnificent screenplay by Robert Bolt so illuminated the spirit of the Renaissance and of humanism and which is now – in Scofield's performance as Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England – more relevant to the times we live in than ever before. So much for the superlatives and the hyperbole. But are there any Thomas Mores left?
Robert Fisk: It's not a straight road to dictatorship
Saturday, 22 March 2008
An Italian restaurant in the Irish village of Dalkey caused quite a kerfuffle when it opened a few months ago. It is called Benito's and – yes – it is indeed named after Il Duce. And there are Italian fascist newspaper front pages on the wall to remind you just how bravely his men fought in the Second World War. A 1941 cover of La Domenica del Corriere carries a dramatic painting of six RAF Hurricanes crashing into the rooftops of Malta after vainly taking on the Italian air force. On another front page of the same year, four frightened British Tommies – a few of the 19,000 captured in the siege of Tobruk – surrender to black-feathered Bersaglieri troops at Sollum on the Egyptian-Libyan border.
Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
Robert Fisk: Silenced by the men in white socks
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Shut them up. Accuse them. Imprison them. Stop them talking. Why is it that this seems to have become a symbol of the Arab – or Muslim – world? Yes I know about our Western reputation for free speech; from the Roman Empire to the Spanish inquisition, from Henry VIII to Robespierre, from Mussolini and Stalin to Hitler, even – on a pitiable scale – to Mr Anthony Blair. But it's getting hard to avoid the Middle East.
Robert Fisk: The cult of the suicide bomber
Friday, 14 March 2008
Khaled looked at me with a broad smile. He was almost laughing. At one point, when I told him that he should abandon all thoughts of being a suicide bomber – that he could influence more people in this world by becoming a journalist – he put his head back and shot me a grin, world-weary for a man in his teens. "You have your mission," he said. "And I have mine." His sisters looked at him in awe. He was their hero, their amanuensis and their teacher, their representative and their soon-to-be-martyred brother. Yes, he was handsome, young – just 18 – he was dressed in a black Giorgio Armani T-shirt, a small, carefully trimmed Spanish conquistador's beard, gelled hair. And he was ready to immolate himself.
Robert Fisk: Offended by Shakespeare? Let's ban him
Saturday, 8 March 2008
When I first read of the nine 14-year-old students at the Jewish Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School in east London who refused to sit a Shakespeare test because they believed the Bard was anti-Semitic, I could well understand their feelings. Their protest against Shylock in The Merchant of Venice – reported in this newspaper last week – seemed well grounded.
Robert Fisk: The gardens of the devil, still sowing death
Saturday, 1 March 2008
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.
Robert Fisk: Dreams of becoming Hitchcock's hero
Saturday, 23 February 2008
When I was at university, I wrote to every journalist known to me for advice. Should I return to my old job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle or try for Fleet Street? How could I become a foreign correspondent like Huntley Haverstock, the hero of Hitchcock's wartime movie of the same name who filed a scoop after crashing into the Atlantic? Should I really be studying Latin and Roman history if I wanted to be an intrepid warrior for truth among the guns?
Robert Fisk: The remnants of war in the desert sands
Saturday, 16 February 2008
Don Sheridan rang me a few days before his death. I was walking on the Beirut Corniche when my mobile purred and there was my 78-year-old Irish friend, calling, as he often did when life was dangerous in the Middle East, anxious to know that his friend Robert was still safe and well.
Robert Fisk: Bloody end of man who made kidnapping a weapon of war
Thursday, 14 February 2008
It wasn't the staring eyes, nor the way he picked up an apple in front of me and cut it open with such careful deliberation. It was the vice-like handshake, the steely grip that made my fingers hurt. "Imad Mougnieh," he said, as if to show he wasn't on the run, wasn't afraid to use his real name.
Robert Fisk: Seduced by the power of historic books
Saturday, 9 February 2008
There is nothing to match the smell of old books. "Musty" is the cliché that comes to mind but there is something more attractive, more refined about the perfume of ancient volumes. It's the same kind of smell you find in Anglo-Saxon churches, the smell of wood pulp, of trees.
Robert Fisk: Torture does not work, as history shows
Saturday, 2 February 2008
"Torture works," an American special forces major – now, needless to say, a colonel – boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses – and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees – has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned – the "waterboarding" technique – before they could be seen by US investigators?
Robert Fisk: The curious case of the forged biography
Friday, 1 February 2008
It arrived for me in Beirut under plain cover, a brown envelope containing a small, glossy paperback in Arabic, accompanied by a note from an Egyptian friend. "Robert!" it began. "Did you really write this?"
Robert Fisk: Eight dead, and echoes of Beirut's bloody history reverberate around its streets
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
When is a civil war a civil war? A bomb a week? A street battle a month? For after yesterday's funerals in Beirut, this question is no longer academic. Eight Shia Lebanese Muslims were killed in just two hours in the Mar Mikael district of the city in a shootout involving unknown assailants in – and this is the most sinister part of the carnage – the very streets where the 15-year Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975. Then it was a busload of Palestinians ambushed on their way home from the Tel el-Zaatar refugee camp. On Sunday night, it was a large group of Lebanese Muslims protesting against high prices and power cuts.
Robert Fisk: Visions that come to men as they sleep
Saturday, 26 January 2008
As a little boy, I had a recurring nightmare and it always featured my grandfather's dog. Arthur Rose had a Labrador called Sir Lancelot – Lance for short – and I adored this dog. I think he liked me too, because we raced around Arthur's great lawns together and when I tried to trip him up, he tried to trip me up and when I lay on the ground, he would sit with his back to me and bang his heavy, powerful tail into my face.
Beirut's assassins kill the detective on their trail
Saturday, 26 January 2008
The assassins of Beirut are getting personal. Yesterday morning, they killed the most important detective on their trail, the very man who is leading the Lebanese government's investigations into the murder – and attempted murder – of so many of the country's politicians, journalists and soldiers.
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