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Bin Laden and [[Adam Yahiye Gadahn|Adam Gadahn]], an Al-Qaeda spokesman and [[Translation|translator]] of [[United States|American]] birth, have apparently mentioned Robert Fisk in speeches. Osama bin Laden said Fisk's reporting was "neutral".<ref>[http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech], [[Al Jazeera]], 1 November 2004</ref> According to a [[MEMRI]] report, on September 2, 2006, in a videotaped statement, [[Adam Yahiye Gadahn|Adam Gadahn]] said that Fisk and [[George Galloway]] have a "respect and admiration for Islam," have "sympathy for Muslims their causes", and added "I say to them, isn't it time you stopped sitting on the fence and came over to the side of truth?".<ref>[http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP128106 Special Dispatch Series - No. 1281], [[MEMRI]], September 6, 2006 (contains ellipses)</ref>


Fisk condemned the [[September 11, 2001 attacks]], describing them as a "hideous [[crimes against humanity|crime against humanity]]." He has called for an honest discussion of the motives behind the attacks, a discussion which he says was not occurring in the Western press.<ref>[http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/24/features/bookfri.php The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East], ''[[The New York Times]]'' (reprinted in ''[[The International Herald Tribune]]''), November 25, 2005.</ref> His own belief is that it was a response to U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly its support for Israel,<ref>[http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=2319 One Year On: A View From The Middle East], Robert Fisk, [[The Independent]], September 11 2002, reprinted at [[ZNet]]</ref> and has questioned [[George W. Bush|President Bush]]'s view that the perpetrators of 9/11 acted "because they hate our freedom."<ref>[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People], [[George W. Bush]], White House Office of the Press Secretary, September 20 2001</ref>
Fisk condemned the [[September 11, 2001 attacks]], describing them as a "hideous [[crimes against humanity|crime against humanity]]." He has called for an honest discussion of the motives behind the attacks, a discussion which he says was not occurring in the Western press.<ref>[http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/24/features/bookfri.php The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East], ''[[The New York Times]]'' (reprinted in ''[[The International Herald Tribune]]''), November 25, 2005.</ref> His own belief is that it was a response to U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly its support for Israel,<ref>[http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=2319 One Year On: A View From The Middle East], Robert Fisk, [[The Independent]], September 11 2002, reprinted at [[ZNet]]</ref> and has questioned [[George W. Bush|President Bush]]'s view that the perpetrators of 9/11 acted "because they hate our freedom."<ref>[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People], [[George W. Bush]], White House Office of the Press Secretary, September 20 2001</ref>

Revision as of 12:04, 8 January 2009

For other people named Robert Fiske, see Robert Fiske (disambiguation).
Robert Fisk
At a book festival in Christchurch, New Zealand, 2008.
Born (1946-07-12) 12 July 1946 (age 78)
Maidstone, Kent, England
EducationLancaster University (B.A., 1968)
Trinity College, Dublin (Ph.D., 1985)
OccupationMiddle East correspondent for The Independent
Notable creditsJacob's Award, Amnesty International UK Press Awards, British Press Awards, International Journalist of the Year, "Reporter of the Year", David Watt prize, Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize
Websitehttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946 in Maidstone, Kent) is an award-winning British journalist and author. He is the Middle East correspondent of the UK newspaper The Independent, and has spent more than 30 years living in and reporting from the region. [1]

Career

Fisk has been described in the New York Times as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain." [2] He covered the Northern Ireland Troubles in the 1970s, the Portuguese Revolution in 1974, the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-88 Iran–Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He has received numerous awards, including the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year award seven times. Fisk speaks vernacular Arabic, and is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden–three times between 1994 and 1997.[3] [4]

Fisk has said that journalism must "challenge authority — all authority — especially so when governments and politicians take us to war." He has quoted with approval the Israeli journalist Amira Hass: "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power." [5]

He has written at length on how much of contemporary conflict has, in his view, its origin in lines drawn on maps: "After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people within those borders burn." [6]

Early career

Fisk received a BA in English Literature at Lancaster University in 1968[7] and a PhD in Political Science, from Trinity College, Dublin in 1985.[8] The title of his doctoral thesis was "A condition of limited warfare: Eire’s neutrality and the relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939–1945" [8]. He first worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times.[9] From 1972-75 Fisk served as Belfast correspondent for The Times, before becoming its correspondent in Portugal covering the aftermath of the 1974 revolution. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976-1988). He later moved to The Independent, with his first report published there on 28 April 1989.

As Middle East correspondent, Fisk covered the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-1988 Iran–Iraq War, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Fisk has been living in Beirut since 1976,[10] and was present in Beirut throughout the Lebanese civil war. He was one of the first journalists to visit the scene of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. His book on the conflict, Pity The Nation, was first published in 1990. Fisk has also reported on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the conflicts in Kosovo and Algeria.

Osama bin Laden, 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan

Fisk is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden - three times (all published by The Independent: December 6, 1993, July 10, 1996, and March 22, 1997). During one of Fisk's interviews with Bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt by Bin Laden to possibly recruit him. Bin Laden said, "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed ... that you were a spiritual person ... this means you are a true Muslim." Fisk replied, "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim ... I am a journalist".[11] Bin Laden and Adam Gadahn, an Al-Qaeda spokesman and translator of American birth, have apparently mentioned Robert Fisk in speeches. Osama bin Laden said Fisk's reporting was "neutral".[12] According to a MEMRI report, on September 2, 2006, in a videotaped statement, Adam Gadahn said that Fisk and George Galloway have a "respect and admiration for Islam," have "sympathy for Muslims their causes", and added "I say to them, isn't it time you stopped sitting on the fence and came over to the side of truth?".[13]

Fisk condemned the September 11, 2001 attacks, describing them as a "hideous crime against humanity." He has called for an honest discussion of the motives behind the attacks, a discussion which he says was not occurring in the Western press.[14] His own belief is that it was a response to U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly its support for Israel,[15] and has questioned President Bush's view that the perpetrators of 9/11 acted "because they hate our freedom."[16]

After the U.S. launched its attack on Afghanistan shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan to provide coverage of that conflict. While reporting from there, he was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees but was also saved from this attack by another Afghan refugee. In his graphic account of his own beating, published in The Independent of December 10, 2001, Fisk excused the attackers of responsibility ("I couldn't blame them for what they were doing,") and said that, in his view, their "brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the 'War for Civilisation' just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them 'collateral damage.'"[17] Commenting on the attack Fisk said he could understand the refugees' anger, as a natural response to the US invasion. He stated: "They had every reason to be angry - I've been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me." [18]

In August 2007 Fisk publicly expressed, for the first time, his personal doubts about the orthodox historical record of the September 11 attacks. In an article for The Independent, he wrote: "I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11." He went on to raise his concerns about missing aircraft parts, lack of aircraft debris, the melting point of steel, the collapse of World Trade Center 7, and other familiar questions that have circulated within the 9/11 Truth Movement. He added that he does not condone the "crazed 'research' of David Icke[...] I am talking about scientific issues". [19]

Iraq War

During the 2003 Iraq War, Fisk was stationed in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. He has criticized other journalists based in Iraq for what he calls their "hotel journalism", literally reporting from one's hotel room without interviews or first hand experience of events.[20]

Fisk's opposition to the war brought attacks from many pro-war supporters. Irish columnist and Senator Eoghan Harris called Fisk's analysis of Middle East politics "a first cousin to believing that aliens take away people in flying saucers",[21] while Guardian columnist and war supporter Simon Hoggart attacked his prediction that "the (action of the) West (in response to 9/11) was about to bring total disaster upon its own head." While acknowledging Fisk's "brilliant and vivid reporting", Hoggart stated his belief that Fisk's pessimism revealed a judgement that was "not just mistaken, but reliably mistaken".[22]

In May 2002, actor John Malkovich, speaking at the Cambridge Union Society, was asked who he would like to fight to the death. He responded with the names of Fisk and British MP George Galloway, adding, "I'd rather just shoot them." Fisk responded with a column titled, "Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?" in which he lamented the fact that he and other journalists who criticized U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East would have to deal with the hate mail and death threats that comments like Malkovich's would inevitably bring forth.[23]

In February 2008, Fisk reported that he had discovered a biography of Saddam Hussein with his name on the cover as author, but clearly a forgery.[24]

Awards

In 1991, Fisk won a Jacob's Award for his RTÉ Radio coverage of the first Gulf War.[25] He received Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. He received the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times, and twice won its "Reporter of the Year" award.[26] In 2001, he was awarded the David Watt prize for "outstanding contributions towards the clarification of political issues and the promotion of their greater understanding" for his investigation into the Armenian Genocide by the Turks in 1915.[27] More recently, Fisk was awarded the 2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize along with $350,000.[28]

He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of St Andrews on June 24, 2004. The Political and Social Sciences department of Ghent University (Belgium) awarded Fisk an honorary doctorate on March 24, 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the American University of Beirut in June 2006. Trinity College Dublin awarded him a second, honarary, Doctorate in July 2008.[29]


Books and other works

Fisk has published a number of books. His 2005 work, "The Great War for Civilisation", with it's criticism of Western and Israeli approaches to the Middle East, was controversial among supporters of Israel but well-received by critics and students of international affairs, and is perhaps his best-known work.

  • The Point of No Return: The Strike which Broke the British in Ulster (1975). London: Times Books/Deutsch. ISBN 0-233-96682-X
  • In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-1945 (2001). London: Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 0-7171-2411-8 — (1st ed. was 1983).
  • Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (3rd ed. 2001). London: Oxford University Press; xxi, 727 pages. ISBN 0-19-280130-9 — (1st ed. was 1990).
  • The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East (October 2005) London. Fourth Estate; xxvi, 1366 pages. ISBN 1-84115-007-X
  • The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings (2008) London, Fourth Estate ISBN 978 0 00 727073 6

Video documentary

Forgeries misattributed to Robert Fisk

  • Saddam Hussein - From Birth to Martyrdom (2007). Egypt: Ibda; 272 pages. (forged authorship[30])

References

  1. ^ "Robert Fisk". The Independent. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  2. ^ Bronner, Ethan (2005-11-19). "A Foreign Correspondent Who Does More Than Report". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-07-19. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ Robert Fisk: The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle Eastpp.1-39 ISBN 184115007X
  4. ^ "Honoured War Reporter Sides With Victims of Conflict". New Zealand Press Association. 2005-11-04. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ Miles, Oliver (2005-11-19). "The big picture". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 2006-07-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation, 2005
  7. ^ "Robert Fisk lecture", LU News, Lancaster University, Nov 2006, retrieved 2008-10-14
  8. ^ a b "Former postgraduate students". Trinity College, Dublin. Retrieved 2008-07-26.
  9. ^ Robert Fisk (26 July 2008). "My days in Fleet Street's Lubyanka". The Independent. Retrieved 2008-07-26.
  10. ^ Fisk, Robert (2006). The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Harper Perennial. p. 973. ISBN 978-1-84115-008-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  11. ^ Fisk, Robert (2007). The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Vintage. pp. 29–30. ISBN 9781400075171.
  12. ^ Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech, Al Jazeera, 1 November 2004
  13. ^ Special Dispatch Series - No. 1281, MEMRI, September 6, 2006 (contains ellipses)
  14. ^ The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, The New York Times (reprinted in The International Herald Tribune), November 25, 2005.
  15. ^ One Year On: A View From The Middle East, Robert Fisk, The Independent, September 11 2002, reprinted at ZNet
  16. ^ Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, George W. Bush, White House Office of the Press Secretary, September 20 2001
  17. ^ Fisk, Robert (2001-12-10). "My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war". robert-fisk.com. Retrieved 2006-07-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  18. ^ UK journalist beaten by Afghan mob[BBC News]
  19. ^ Fisk, Robert (2007-08-25). "Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11". The Independent. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
  20. ^ Fisk, Robert (2005-01-17). "Hotel journalism gives American troops a free hand as the press shelters indoors". [1]. Retrieved 2006-07-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help)
  21. ^ Air-kissing the terrorists - call it Luvvies Actually - Analysis, Opinion - Independent.ie
  22. ^ Hoggart, Simon. A war cry from the pulpit, The Guardian, November 17, 2001.
  23. ^ "Robert Fisk: Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?". 14 May 2002.
  24. ^ "Robert Fisk: The curious case of the forged biography". Retrieved 2008-02-02. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |published= ignored (help)
  25. ^ The Irish Times, "In the wars", November 19, 1991
  26. ^ ""Times reporter wins award"". The Times. 1987-12-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  27. ^ ""Fisk wins award for political journalism"". The Independent. 2001-07-20. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |title= (help)
  28. ^ ""2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize awarded to Robert Fisk"". Lannan Foundation.
  29. ^ ""Five recipients to receive honorary degrees at Trinity College Dublin"".
  30. ^ Fisk, Robert (2008-02-01). "Robert Fisk: The curious case of the forged biography". The Independent. Retrieved 2008-02-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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