Articles by Robert Fisk
We found 126 results.
Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights in Syria
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
20 Sep 2010
Ribal al-Assad gives a rare insight into the dynasty that has shaped modern Syria.
→ read full articleIraq: Torture. Corruption. Civil war. America Has Certainly Left Its Mark
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
23 Aug 2010
When you invade someone else’s country, there has to be a first soldier – just as there has to be a last.
→ read full articleIsrael Has Crept Into the EU Without Anyone Noticing
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
9 Aug 2010
I’m not comparing Israel and Hamas. Israel is the country that justifiably slaughtered more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza 19 months ago – more than 300 of them children – while the vicious, blood-sucking and terrorist Hamas killed 13 Israelis (three of them soldiers who actually shot each other by mistake).
→ read full articleFighting Talk: The New Propaganda
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
28 Jun 2010
Journalism has become a linguistic battleground – and when reporters use terms such ‘spike in violence’ or ‘surge’ or ‘settler’, they are playing along with a pernicious game.
→ read full articleWestern Leaders are too Cowardly to Help Save Lives
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
7 Jun 2010
It is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events.
→ read full article‘I Listen as a Lost People Tell of Their Woes in a Kind of Trance’
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
26 Apr 2010
Other men among my guests have darker tales. They fled to Malaysia, then to Thailand, were imprisoned in Bangkok, then shipped to the Philippines and imprisoned again. The problem, these nations discovered, was that the Palestinians couldn’t be deported home. They didn’t have a home, for some reason. Malaysia does not recognise Israel – Malaysian Christians can travel to Jerusalem only with government permission – and so the authorities in Kuala Lumpur could not negotiate with the men who control “Palestine”.
→ read full articleONCE AGAIN, A NATION WALKS THROUGH FIRE TO GIVE THE WEST ITS ‘DEMOCRACY’
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
8 Mar 2010
Democracy doesn’t seem to work when countries are occupied by Western troops.In 2005 the Iraqis walked in their tens of thousands through the thunder of suicide bombers, and voted – the Shias on the instructions of their clerics, the Sunnis sulking in a boycott – to prove Iraq was a "democracy". There followed the most […]
→ read full articleWHY DOES THE US TURN A BLIND EYE TO ISRAELI BULLDOZERS?
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
2 Feb 2010
Most of the West Bank is under rule which amounts to apartheid by paper."Palestine" is no more. Call it a "peace process" or a "road map"; blame it on Barack Obama’s weakness, his pathetic, childish admission – like an optimistic doctor returning a sick child to its parents without hope of recovery – that a […]
→ read full articleISRAEL FEELS UNDER SIEGE. LIKE A VICTIM. AN UNDERDOG
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
2 Feb 2010
Anyone who is anyone in Israel will come to Herzliya this week for a conference about the state of the Jewish nation. Our correspondent joined them and found a climate of unprecedented insecurity – and paranoia.So the propaganda war is on. Forget Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the 15,000 Lebanese and Palestinian dead. […]
→ read full articleIN THE WEST BANK’S STONY HILLS, PALESTINE IS SLOWLY DYING
Robert Fisk in Jiftlik,
31 Jan 2010
In the richest of the Occupied lands, Israeli bureaucracy is driving Palestinians out of their homes.Area C doesn’t sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it’s part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually […]
→ read full articleAMERICA IS PERFORMING ITS FAMILIAR ROLE OF PROPPING UP A DICTATOR
Robert Fisk – The Independent,
5 Nov 2009
As in Vietnam, Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption.Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it – they still […]
→ read full articleTHE DEMISE OF THE DOLLAR
Robert Fisk,
9 Oct 2009
In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading. In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end […]
→ read full articleRIGHT TO THE VERY END IN IRAQ, OUR MASTERS DENIED US THE TRUTH
Robert Fisk,
12 May 2009
The sentence ‘millions of Iraqis now live free of oppression’ is pure public relations. ‘We acknowledge," the letter says, "that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to […]
→ read full articleWAR REPORTERS USED TO PREFER MORALITY OVER IMPARTIALITY
Robert Fisk,
8 Feb 2009
I wonder whether we show the same power and passion as the earlier generations. The "normality" of war, part two. We had a great storm in Beirut this week, thunder-cracks like gunfire, great green waves crashing below my balcony, rain like hail. So I curled up on my balcony sofa – coat and red scarf […]
→ read full articleWHEN DID WE STOP CARING ABOUT CIVILIAN DEATHS DURING WARTIME?
Robert Fisk,
2 Feb 2009
The mere monitoring of bloody conflict assumes precedence over human suffering. I wonder if we are "normalising" war. It’s not just that Israel has yet again got away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza. And after its own foreign minister said that Israel’s army had been allowed to "go wild" there, it […]
→ read full articleSO FAR, OBAMA’S MISSED THE POINT ON GAZA…
Robert Fisk,
25 Jan 2009
It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what everyone in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn’t the US withdrawal from Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning of the end of Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George Mitchell as a Middle East envoy was […]
→ read full articleWHEREVER I GO, I HEAR THE SAME TIRED MIDDLE EAST COMPARISONS
Robert Fisk,
11 Jan 2009
On both sides of the Atlantic the experience has been weirdly repetitive It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel’s propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies – we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes – don’t realise the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 […]
→ read full articleWHY DO THEY HATE THE WEST SO MUCH, WE WILL ASK
Robert Fisk,
7 Jan 2009
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised? Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead […]
→ read full articleWHY BOMBING ASHKELON IS THE MOST TRAGIC IRONY
Robert Fisk,
7 Jan 2009
How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets […]
→ read full articleONE MISSING WORD SOWED THE SEEDS OF CATASTROPHE
Robert Fisk,
21 Dec 2008
No One in 1967 Thought the Arab-Israeli Conflict Would Still Be in Progress 41 Years Later A nit-picker this week. And given the fact that we’re all remembering human rights, the Palestinians come to mind since they have precious few of them, and the Israelis because they have the luxury of a lot of them. […]
→ read full articleWHENEVER I’M IN TAJIKISTAN, MY MOBILE PHONE SAYS I’M IN DUBAI
Robert Fisk,
6 Dec 2008
Just look how we’ve forgotten the CIA’s secret prisons in Afghanistan I knew I was in Tajikistan this week when my Lebanese roaming mobile phone welcomed me to "Russia" on arrival at Dushanbe airport. Yup folks, Alpha Beirut really believed I was in Mr Putin’s empire. And, wondrous to behold, the phone pinged again when […]
→ read full articleKABUL 30 YEARS AGO, AND KABUL TODAY – HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING?
Robert Fisk,
24 Nov 2008
‘Terrorists’ Were in Soviet Sights; Now They Are in the Americans’ I sit on the rooftop of the old Central Hotel – pharaonic-decorated elevator, unspeakable apple juice, sublime green tea, and armed Tajik guards at the front door – and look out across the smoky red of the Kabul evening. The Bala Hissar fort glows […]
→ read full articleONCE MORE FEAR STALKS THE STREETS OF KANDAHAR
Robert Fisk,
23 Nov 2008
Five years after his last visit, our correspondent finds the Taliban back in charge of their spiritual home – and girls attacked with acid simply for attending school There is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. […]
→ read full articleTHERE IS NO END TO THE CENTURIES OF SAVAGERY IN AFGHANISTAN
Robert Fisk,
17 Nov 2008
Geneva Conventions were supposed to end the mass destruction of human life Back in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave. The torture and killing of prisoners in this pitiful place – the American variety in Bagram and […]
→ read full articleARABS HAVE TO RELY ON BRITAIN AND ISRAEL FOR THEIR HISTORY
Robert Fisk,
4 Nov 2008
There is no Public Record Office in the Arab World, no National Archive In Damascus, a massive statue of the late President Hafez al-Assad sits on a mighty iron chair outside the 22,000sq m Assad Library, a giant book open in his right hand. Behind him lie the archives of his dictatorship. But not a […]
→ read full articleWHY DO WE KEEP LETTING THE POLITICIANS GET AWAY WITH LIES?
Robert Fisk,
16 Sep 2008
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