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  Robert Fisk

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  For the American lawyer and librarian, see Robert Farris Fisk. For people of a similar name, see Robert Fiske (disambiguation).
  Robert Fisk

  Robert Fisk at Al Jazeera Forum 2010
  Born 12 July 1946
  Maidstone, Kent, England
  Died 30 October 2020 (aged 74)
  Dublin, Ireland
  Citizenship
  Irish
  British
  Education
  Lancaster University (BA, 1968)
  Trinity College Dublin (PhD, 1985)
  Occupation Middle East correspondent for The Independent
  Notable credits
  Jacob's Award
  Amnesty International UK Press Awards
  British Press Awards
  International Journalist of the Year
  Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize
  Spouses
  Nelofer Pazira ​(m. 2009)​
  Lara Marlowe
  ​
  ​(m. 1994; div. 2006)​
  Website independent.co.uk/author/robert-fisk
  Robert William Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was an English writer and journalist.[1][2] He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians.[3]

  As an international correspondent, he covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria, the Iran–Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. invasion, and occupation of Iraq. An Arabic speaker,[4][5] he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997.[6][7]

  He began his journalistic career at the Newcastle Chronicle and then the Sunday Express. From there, he went to work for The Times as a correspondent in Northern Ireland, Portugal and the Middle East; in the last role, he based himself in Beirut intermittently from 1976. After 1989, he worked for The Independent.[8] Fisk received many British and international journalism awards, including the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times.[1]

  Books by Fisk include The Point of No Return (1975), In Time of War (1985), Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990), The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005),[1] and Syria: Descent Into the Abyss (2015).[9]

  The term fisking (meaning a line-by-line rebuttal) was named after him.[10]

  Early life and education
  Fisk was an only child, born in Maidstone, Kent,[11] to William and Peggy Fisk. His father was Borough Treasurer at Maidstone Corporation and had fought in the First World War.[12] His mother was an amateur painter who in later years became a Maidstone magistrate.[4] At the end of the war Bill Fisk was punished for disobeying an order to execute another soldier; his son said, "My father's refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done." Though his father said little about his part in the war, it held a fascination for his son. After his father's death, he discovered that he had been the scribe of his battalion's war diaries from August 1918.[13]

  Fisk was educated at Yardley Court, a preparatory school,[14] then at Sutton Valence School and Lancaster University,[15] where he undertook his B.A. in Latin and Linguistics[16] and contributed to the student magazine John O'Gauntlet. He gained a PhD in political science from Trinity College Dublin in 1983;[17] the title of his doctoral thesis was "A Condition of Limited Warfare: Éire's Neutrality and the Relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939–1945".[17] It was published as In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-1945 (London: André Deutsch, 1983; reprinted in Dublin by Gill & MacMillan, 1996). Reviewer F. I. Magee in 1984 stated: "This book presents a detailed and definitive account of Anglo-Irish relations during the Second World War....Fisk's excellent book highlights the ambivalence in relations between Britain, the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland and goes a long way towards explaining why the current situation is so intractable."[18]

  Career
  Newspaper correspondent
  Fisk worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times.[19] From 1972 to 1975, at the height of the Troubles, Fisk was The Times' Belfast correspondent,[20] before being posted to Portugal following the Carnation Revolution in 1974.[21] He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976–1987).[22] In addition to the Troubles and Portugal, he reported the Iranian revolution in 1979.[2] When a story of his on Iran Air Flight 655 was spiked shortly after the paper's takeover by Rupert Murdoch, Fisk moved to The Independent[23] in 1989.[2] The New York Times described Fisk as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain".[24] The Economist referred to him as "one of the most influential correspondents in the Middle East since the second world war."[25]

  War reporting

  Robert Fisk in 2008
  Fisk lived in Beirut from 1976,[26] remaining throughout the Lebanese Civil War. He was one of the first Western journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon,[27] as well as the Hama Massacre in Syria.[28] His book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, was published in 1990.[29]

  Fisk also reported on the Soviet–Afghan War, the Iran–Iraq War, the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Algerian Civil War, the Bosnian War, the 2001 international intervention in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Arab Spring in 2011 and the ongoing Syrian Civil War. During the Iran–Iraq War, he suffered partial but permanent hearing loss as a result of being close to Iraqi heavy artillery in the Shatt-al-Arab when covering the early stages of the conflict.[30]

  After the United States and allies launched their intervention in Afghanistan, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan to cover the conflict. While reporting from there, he was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees fleeing heavy bombing by the United States Air Force. In his graphic account of his almost being beaten to death until a local Muslim leader intervened,[31] Fisk absolved the attackers of responsibility and pointed out that 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'."[32] According to Richard Falk, Fisk said of his attacker: "There is 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."[33]

  During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Fisk was based in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. He criticised other journalists based in Iraq for what he calls their "hotel journalism": reporting from one's hotel room without interviews or first-hand experience of events.[34][35] Fisk's criticism of the invasion was rejected by some other journalists.[36][37] Fisk criticised the Coalition's handling of the sectarian violence in post-invasion Iraq and argued that the official narrative of sectarian conflict is not possible: "The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militiamen who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. ... We need to look at this story in a different light."[38]

  Osama bin Laden
  Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden on three occasions.[35] The interviews appeared in articles published by The Independent on 6 December 1993, 10 July 1996 and 22 March 1997. In Fisk's first interview, "Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace", he wrote of Osama bin Laden, then overseeing the construction of a highway in Sudan: "With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend. Chadored children danced in front of him, preachers acknowledged his wisdom" while observing that he was accused of "training for further jihad wars".[39]

  During one of Fisk's interviews with bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt by bin Laden to convert him. Bin Laden said: "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream ... 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 [whose] task is to tell the truth." Bin Laden replied: "If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim."[40][41] During the 1996 interview, bin Laden said the Saudi royal family was corrupt. During the final interview in 1997, bin Laden said he sought God's help "to turn America into a shadow of itself".[42]

  Fisk strongly condemned the September 11 attacks, describing them as a "hideous crime against humanity". He also denounced the Bush administration's response to the attacks, arguing that "a score of nations" were being identified and positioned as "haters of democracy" or "kernels of evil", and urged a more honest debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East. He argued that such a debate had hitherto been avoided "because, of course, to look too closely at the Middle East would raise disturbing questions about the region, about our Western policies in those tragic lands, and about America's relationship with Israel".[43]

  In 2007, Fisk expressed personal doubts about the official historical record of the attacks. In an article for The Independent, he wrote that, while the Bush administration was incapable of successfully carrying out such attacks due to its organisational incompetence, he was "increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11" and added that he did not condone the "crazed 'research' of David Icke", but was "talking about scientific issues".[44] Fisk had earlier addressed similar concerns in a speech at Sydney University in 2006.[45] During the speech, Fisk said: "Partly I think because of the culture of secrecy of the White House, never have we had a White House so secret as this one. Partly because of this culture, I think suspicions are growing in the United States, not just among Berkeley guys with flowers in their hair. ... But there are a lot of things we don't know, a lot of things we're not going to be told. ... Perhaps the [fourth] plane was hit by a missile, we still don't know".[46]

  Bill Durodié noted that at one point Osama bin Laden had advised the White House to "read Robert Fisk, rather than, as one might have supposed, the Koran."[47]

  Syrian Civil War
  Reporting from Douma, in April 2018 on the Douma chemical attack, Fisk quoted a Syrian doctor who attributed the victims' breathing problems not to gas but to dust and lack of oxygen after heavy shelling by government forces. Other people he spoke to doubted a gas attack, and Fisk queried the incident.[48] Fisk's reporting drew criticism for having relied on government supplied contacts, with Asser Khattab writing in Raseef22 that the doctor quoted by Fisk "had been introduced to him by officials in the Syrian government and army".[49] Richard Spencer and Catherine Philp in The Times wrote that journalists had been taken to Douma on a government-organised trip while international investigators were forced to remain in Damascus, and that the doctor interviewed by Fisk admitted to not having been to the hospital where the victims were taken.[50] The Snopes website said other reporters on the same trip as Fisk had interviewed locals who said they had inhaled toxic gas.[51]

  Fisk returned to the subject of the Douma attacks in early January 2020, in an article concerning internal disagreements within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) recorded in documents released by WikiLeaks.[52]

  Media appearances
  He was interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs in 2006. His final selections were Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, and a violin.[53]

  Fisk featured in the 2016 documentary film notes to eternity by New Zealand filmmaker Sarah Cordery, along with Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Sara Roy.[54] The film explores their lives and work in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

  Fisk was profiled in Yung Chang's 2019 documentary film This Is Not a Movie.[55] In reviewing the film, Slant Magazine stated: "The two things that give this documentary its power and provocativeness are intellectual rather than dramatic: Fisk’s work, and his ideas."[56] Cath Clarke, writing for The Guardian, said the film asks its audience about war: "Is there something deep in our souls that permits it because it feels natural? His painful, deeply serious question about the inevitability of war sets the tone of this documentary about his career."[57]

  Views
  Photo of Fisk in Antwerp in 2015
  Fisk book signing in 2015
  Stances and reception
  Fisk was known for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States, particularly the country's involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.[2] He was consistently critical of Israel, labelling some of the country's actions against Palestinians as "war crimes".[58] One of his beliefs was that he should report events from the point of view of the victim rather than those in authority.[59][60] The Times newspaper, in its November 2020 obituary of Fisk, said that he had developed a "visceral dislike of the Israeli government and its allies" following his coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, arguing that this had made Fisk biased and "unable to provide a dispassionate account of events and their context".[59] David Pryce-Jones, writing in The Spectator in 2003, said that Fisk was guilty of "hysteria and distortion" in his coverage of Middle Eastern topics. In contrast, The Independent, for whom he wrote from 1989, praised him as being "renowned for his courage in questioning official narratives from governments".[61]

  The BBC's Jeremy Bowen also praised him following his death, and noted the controversy Fisk drew for his "sharp criticism of the US and Israel, and of Western foreign policy". Bowen described himself as an admirer who would miss Fisk's "guts and his appetite for the fight".[58] Fisk dismissed the controversy related to his reporting in Syria, saying that he was "writing only what he saw and heard".[62] His ex-wife, Lara Marlowe, took exception to the use of the adjective "controversial" in his obituaries, saying "he was a prolific non-conformist in the world of journalism, whose judgments avoided jumping on the bandwagon" and, in her experience, had been "intuitive, rapid [...] and invariably right".[63]

  Similarly, the foreign correspondent for The Independent Patrick Cockburn, responding to criticisms raised in obituaries, said "Derring-do in times of war usually gets good notices from the press and from public opinion, but moral endurance is a much rarer commodity, when the plaudits are replaced by abuse, often from people who see a world divided between devils and angels and denounce anybody reporting less than angelic behaviour on the part of the latter for being secret sympathisers with the devil." Cockburn wrote that Fisk was better than anyone at "find[ing] out significant news as fast as possible, disregard[ing] all efforts by governments, armies and media to suppress it, and pass[ing] that information on to the public so they can better judge what is happening in the world around them".[64]

  On journalism and politics

  This section relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this section by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
  Find sources: "Robert Fisk" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  Fisk described himself as a pacifist and non-voter.[65] He said that journalism must "challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war". He quoted, with approval, the words of 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."[66] In light of his earlier training as a journalist on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, he said "I had a suspicion that the language we were forced to write as trainee reporters all those years ago had somehow imprisoned us, that we had been schooled to mould the world and ourselves in clichés, that for the most part this would define our lives, destroy our anger and imagination, make us loyal to our betters, to governments, to authority. For some reason, I had become possessed of the belief that the blame for our failure as journalists to report the Middle East with any sense of moral passion or indignation lay in the way that we as journalists were trained."[67] In an interview with the BBC in 2005, he articulated this position further: "If you believe that victims should have more of a say than people who commit atrocities, then yes, I take a definite position. If reporters don't do that then they are out of their minds."[68]

  On coverage of foreign reporting, he observed in a 2006 interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley: "the French are very good at getting to the scene and reporting the reality. I know France doesn't have a very clean reputation in American politics at the moment but my goodness, they've got good journalists. You read a translation of Libération, Figaro, Le Monde – they've got it. I work a lot with French – I normally work on my own, but if I work with other reporters, I tend to report with Italians or the French because, my goodness, they get to the war front."[69]

  When he spoke on "Lies, Misreporting, and Catastrophe in the Middle East" at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley on 22 September 2010, he stated: "I think it is the duty of a foreign correspondent to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer, whoever they may be."[70] He wrote at length on how many contemporary conflicts had their origins, in his view, 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."[71]

  Armenian genocide
  Fisk wrote extensively about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and supported moves to persuade the Turkish Government to acknowledge it.[72]

  Remembrance Day

  This section relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this section by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
  Find sources: "Robert Fisk" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  For Remembrance Day in 2011, Fisk wrote that his father "old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. 'All I can tell you, fellah,' he said, 'was that it was a great waste.' And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see 'so many damn fools' wearing it."[73] He returned to the subject in 2014, the standfirst summarised his experience "My family was haunted by my father's experience on the Somme and the loss of his friends. Why do we pay homage to the dead but ignore the lessons of their war?"[74] and in 2016 where he said "His example was one of great courage. He fought for his country and then, unafraid, he threw his poppy away. Television celebrities do not have to fight for their country – yet they do not even have the guts to break this fake conformity and toss their sordid poppies in the office waste paper bin."[75]

  Personal life
  Fisk married American-born journalist Lara Marlowe in 1994. The couple divorced in 2006.[12] At the time of his death, he was married to Nelofer Pazira, an Afghan-Canadian journalist, author and human rights activist.[76]

  On settling down, he wrote in 2005: "I told the journalism students there [at City, University of London] that when I saw families walking happily in London or Paris, I wondered whether I had not missed out on life, that perhaps comparative safety and security with nothing more than the mortgage to worry about was preferable to the existence I had chosen for myself. A friend of my father's once said I had enjoyed the privilege of seeing things that no other man had seen. But after a flood of questions from students in Sydney about suffering in the Middle East, I began to wonder if my privilege had not also been my curse."[77]

  Death
  On 30 October 2020, Fisk died aged 74 at St. Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, after a suspected stroke.[2][78] Due to the Irish Government COVID-19 restrictions, his funeral was held privately.[79][80]

  The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins said "with his passing the world of journalism and informed commentary on the Middle East has lost one of its finest commentators" and the Taoiseach Micheál Martin stated that "he was fearless and independent in his reporting, with a deeply researched understanding of the complexities of the Middle East, eastern history and politics".[81]

  The Australian anti-war journalist John Pilger declared upon hearing of his death that "Robert Fisk has died. I pay warmest tribute to one of the last great reporters. The weasel word 'controversial' appears in even his own paper, The Independent, whose pages he honoured. He went against the grain and told the truth, spectacularly. Journalism has lost the bravest."[82] Former Leader of the UK Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn eulogised him on Twitter, finding it "[s]o sad to hear of the death of Robert Fisk. A huge loss of a brilliant man with unparalleled knowledge of history, politics and people of Middle East."[83] The Greek politician and economic theorist Yanis Varoufakis also posted a eulogy on Twitter, declaring that "[w]ith Robert Fisk's passing we have lost a journalistic eye without which we shall be partially blind, a pen without which our capacity to express the truth is diminished, a soul without which our own empathy for victims of imperialism will be lacking."[84]

  Christian Broughton, the managing director of The Independent, said "Fearless, uncompromising, determined and utterly committed to uncovering the truth and reality at all costs, Robert Fisk was the greatest journalist of his generation. The fire he lit at The Independent will burn on."[85] For Harry Browne in Jacobin: "Robert Fisk's voice was everywhere, and his ideas were vital in both creating and meeting that Irish urge for explanation."[86] The Irish Times obituary read: "He used to explain his rejection of conventional journalistic detachment by saying: 'If you watch wars, the old ideas of journalism that you have to be neutral and take nobody's side is rubbish. As a journalist, you have got to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer."[87] Former Chartered Institute of Journalists president Liz Justice wrote: "I knew him as a very detailed and knowledgeable journalist. My friend had to edit his work from 2,000 words to 400 and we have very different views involving eggshells and walking carefully. We both agree he will be missed."[88] Richard Falk, in an interview with CounterPunch, said: "Fisk's departure from the region left a journalistic gap that has not been filled. It is important to appreciate that there are few war correspondents in the world that combine Fisk's reporting fearlessness with his interpretative depth, engaging writing style, and candid exposures of the foibles of the high and mighty."[33]

  Memoir
  Love in a Time of War, a memoir by Fisk's first wife, Lara Marlowe, was published in 2021. It covers the period from 1988 to 2003, the period Fisk and Marlowe worked together.[89]

  Awards, honours and degrees
  Fisk received the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times,[90] and twice won its "Reporter of the Year" award.[91] He also received Amnesty International UK Media Awards in 1992 for his report "The Other Side of the Hostage Saga",[92] in 1998 for his reports from Algeria[93] and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against the FRY in 1999.[94]

  1984 Lancaster University honorary degree[95]
  1991 Jacob's Award for coverage of the Gulf War on RTÉ Radio 1[96]
  1994 Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards for coverage on Algeria, the Hebron massacre, and Bosnia [97]
  1995 Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards[97]
  1999 Orwell Prize for journalism[98]
  2001 David Watt Prize for an investigation of the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire[99]
  2002 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism[100]
  2003 Open University honorary doctorate[101]
  2004 University of St Andrews honorary degree[102]
  2004 Carleton University honorary degree[103]
  2005 University of Adelaide Edward Said Memorial lecture[104]
  2006 Ghent University honorary degree Political and Social Sciences[105]
  2006 American University of Beirut honorary degree[106]
  2006 Queen's University Belfast honorary degree[107]
  2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize worth $350,000[108]
  2008 University of Kent honorary degree[109]
  2008 Trinity College Dublin honorary doctorate[110]
  2009 College Historical Society's Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse[111]
  2009 Liverpool Hope University honorary degree[112][113]
  2011 International Prize at the Amalfi Coast Media Awards, Italy[114]
  Works
  Books
  His 2005 work, The Great War for Civilisation, was critical of Western and Israeli approaches to the Middle East. Neal Ascherson, for The Independent on Sunday commented: "This is a very long book, allowing Fisk to interleave political analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories which concern him. These are the sufferings of ordinary people under monstrous tyrannies or in criminal, avoidable wars".[115] In The Guardian, a former British Ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, complained of "a deplorable number of mistakes" in the book's 1,366 pages which "undermine the reader's confidence", and that "vigilant editing and ruthless pruning could perhaps have made two or three good short books out of this one".[66] Richard Beeston, a longtime foreign correspondent and then foreign editor for The Times, wrote in a review of the book that Fisk's "central argument is lost in a verbal avalanche, as Fisk empties 30 years of notebooks onto the page" and that while there are what he calls "passages of descriptive brilliance" he regarded some of his arguments "ridiculous" and "utter nonsense".[116]

  Other books
  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. 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
  Robert Fisk on Algeria: Why Algeria's Tragedy Matters (2013) Independent Print Limited ISBN 9781633533677
  Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East (2024) Fourth Estate Ltd ISBN 9780007350612
  Video documentary
  Fisk produced a three-part series titled From Beirut To Bosnia in 1993 which Fisk said was an attempt "to find out why an increasing number of Muslims had come to hate the West".[117] Fisk said that the Discovery Channel did not show a repeat of the films, after initially showing them in full, due to a letter campaign launched by pro-Israel groups such as CAMERA.[117][118]

Fisk, Robert NIGHT OF POWER Harper360 (NonFiction None) $40.00 10, 8 ISBN: 9780007255481

Journalism morphs into history in this collection of the late Irish writer's essays on the Middle East.

"I met Osama bin Laden three times," writes Fisk, "once in Sudan and twice in Afghanistan, and he became a kind of albatross for me." Called on frequently after September 11 to comment on the founder of al-Qaeda, he laments not having given more credence to bin Laden's pledge to reduce the U.S. to "a shadow of itself." Still, Fisk, who reported on the Middle East forThe Independent and other UK publications for nearly half a century, allows that bin Laden had a point: the democracy-touting West came storming in after 9/11, overturning the regional balance of power. As it did so, according to his account, its actions lost any claim to the moral high ground. Fisk was one of the first to document atrocities on the part of U.S. and U.K. forces, writing sadly, "This was us. These young soldiers were our representatives in Iraq. And they had innocent blood on their hands." The overall effect of Fisk's present-tense historical writing--he holds a doctorate in history and is able to make deep connections between present and past--is to underscore the dangers of making too many assumptions about a much-assumed-about region. Suicide bombers, for instance, don't bomb for the fun of it, but neither do they do so because high on drugs, brainwashed, or insane; it's because they are committed enough to their cause to die for it. Fisk's overall conclusions, reached as the Syrian civil war blossomed, are glum: The Arab Spring is dead, the West lost, Russia and Iran won. But, he adds hopefully, "wars come to an end. And that's where history restarts."

An incisive view of the Middle East that won't please the Pentagon or veterans of the Bush and Blair administrations.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Fisk, Robert: NIGHT OF POWER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=31488a65. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

Byline: Robert F. Worth

NIGHT OF POWER: The Betrayal of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk was the best-known British war correspondent of his generation, thanks in part to sheer persistence. He spent more than four decades running from one Middle Eastern death zone to the next, cataloging the horrors he saw in gruesome detail and railing against the West's complicity in them. He was something of a cult figure on the British left, where his anti-imperial and anti-Zionist convictions were widely shared.

Few could match Fisk's record of being there. He was among the only journalists to witness the Syrian military's destruction of the city of Hama in 1982, and reported on the Iran-Iraq war from both countries. He saw every phase of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, and chronicled it all in a widely praised book, "Pity the Nation." He was beaten bloody by a mob of Afghan refugees in Pakistan in late 2001, and said afterward, "If I had been them, I would have attacked me."

"Night of Power" appears four years after Fisk's death at the age of 74. Like his earlier books, it is a long, rambling mash-up of his dispatches, this one running from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the Arab spring and its aftermath. Fisk knew he was writing in the twilight of his career, and the action is interspersed with self-assessments, some bitter, some haughty. He laments that his reports on Lebanese children massacred by Israeli bombs in 2006 "had not the slightest effect," but no one, he adds, "could claim later that they hadn't been warned."

It isn't clear what Fisk thought his reporting would achieve. Much of what he has to say - about Iraq especially - is now grindingly familiar to an audience that has grown numb after a quarter-century of lurid Middle Eastern violence. His vitriolic chapters on Israel are more about fist shaking than reportage. Politics aside, the book's most consistent theme is a morbid preoccupation with violent death. He seems to head straight for the mortuary in any country he visits. He tells us that he spent a month compiling statistics on suicide bombers, and he travels to Doha to see torture videos so gory that even Al Jazeera wouldn't air them.

Fisk had a grudging respect for the bravery and panache of Osama bin Laden, whom he interviewed at least three times in the 1990s. (He is not shy about rehashing those reporting coups, which featured in a previous book as well.) Curiously, the feeling appears to have been mutual. The letters in the Abbottabad archive, recovered after bin Laden's assassination in 2011, make clear that the Qaeda leader followed Fisk's work, and even wanted to send him audio and visual material for a documentary to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks - a collaboration, more or less. My guess is that bin Laden sensed an ideological affinity with Fisk, who believed that "the West's oppression of the Muslim world," as he puts it here, is at the root of the region's troubles.

One of Fisk's meetings with bin Laden yields "Night of Power"'s most poignant passage. Fisk asked bin Laden's son Omar - then 15 years old - if he was happy. The boy, clearly unprepared for the question, said yes. But years later, as Fisk notes, Omar wrote his own book describing the encounter, which he remembered vividly: "My tongue ached to take back those words - to confide the truth, that I was the most miserable boy alive, and that I hated the hatred and violence my father was promoting."

Despite the hours Fisk spent with Osama bin Laden, his reporting includes some strangely deluded moments. In 2002, Fisk writes, he received a message that bin Laden, then in hiding after the 9/11 attacks, wanted to read Fisk's book "The Great War for Civilization." Fisk writes that he traveled to Islamabad, where a Qaeda courier came to his bed-and-breakfast and picked up an Arabic translation of the book. Fisk then wrote down 12 questions for the courier to bring to bin Laden, which he later answered, in order, in one of the audio recordings he regularly released to Arab news outlets, but without mentioning Fisk.

This story isn't just false; it's preposterous. Fisk may have met someone who claimed to be a Qaeda courier in 2002, but if so he should have known by the time he wrote the sentence that the man was a liar. Bin Laden cut off all communication with his associates for about three years after his escape from Afghanistan, according to Nelly Lahoud's authoritative study "The Bin Laden Papers." Even in later years, meeting with couriers who were being hunted by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies would have been impossible. Then there is the fact that "The Great War for Civilization" wasn't published until 2005 - three years after the encounter he describes.

How does an experienced reporter produce such a self-aggrandizing fantasy? The charitable view would be that this passage resulted from a slip by editors who were struggling to shape an author's posthumous manuscript into a book. But Fisk's previous work is also peppered with factual and historical errors that suggest a shocking carelessness. And he has been accused for decades of juicing his dispatches with exaggerated or even fabricated details. Perhaps he fell prey to the temptations inherent in war zones, where there is rarely anyone around to hold you to account.

My sense is that Fisk fell in love with his own legend. He felt he had a higher mission than reporting facts: He was waging a war of his own against the colonial arrogance of the West, a little like bin Laden's. You sense this in his narrative voice, a snarl of righteous indignation. At times, this tone feels exactly right; his anger at the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 is certainly warranted. But the anger rarely relents, and often, reading him is like being lectured by an irritable old man.

Fisk's didactic fury may have kept him going, but it tainted his fidelity as a witness and narrowed his vision. His writings scarcely register the richness or color of the Middle Eastern landscape he lived in for 44 years. He has almost nothing to say about the region's music or art, the atmosphere of its markets and squares. Its people rarely appear as anything more than perpetrators or - more often - victims, whether of guns and bombs or of the schemes of European colonialists. In a sense, Fisk was himself a casualty, permanently scarred by the wars he deplored, condemned to return again and again to the scene of his trauma.

NIGHT OF POWER: The Betrayal of the Middle East | By Robert Fisk | Fourth Estate | 644 pp. | $40

Robert F. Worth is a contributing writer for The Atlantic.

PHOTO: Robert Fisk in a suburb of Damascus in 2018. (PHOTOGRAPH BY Bassem Mroue/Associated Press FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

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Worth, Robert F. "Dispatches From the Middle East, With Cameos by Osama bin Laden." International New York Times, 13 Nov. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815707326/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c13e8654. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

Robert Fisk, 74, journalist, commentator and author, died Oct. 30 in Dublin, Ireland. Born in Maidstone, England, Fisk's five-decade career in journalism focused on the Middle East, the last three of which as a foreign correspondent for The Independent. Before coming to The Independent, he worked at the Newcastle Chronicle, Sunday Express and The Times. Fisk, a self-described pacifist and sharp critic of Western intervention and imperialism, made clear who was to blame for many of the tragedies that played out in the Middle East during his career. He believed that the story should be told from the victim's perspective instead of from those in authority. As a challenger of the dominant discourses crafted by militaries and governments, Fisk expressed criticism of "embedded journalism" and "hotel journalists" who did not actually go into the streets of the countries from which they reported.

After earning his Ph.D. in political science from Trinity College Dublin in 1983, Fisk published his first book from his doctoral thesis titled, In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-1945. In 1976, Fisk arrived in Beirut and stayed there covering the Lebanese Civil War. He was one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. The culmination of his reporting during the civil war resulted in his 700-page book, Pity the Nation, published in 1990. Until his death, he maintained an apartment along Beirut's corniche.

Throughout the '80s, '90s and 2000s, Fisk also reported, among other events, on the Soviet-Afghan War, Iran-lraq War, Gulf War, Kosovo War, Algerian Civil War, Arab-lsraeli conflict, Bosnian War, 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring and Syria's Civil War. Fisk also had three exclusive interviews with Osama bin Laden in 1993, 1996 and 1997well before bin Laden became a priority for foreign journalists to interview. Fisk later condemned the September 11 ter ror attacks while also criticizing the Bush administration's response.

According to The Guardian, Fisk shied from prime-time TV interviews, but rather preferred to address community groups about issues happening in the region. He was considered a hero in the Arab world for his critical reporting on Western foreign policies, military interventions and the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians which garnered both supporters and critics among colleagues at home. Regarding Fisk's death, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis stated that "With Robert Fisk's passing we have lost a journalistic eye without which we shall be partially blind, a pen without which our capacity to express the truth is diminished, a soul without which our own empathy for victims of imperialism will be lacking."

Jan Morris, 94, famous British travel writer, journalist and novelist, died Nov. 20 in Wales. Born in 1926, she began training as a newspaper reporter in Bristol as a teenager and was involved in interviewing victims of bombing raids during World War II. As an intelligence officer, she traveled to Palestine and Italy. After completing a fellowship at the University of Chicago, she visited every U.S. state and wrote her first of more than 40 books, Coast to Coast.

Fascinated with the Arab world, Morris found a job at a news agency in Cairo, which then led to a position at The Times. In 1956, as the Suez crisis erupted, Morris left her position at The Times due to her disagreement with the editorial line of the newspaper's coverage of the crisis. After leaving, she joined The Guardian and traveled to Suez to witness and report on the crisis herself. While in Egypt, she uncovered evidence that debunked allegations that Britain and France had secretly asked Israel to launch an invasion of Egypt, revealing instead that this was merely a front designed to give the two European nations a pre text to intervene in the crisis and retake the canal. Morris saw first-hand the fighting in the Negev desert and the canal zone but had to flee to Cyprus due to Israeli censorship. During her travels in the region, French pilots had told Morris that the Israelis had used napalm in the Negev and that French and British pilots had been involved. Her report, published in The Manchester Guardian, caused great difficulty for the British establishment forcing both Britain and France to withdraw their forces from Suez. A few months later, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned due to the embarrassment the revelations caused.

Prince Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, 84, the world's longest serving prime minister, died Nov. 11 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. During his fifty-year tenure as Bahrain's prime minister, Prince Khalifa was a staunch defender of the royal family's rule over the country, while suppressing critics of the regime. He survived the Arab Spring protests that called for his removal due to corruption. In 2017, Bahrain joined the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in their blockade of Qatar under his watch.

Considered to be part of the old guard of the regime--"rooted in royal privilege" and "personal patronage"--Khalifa shaped and built much of modern Bahrain. It's been reported that "he had his own private island where he met foreign dignitaries, complete with a marina and a park that had peacocks and gazelle roam its grounds." He was thought to have an off-the-books income and became entangled in a corruption scandal with British aluminum producer Alcoa in 2014. The U.S. position on his legacy was more cynical. Former U.S. ambassador Ronald E. Neumann stated, I believe that Shaikh Khalifa is not wholly a negative influence ... While certainly corrupt, he has built much of modern Bahrain."

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Educational Trust
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Tayeb, Sami. "OBITUARIES." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2021, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A651642215/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e5ff6e08. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

The writer at rest

A journalist known for his scoops--and for the controversies he created

ROBERT FISK, who died in Dublin on October 30th, aged 74, was one of the most influential correspondents in the Middle East since the second world war. For the past 30-odd years he wrote mainly for the Independent, a left-of-centre British newspaper with dwindling circulation and influence at home, but his reach extended far beyond. His bitter narrative of Arab victimhood and Western wickedness (particularly American and Israeli), often brilliantly crafted, resonated across the region and was picked up in newspaper columns, by radio stations and on campuses across the world, America included. Again and again, Western correspondents in Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad would listen politely as Fisk-aficionados, from diplomats and politicians to taxi drivers and coffee-house waiters, regaled them with the wisdom of Mr Fisk's latest diatribe.

Brought up in small-town England, Mr Fisk (pictured) made his journalistic mark for the Times, covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where the British authorities found his reports unduly keen on the Irish republican cause; he later took up Irish citizenship, while keeping a British passport. Leading the paeans of praise on his death was Ireland's president.

Some of his scoops were world-beating. In 1982 he was among the first to enter the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, where more than a thousand people had been massacred by Lebanese militias as Israeli forces looked the other way. In 1993 in Sudan, he became the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden, penning an article headed: "Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace". "I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist," he told Mr Fisk, who pulled off two more meetings with him before the al-Qaeda leader orchestrated the killing of some 3,000 people in New York in 2001. In one session bin Laden praised "Mr Robert" for being "neutral".

Based most often in Beirut, Mr Fisk was a consummate operator who roved far and wide, from Algeria and Libya, through the Balkans and Turkey, to the homelands of Kurds and Afghans. He injected a vivid sense of history into his coverage, showing why so many people in the region felt angry and humiliated--and tended to blame the former colonial powers, and above all America and its protégés, especially Israel, for their unhappy predicament.

On one occasion, not long after the attacks of September 11th, he was roughed up by Afghan refugees in Pakistan. "I realised", he wrote, that 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'."

His reputation among his peers was less rosy. He was a braggart. As we wrote in a review 15 years ago, "Mr Fisk tries to tell the story of the Middle East, but he does not flinch from telling the story of Mr Fisk." He was self-righteous, though most recently had been excoriated for the leniency of his attitude to Bashar al-Assad, the blood-soaked Syrian dictator. He treated rumour as fact, if it suited his narrative: in 2004 he reported that the Americans had secretly spirited Saddam Hussein out of prison in Iraq to an American base in Qatar.

Correspondents from a range of worthy outlets and a diversity of ideologies have accused him of making stories up. In his mode of reporting, a tall tale, colourfully told in the supposed interests of the underdog, would often trump the literal truth.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"Rage on the page; Robert Fisk." The Economist, 7 Nov. 2020, p. 44(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A640675976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9edabbad. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

ROBERT FISK DIED on 20 October 2020, at the age of 74, in Dublin. He had a house there, in the seaside suburb of Dalkey, and his connections with Ireland went back nearly half a century. They included his first major stint as a frontline reporter in a conflict zone, when he reported from Belfast for the Times of London between 1972 and 1975: Although he left Ireland for Lebanon in . 1976 and began a new chapter in his life's work as a war correspondent (a term he did not like), he remained a frequent visitor and spent long sojourns in a country where he eventually, and to his great satisfaction, became a citizen. He found time as well to write the thesis for which he obtained his PhD in Political Science, "A Condition of Limited Warfare: Eire's Neutrality and the Relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939-1945" at Trinity College Dublin in 1983, under the supervision of Professor Patrick Keatinge. That dissertation was published in book form as In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45. The preface and acknowledgments in this fascinating book show how intensely embedded he had become in Irish society; he cites a veritable gallery of prominent names in Irish public life as well as many civil servants, academics, diplomats, journalists and other less well-known figures from many walks of life, who had helped him in his painstaking reconstruction of a difficult and challenging period.

Robert Fisk was one of the English-speaking world's best-known journalists. It would take a long time to enumerate his many awards and achievements, the conflicts he covered, notably in the Middle East and the Balkans, the life he led along the way and the people he interviewed, including, famously, Osama Bin Laden (three times), who did his best, and failed, to convert him to Islam. However, his stature has been well acknowledged, in the many fine tributes to his lifetime's work, notably from peers in his own profession. Those tributes were led, among others, by his close friend and fellow journalist, who also covered the Middle East, Irishman Patrick Cockburn, and by another journalist who knew him and the area well, his ex-wife, American-born Lara Marlowe, nowadays the Irish Times Paris correspondent. Indeed, there could be no more generous and informed tribute to his life's work and to his character as a human being than that of Marlowe. They were married for 12 years and reported from some of the world's most intense conflict zones. Writing in the Irish Times on 7 November 2020, she describes him in unequivocal terms:

In my opinion, he was the finest journalist of his generation, one of
the finest ever. No one did journalism with greater courage, dedication,
determination and intelligence than Robert.
So what made his journalism so distinguished and so distinctive? Again, Marlowe puts her finger on it:

Robert's first rule was to go there, be a witness, even if it meant
risking his life. He scorned cliches, journalists who covered the Middle
East from afar, regurgitated the line peddled by governments and
diplomats, covered wars from hotel rooms. Most of all, he condemned
journalists who did not care about the people they wrote about.
His work was not without its "controversial" aspects. Indeed, that word, in itself, became one of those sly, weasel terms with which some of his critics sought to undermine him. Others went further and tried to paint him in partisan colours, accusing him of being anti-Israeli, sometimes even of anti-Semitism, or of "anti-Western" views, or of having been overly sympathetic to the Palestinians or the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad.

The reality was otherwise. Fisk did not accept the convention that "objective" news reporting meant giving equal weight to every side. He believed the reporter's duty was to bear witness, in person, to travel any road and follow every lead and never to stop until you had established, as far as was humanly possible, the truth of the situation. He was one of the last exponents of dogged, old-fashioned journalism in the best sense. I often heard him speak--and it was no coincidence--of one of the first great exponents of that kind of journalism, Irish-born William Howard Russell (1820-1907), sometimes described as "the world's greatest. war correspondent," who reported events as far apart as the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Russell too believed in speaking truth to power and was dismissed by Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, with the phrase "that miserable scribbler" following his all too honest reporting of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade and the incompetence of the British commander Lord Raglan.

Fisk was ho unalloyed admirer of nation or person and no ideologue or partisan witness. He wrote critically of Syria's role in Lebanon in the late 1970s, for instance, in a manner that might well have been a very unsafe thing to do from his West Beirut home. He criticized Israel, but also sought to understand as fully as he could what had made Israel the place that it was, counting notable Israeli journalists such as Amira Hass of Haaretz among his friends and taking pains fully to explore the history of the Holocaust through his own reading and personal visits to Nazi death camps. His dispassionate reporting of the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 was an early first-hand account of an appalling atrocity. But while he laid the blame squarely where it belonged--a rag-tag group of Christian militiamen facilitated in vital respects by the Israeli military--he was not blind either to the role of other forces in creating the Lebanese imbroglio, from the PLO to the Syrians and a corrupt, ineffective government. Above all, he was unequivocally and unapologetically on the side of the downtrodden, the oppressed and the unheard; theirs was the story he wanted to tell.

One of my first encounters with Robert Fisk was just after I arrived myself in the Irish Embassy in Beirut in the autumn of 1982. The atmosphere in the city was febrile and uneasy. The Israeli forces were still on the edge of the city, while hard-line elements from the Kataeb, or Christian Phalange militia, were now present in key parts of the administration and security apparatus. The PLO's military forces had left for Tunis. One of my first official concerns was the case of an Irish doctor, a woman of great courage and fortitude, who had been working during the summer of '82 in a MASH-style field hospital in the Palestinian camps, operating under torchlight. She had been taken by Lebanese security forces and was being held at their HQ, a dark place with bloodstains on the walls and screams in the distance. Freshly arrived from Dublin, my job was to get her out. I contacted Robert, who could have been forgiven for finding better things to do than advise a neophyte on the protocols to follow in a violent and dangerous situation. Instead he used his contacts and gave me detailed advice, including guidance on media aspects and on dealing with the thugs now holding my compatriot. I clearly remember his advice on not being drawn into any partisan stance: "sometimes, there are no good guys." It was a difficult moment but eventually she was released into my custody and brought to the relative safety of Syria.

West Beirut was not a safe place then and the number of remaining media people and western diplomats dwindled rapidly and alarmingly; fewer still were prepared to travel around the city and the country and a small multinational group--Irish, British, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish--found ourselves sharing these dangerous journeys. Fisk, who became a friend and with whom I worked closely on a number of occasions during my three years there, was the bravest of the brave, but also possessed of a healthy sense of self-deprecation. On some of these trips conventional roles were reversed. I was sometimes the one, as driver, who hid my terror behind a rather British stiff upper lip, while he would extemporize made-up Irish come-all-ye ballads "Oh come all ye gallant heroes and listen to my song, for 'tis of gallant AH, the brave Shiite gunman...".

Was he afraid? In a word, Yes. He knew the risks, barely escaping kidnap (a fate which befell close friends of his, such as American Terry Anderson) in Beirut in 1984. Later he was beaten to within an inch of his life by embittered Afghan refugees following the US invasion of that country in 2001. But he always did it anyway.

Some part of that stubbornness probably had to do with his relationship with his father, which was not a happy one, but he respected him for one incident. Bill Fisk was punished towards the end of WW1 for disobeying an order to execute another soldier (probably for desertion); "My father's refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done." Revealingly, he told Kirsty Wark of BBC in an edition of Desert Island Discs in 2006 that "refusing to obey orders is part of what journalism is about." He told the same program that he "could have lived a happier life." But he kept going. He wrote in The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005):

But if I wanted to quit, if I grew sick of the horrors I saw, I could
pack my bag and fly home business class, a glass of champagne in my
hand, always supposing--unlike too many of my colleagues--that I hadn't
been killed. Which is why I cringe each time someone wants to
psycho-babble about the "trauma" of covering wars, the need to obtain
"counselling" for us well-paid scribes that we may be able to "come to
terms" with what we have seen.
Robert was an internationalist, choosing to base himself in Ireland and Lebanon rather than Britain. I traveled with him on more than one occasion to the Irish Battalion's UNiFiLarea of operations. He was popular and respected, spoke down to nobody and was always curious, happy to talk Irish politics with an Irish soldier or local politics with the Lebanese. That openness and willingness to engage became powerfully evident in the online book of condolences which can still be inspected at http://www.rip.ie: tribute after tribute from the great and the good, but more than a few from "admirer" and "humble Irish soldier."

We saw Bob for the last time, appropriately in Beirut, in September 2019. He told us about his new documentary This is not a movie, about his life as a journalist, co-written by his wife, Afghan-Canadian actor Nelofer Pazira (herself a distinguished journalist who worked with Robert on a number of missions), and director Yung Chang. It seems appropriate to finish with his own words from that film:

If we journalists can do anything, it is to write the story of what we
see and witness with our own eyes, to leave a direct and emotional
record for people who are not yet alive, so that no-one can say this
didn't happen. No-one can say we didn't know; no-one told us.
By Piaras Mac Einri

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Einri, Piaras Mac. "To Witness with Our Own Eyes." Irish Literary Supplement, vol. 40, no. 2, spring 2021, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656329584/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8ee14167. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

"Fisk, Robert: NIGHT OF POWER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=31488a65. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024. Worth, Robert F. "Dispatches From the Middle East, With Cameos by Osama bin Laden." International New York Times, 13 Nov. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815707326/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c13e8654. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024. Tayeb, Sami. "OBITUARIES." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2021, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A651642215/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e5ff6e08. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024. "Rage on the page; Robert Fisk." The Economist, 7 Nov. 2020, p. 44(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A640675976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9edabbad. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024. Einri, Piaras Mac. "To Witness with Our Own Eyes." Irish Literary Supplement, vol. 40, no. 2, spring 2021, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656329584/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8ee14167. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

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