an interview with robert fisk:
RF: There are several things. First of all, there's the inability of many journalists from the United States to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation--hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost. Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it's about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it's about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.
(...) RF: Then you have this business where television will not show what we see, for reasons of so-called "bad taste". I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Jazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, "there's no point feeding us this, we can't show this"the first excuse was, "people will be having their tea, so we can't put it on", and then it was, "this is sort of pornography, we don't show this". And it ended up--it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff - the last thing was "We have to show respect for the dead". So we don't show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for themSo because of this - and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating - it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat - when in fact, it's about death, and the infliction of massive pain.
(...) RF: I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating themIf you saw what I saw you would never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again.
(...) RF: Just as the wall is called a fence instead of a wall, and it's a neighbourhood not a settlement, so these are now contractors rather than mercenaries. I've always called them mercenaries. When they say two 'contractors' have been murdered, the idea that they are going around in an armoured humvee loaded with weapons doesn't come into the brain pod immediately does it?"
(...) RF: But you don't actually have to set off car bombs to do this. Look at the way we as journalists publish all these maps, you know--Shi'ites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds at the top. The British did the same in Belfast - green for Catholics, Orange for protestants, medium sherry colour for mixed areas, for people who are inconsiderate enough to marry across the religious divide. But we don't, obviously, do these ethnic maps about Birmingham or Bradford or Washington. I could draw you an ethnic map of Toronto, with the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim. But they wouldn't print it. Because in our superior, civilised Western society, we don't acknowledge it. In their society, we spend our time pointing it out to them. I was in New York some months ago, and on the front cover of Time was "How to tell a Sunni from a Shia." Can you imagine it?
(...) The dilemma for the US in Iraq, as Fisk puts it, is that "they must leave, they will leave, but they can't leave--that is the equation that turns sand into blood". For those who want to understand this process, and what it means in human terms, rather than simply be lied to about it, Robert Fisk's reporting is a good place to start.

the iraqis dont deserve us:
Now we are at work in Iraq. Those pesky Iraqis don’t deserve our sacrifice, it seems, because their elected leaders are not doing what we want them to do.

believe it or not in the middle east:
The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes ("Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon"), no major casualty tolls ("Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq"). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).
(...) but I think only the French press - in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique - was prepared to confront a bit of "Believe It or Not". It recalled vividly - and shamefully - how the world's newspapers covered the story of Egypt's "aggression" against Israel. In reality - Believe It or Not - it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. "The Egyptians attack Israel," France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to "It's Middle East War!".
(...) Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel "is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism'".
(...) Congolese troops from Belgium's immensely wealthy African colony scored enormous victories over Italian troops in Africa during the Second World War, capturing 15,000 prisoners, including nine generals. Called "the Public Force" - a name which happily excluded the fact that these heroes were black Congolese - the army mobilised 13,000 soldiers and civilians to fight Vichy French colonies in Africa and deployed in the Middle East - where they were positioned to defend Palestine - as well as in Somalia, Madagascar, India and Burma. Vast numbers of British and American troops passed through the Congo as its wealth was transferred to the war chests of the United States and Britain. A US base was built at Kinshasa to move oil to Allied troops fighting in the Middle East. But - Believe It or Not - when Congolese trade unions, whose members were requisitioned to perform hard labour inside Belgium's colony by carrying agricultural and industrial goods and military equipment, often on their backs, demanded higher salaries, the Belgian authorities confronted their demonstrations with rifle fire, shooting down 50 of their men.

fisk in lebanon:
The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
(...) But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.

fisk on clashes in lebanon's refugee camps:
And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
(...) Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. “Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn’t have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis,” he said. “It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can’t storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take.”
(...) And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.

robert fisk on olmert:
[fisk falters?] Yes, Hizbollah provoked last summer's folly [?] by capturing two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese-Israel border, but Israel's response - so totally out of proportion to the sin - produced another debacle for the Israeli army and, presumably now, for its Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.
(...) Insisting the two captured Israeli soldiers should be released and the militarily powerless Lebanese government should be held responsible for their capture was never going to produce political or military results favourable to Israel. One would have to add that Tzipi Livni's demand for the Prime Mnister's resignation sits oddly with her support for this preposterous war.
(...) Day after day, for 34 days after 12 July, the Israeli air force systematically destroyed the major infrastructure of Lebanon, repeatedly claiming it was trying to avoid civilian casualties while the world's press watched its aircraft blasting men, women and children to pieces in Lebanon. Israelis, too, were savagely killed in this war by Hizbollah's Iranian-provided missiles. But it only proved the Israeli army, famous in legend and song but not in reality, could not protect their own people. Hizbollah fighters were told by their own leadership that if they would just withstand the air attacks, they could bite the Israeli land forces when they invaded.