Robert Fisk, Author at Toward Freedom

What has happened to Egypt? The dead are being called “terrorists”, the word the Israelis use of their enemies. The word the Americans use. The Egyptian press talks of “clashes”, as if armed Muslim Brothers fought the police. Yesterday morning, I met an old Egyptian friend who said he looked at his country’s flag and began to cry.

I can understand why. Why did so many die? Who killed them? There are many Egyptians today, anti-Morsi people, to be sure, who told me yesterday that they could not believe this, that the Brotherhood folk were all holding guns, as one was indeed holding a Kalashnikov near the hospital – a man I saw – but the truth is that the police shot down the unarmed men and not a single policeman died. This was a massacre. This was a mass killing. There is no other word for it. read more

Fisk on Syria: After Israel’s Air Strikes, EU and US Are Involved

Robert Fisk May 9, 2013 Robert Fisk

Source: The Independent

Lights in the sky over Damascus. Another Israeli raid – “daring” of course, in the words of Israel’s supporters, and the second in two days – on Bashar al-Assad’s weaponry and military facilities and weapons stores. The story is already familiar: the Israelis wanted to prevent a shipment of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles reaching Hezbollah in Lebanon; they were being sent by the Syrian government. According, at least, to a ‘Western intelligence source’. Anonymous, of course. And it opens the old question: why when the Syrian regime is fighting for its life would it send advanced missiles out of Syria? read more

Fisk: War on Terror is the West’s New Religion

Robert Fisk February 26, 2013 Robert Fisk

Source: The Independent/UK

Mohamed al-Zawahiri, younger brother of Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman, made a particularly intriguing statement in Cairo last month. Talking to that wonderful French institution Le Journal du Dimanche about Mali, he asked the paper to warn France “and to call on reasonable French people and wise men not to fall into the same trap as the Americans. France is held responsible for having occupied a Muslim country. She has declared war on Islam.” No clearer warning could France have received. And sure enough, one day later, suicide bombers attacked occupied Gao, while, exactly 10 days later, France lost its second soldier in Mali, shot dead by rebels in a battle in the Ifoghas mountain range. That’s where, according to the tired old rhetoric of President Hollande, there had been a battle with “terrorists” who were “holed up” in the area during an operation which was “in its last phase”. The phraseology is as wearying – you could listen to the same old wording in almost every US pronouncement during the Iraqi war – as is the West’s incomprehension of the new al-Qa’ida. read more

Algeria’s Ongoing Conflict: Don’t Bet on a Happy Ending

Robert Fisk January 21, 2013 Robert Fisk

Source: The Independent

No wonder the Algerians stubbornly refused to help the French in their Mali adventure. No amount of French government pressure last year could persuade President Abdulaziz Bouteflika – which means the Algerian army – to march into the deserts of its southern neighbour and engage in battle once more with its al-Qa’ida opponents and their allies. But Algeria’s enemies – and, of course, France’s enemies – came to Algeria yesterday, turning the Algerian desert into another battleground. Foreigners, two of them reported dead, 41 held hostage on the In Amenas gas field, Algerian troops surrounding both the prisoners and their captors; it sounds like a replay of Algeria’s own 1990s civil war. And if precedent is anything to go by, don’t bet on a happy ending. read more

Fisk: Netanyahu is Leading Israel Into Isolation

Robert Fisk November 26, 2012 Robert Fisk

Source: The Independent

Israelis are congratulating themselves on the success of their Iron Dome missile shield. But across Israel these past years has fallen a different kind of iron dome, one that isolates the country rather than protects it, which shields its people from the realities of the Middle East, from Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world.

The country’s liberal elite fear this isolation and the soullessness it has created. How else can one account for the government minister who proposed “sending Gaza back to the Middle Ages” or the accusations against Israeli model Bar Refaeli that she was “an enemy of the people” because she merely prayed “for the welfare of the citizens on both sides” during last week’s Gaza war? read more

Fisk: The Children of Fallujah

Robert Fisk April 30, 2012 Robert Fisk

Source: Counterpunch

For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.

But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed. read more

Articles by Robert Fisk

Fisk: Egyptian violence was a massacre, not a ‘post-revolution transition’

Fisk on Syria: After Israel’s Air Strikes, EU and US Are Involved

Fisk: War on Terror is the West’s New Religion

Algeria’s Ongoing Conflict: Don’t Bet on a Happy Ending

Fisk: Netanyahu is Leading Israel Into Isolation

Fisk: The Children of Fallujah