The You of My Song: Notes from a Voluntary Exile

The British reporter, Robert Fisk, was not only a valuable source for me in researching and writing The You of My Song, but a significant moral support, as well, when it came to writing not just with honesty, but with conviction. Now, after spending more than three decades covering the most conflictive areas of Europe and the Middle East, always in the vanguard, Robert Fisk has announced his retirement in an interview on New Zealand Television’s ‘Campbell Live’. In the interview, which you can see here:

Fisk gives the reasons for his decision to leave active duty, and describes his sense of despair at how little positive impact he feels his work has had.What has made Fisk’s journalism unique is his personalized, combative reporting style, along with a notable disregard for personal danger. When he was in Pakistan covering the first days of the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001, he was beaten nearly to death by a crowd of Afghan refugees.The next article he wrote included these lines: “I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing…” and 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.’”

American actor John Malkovich precipitated an international incident when he declared in 2002 at the British Cambridge Union Society, when asked whom he would most like to “fight to the death,” he replied that he would “rather just shoot” journalist Robert Fisk. Fisk’s reply to Malkovich, (published here: http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles77.htm) was eloquent and all inclusive.

Taking for granted the fact that human issues should take first priority in any political considerations, Fisk is as much an advocate as an informant. It is his opinion that journalism must not just inform, but should challenge authority, “especially so when governments and politicians take us to war.” Having lived for the past 25 years in Beirut, Lebanon, he covered all the principal Middle East conflicts since 1976, first for The Times and then, from 1989 for The Independent. This long contact with the Middle East has given Fisk privileged first-hand knowledge of the people, places, and issues which make up his dispatches. He speaks Arabic and has interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times for The Independent: December 6, 1993; July 10, 1996; and March 22, 1997. The Great War for Civilization; The Conquest of the Middle East (2006) his last book, sums up Fisk’s privileged view of the major events of that region–especially those of its battlefields– since the First World War. Fisk’s take on the current impasse in the Middle East is straightforward. Despite the breast beating of the Western “coalition,” insisting they want to give the Muslims democracy, Fisk says: “They don’t want democracy. They want justice and we don’t want to give them justice.”

Fisk’s admirers have created a website where they have posted many of his past articles: http://www.robert-fisk.com. He has been awarded the British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year award seven times. In 2006 he won the $350,000 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.