Libya - February 24 - Dying in Gaddafi's City

Robert Fisk with the first dispatch from Tripoli - a city in the shadow of death

Gunfire in the suburbs – and hunger and rumour in the capital as thousands race for last tickets out of a city sinking into anarchy

Thursday, 24 February 2011 - London Independent

Up to 15,000 men, women and children besieged Tripoli's international airport last night, shouting and screaming for seats on the few airliners still prepared to fly to Muammar Gaddafi's rump state, paying Libyan police bribe after bribe to reach the ticket desks in a rain-soaked mob of hungry, desperate families. Many were trampled as Libyan security men savagely beat those who pushed their way to the front.

Among them were Gaddafi's fellow Arabs, thousands of them Egyptians, some of whom had been living at the airport for two days without food or sanitation. The place stank of faeces and urine and fear. Yet a 45-minute visit into the city for a new airline ticket to another destination is the only chance to see Gaddafi's capital if you are a "dog" of the international press.

There was little sign of opposition to the Great Leader. Squads of young men with Kalashnikov rifles stood on the side roads next to barricades of upturned chairs and wooden doors. But these were pro-Gaddafi vigilantes – a faint echo of the armed Egyptian "neighbourhood guard" I saw in Cairo a month ago – and had pinned photographs of their leader's infamous Green Book to their checkpoint signs...more  

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What Have We Learned from 9-11?

Eight years ago a close relative went to work at a company across the street from the Twin Towers site.  I walked over to meet him a few times those first months and found the experience riveting.  The smell, the pictures posted everywhere, the wooden sidewalks built so that people could get past the site.  

It has been a while already.  Those who lost family members or lived nearby still have to deal with the loss.  The rest of us are reminded  every moment when we watch TV, or check the news on our smart phone.  There is a hysterical preacher out there screaming about burning the Koran.  The media has lapped this up like he's Tiger Woods.  There are people going crazy because there is going to be a Muslim community center at the 9-11 site.  Don't these reactive types realize that the more they scream the more unsafe it is for us to fly?

Hardly anything we have done has made our lives and country safer.  Since that time we have been subjected to potentially dangerous  X-rays at airports, pat-downs, and TSA employees who act like drill sargents (and seem to enjoy it).  Ted Kennedy made it to a no fly list - so did my parents who are in their eighties and were going through the airport in wheelchairs (kind of sad for my Dad who fought in the horrendously bloody front in the Philippines during WWII). 

We have been in war mode every since the Twin Towers went down.  Unfortunately, we didn't notice much when 800,000+ Iraqis died during the U.S. invasion.  We kept out eyes closed about military deaths and suicides during the Bush Administration.  We sent our sons and daughters to do their patriotic duty(?) so that our corporations that make military equipment can have bigger profits.  I'm sure (and hope) there are good reasons (other than to feed Capitalism)  for our military presence in the Middle East.  

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Robert Fisk: Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt

Did 9/11 make us all mad? Our memorial to the innocents who died nine years ago has been a holocaust of fire and blood . . .

Saturday, 11 September 2010 - London Independent

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters...link

Beware Israel's new leaders

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Robert Fisk: Why Avigdor Lieberman is the worst thing that could happen to the Middle East

World Focus: I can identify Lieberman's language with the language of Messrs Mladic and Karadzic and Milosevic

Wednesday, 18 March 2009
London Independent

Only days after they were groaning with fury at the Israeli lobby's success in hounding the outspoken Charles Freeman away from his proposed intelligence job for President Obama, the Arabs now have to contend with an Israeli Foreign Minister whose – let us speak frankly – racist comments about Palestinian loyalty tests have brought into the new Netanyahu cabinet one of the most unpleasant politicians in the Middle East.

The Iraqis produced the hateful Saddam, the Iranians created the crackpot Ahmadinejad – for reasons of sanity, I leave out the weird ruler of Libya – and now the Israelis have exalted a man, Avigdor Lieberman, who out-Sharons even Ariel Sharon.

A few Palestinians expressed their cruel delight that at last the West will see the "true face" of Israel. I've heard that one before – when Sharon became prime minister – and the usual nonsense will be trotted out that only a "hard-line extremist" can make the compromises necessary for a deal with the Palestinians.

This kind of self-delusion is a Middle East disease. The fact is that the Israeli Prime Minister-to-be has made it perfectly clear there will be no two-state solution; and he has planted a tree on Golan to show the Syrians they will not get it back. And now he's brought into the cabinet a man who sees even the Arabs of Israel as second-class citizens.

Lieberman's first visit to Washington will be a gem. AIPAC – posing as an Israeli lobby when in fact it works for the Likudists – will fight for him and Lady Hillary will have to greet him warmly at the State Department. Who knows, he might even suggest to her that she imposes a loyalty test for American minorities as well – which would mean demanding an oath of faithfulness from Barack himself. The horizon goes on forever.

In Egypt, Avigdor Lieberman will have a tough time. Hosni Mubarak can be a soft touch for the Americans but it was Lieberman who, complaining that the Egyptian President should visit Israel or "go to hell", deeply offended a man who has taken great risks in maintaining his country's peace with the Israeli state.

Egyptians have been outraged to read in their newspapers that Lieberman has talked of drowning Palestinians in the Dead Sea or executing Israeli Palestinians who talked to Hamas. Last night, a supporter of Lieberman appeared on Al Jazeera television to describe Hamas as "an anti-Semitic, barbarous organisation" – even though Israeli army officers spoke openly with this supposedly "barbarous" group both before and after the Oslo agreement.

But the growth of such an extremist administration in Israel and the hopeless response of the Obama administration to the so-called supporters of Israel who destroyed Freeman's career, can only be dangerous news for the Middle East. The Jeddah-based Arab News called the Freeman disaster "a grave defeat for US foreign policy". But while uttering all the usual platitudes, the Arab press has been playing up the pusillanimous remarks of US press secretary Robert Gibbs when asked why Obama was "standing mute" in the Freeman affair. "I've watched with great interest how people perceive different things about our policy and during the campaign about whether we were too close to one group or too close to the other. So I don't give a lot of thought to those." Asked for "straight answers", Gibbs said: "I gave you as straight a one as I can get."

This was almost as funny as The New York Times when it attempted last week to explain why Lady Hillary was frightened of offending the Israelis during the formation of the Netanyahu government when she described the destruction of 1,000 Palestinian homes as "unhelpful".

Her caution in the Middle East, it explained, was "a reflection of the treacherous landscape in the Middle East, where a misplaced phrase can ruffle feathers among constituencies back home". You bet it can – and when Mr Lieberman comes to town, we'll see who those feathers belong to.

Their owners would do well, however, to dwell on the incendiary language of Avigdor Lieberman. He speaks like a Russian nationalist rather than the secular Israeli he claims to be.

I covered the bloodbath of Bosnia in the early Nineties and I can identify Lieberman's language – of executions, of drownings, of hell and loyalty oaths – with the language of Messrs Mladic and Karadzic and Milosevic.

Lady Hillary and her boss should pull out a few books on the war in ex-Yugoslavia if they want to understand who they are now dealing with. "Unhelpful" will not be the appropriate response. link to complete article

A short history of war and exaggeration - the Middle East

speaking of genocide, proportionate response, and the Nazis.

link to Democacy Now program on Gaza, January 17, 2009, Bloody Israeli Assault on Gaza Enters Fourth Week, Palestinian Death Toll Tops 1,100

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Robert Fisk’s World: When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War out of it

How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis?
London Independent
Saturday, 17 January 2009

Exaggeration always gets my goat. I started to hate it back in the 1970s when the Provisional IRA claimed that Long Kesh internment camp was "worse than Belsen". It wasn't as if there was anything nice about Long Kesh – or the Maze prison as it was later politely dubbed – but it simply wasn't as bad as Belsen. And now we're off again. Passing through Paris this week, I found pro-Palestinian demonstrators carrying signs which read "Gaza, it's Guernica" and "Gaza-sur-Glane".

Guernica, as we all know, was the Basque city razed by the Luftwaffe in 1937 and Oradour-sur-Glane the French village whose occupants were murdered by the SS in 1944. Israel's savagery in Gaza has also been compared to a "genocide" and – of course – a "holocaust". The French Union of Islamic Organisations called it "a genocide without precedent" – which does take the biscuit when even the Pope's "minister for peace and justice" has compared Gaza to "a big concentration camp".

Before I state the obvious, I only wish the French Union of Islamic Organisations would call the Armenian genocide a genocide – it doesn't have the courage to do so, does it, because that would be offensive to the Turks and, well, the million and a half Armenians massacred in 1915 happened to be, er, Christians.

Mind you, that didn't stop George Bush from dropping the word from his vocabulary lest he, too, should offend the Turkish generals whose airbases America needs for its continuing campaign in Iraq. And even Israel doesn't use the word "genocide" about the Armenians lest it loses its only Muslim ally in the Middle East. Strange, isn't it? When there's a real genocide – of Armenians – we don't like to use the word. But when there is no genocide, everyone wants to get in on the act.

Yes, I know what all these people are trying to do: make a direct connection between Israel and Hitler's Germany. And in several radio interviews this past week, I've heard a good deal of condemnation about such comparisons. How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis? How can anyone compare the Israeli army to the Wehrmacht? Merely to make such a parallel is an act of anti-Semitism.

Having come under fire from the Israeli army on many occasions, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I've never understood why strafing the roads of northern France in 1940 was a war crime while strafing the roads of southern Lebanon is not a war crime. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps – perpetrated by Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli soldiers watched and did nothing – falls pretty much into the Second World War bracket. Israel's own estimate of the dead – a paltry 460 – was only nine fewer than the Nazi massacre at the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 when almost 300 women and children were also sent to Ravensbrück (a real concentration camp). Lidice was destroyed in revenge for the murder by Allied agents of Reinhard Heydrich. The Palestinians were slaughtered after Ariel Sharon told the world – untruthfully – that a Palestinian had murdered the Lebanese Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.

Indeed, it was the courageous Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the Hebrew University (and editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica) who wrote that the Sabra and Chatila massacre "was done by us. The Phalangists are our mercenaries, exactly as the Ukrainians and the Croatians and the Slovakians were the mercenaries of Hitler, who organised them as soldiers to do the work for him. Even so have we organised the assassins of Lebanon in order to murder the Palestinians". Remarks like these were greeted by Israel's then minister of interior and religious affairs, Yosef Burg, with the imperishable words: "Christians killed Muslims – how are the Jews guilty?" - more

Robert Fisk on Wall Street & Iraq

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Robert Fisk's World: Bush rescues Wall Street but leaves his soldiers to die in Iraq

Until the elections, the people in the Middle East are yesterday’s men

Saturday, 27 September 2008

London Independent

It was a weird week to be in the United States. On Tuesday, secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson told us that "this is all about the American taxpayer – that's all we care about". But when I flipped the page on my morning paper, I came across the latest gloomy statistic which Americans should care more about. "As of Wednesday evening, 4,162 US service members and 11 Defence Department civilians had been identified as having died in the Iraq war." By grotesque mischance, $700bn – the cost of George Bush's Wall Street rescue cash – is about the same figure as the same President has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently "won" thanks to the "surge" – for which, read "escalation" – in Baghdad. The fact that the fall in casualties coincides with the near-completion of the Shia ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims is not part of the story.

Indeed, a strange narrative is now being built into the daily history of America. First we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the evil, terrorist-protecting misogynist Islamist crazies called the Taliban, setting up a democratic government under the exotically dressed Hamid Karzai. Then we rushed off to Iraq and overthrew the evil, terrorist-protecting, nuclear-weaponised, secular Baathist crazies under Saddam, setting up a democratic government under the pro-Iranian Shia Nouri al-Maliki. Mission accomplished. Then, after 250,000 Iraqi deaths – or half a million or a million, who cares? – we rushed back to Kabul and Kandahar to win the war all over again in Afghanistan. The conflict now embraces our old chums in Pakistan, the Saudi-financed, American-financed Interservices Intelligence Agency whose Taliban friends – now attacked by our brave troops inside Pakistani sovereign territory – again control half of Afghanistan.

We are, in fact, now fighting a war in what I call Irakistan. It's hopeless; it's a mess; it's shameful; it's unethical and it's unwinnable and no wonder the Wall Street meltdown was greeted with such relief by Messrs Obama and McCain. They couldn't suspend their campaigns to discuss the greatest military crisis in America's history since Vietnam – but for Wall Street, no problem. The American taxpayer – "that's all we care about". Mercifully for the presidential candidates, they don't have to debate the hell-disaster of Iraq any more, nor US-Israeli relations, nor Exxon or Chevron or BP-Mobil or Shell. George Bush's titanic if mythical battle between good and evil has transmogrified into the conflict between good taxpayers and evil bankers. Phew! No entanglement in the lives and deaths of the people of the Middle East. Until the elections – barring another 9/11 – they are yesterday's men and women.

But truth lurks in the strangest of airports. I'm chewing my way though a plate of spiced but heavy-boned chicken wings – final proof of why chickens can't fly – at John Wayne airport in Orange County (take a trip down the escalator and you can actually see a larger-than-life statue of the "Duke"), and up on the screen behind the bar pops Obama himself. The word "Change" flashes on the logo and the guy on my left shakes his head. "I got a brother who's just come back from Afghanistan," he says. "He's been fighting there but says there's no infrastructure so there can be no victory. There's nothing to build on. We're not wanted." At California's San Jose University, a guy comes up and asks me to sign my new book for him. "Write 'To Sergeant 'D'," he says with a sigh. "That's what they call me. Two tours in Iraq, just heading out to Afghanistan." And he rolls his eyes and I wish him safe home afterwards.

Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer gets a look into the debate. McCain's visit to the Middle East and Obama's visit to the Middle East – in which they outdid each other in fawning to the Israeli lobby (Obama's own contribution surely earning him membership of the Knesset if not entry to the White House) – are safely in the past. Without any discussion, Israeli and US officials held a three-day security-technology forum in Washington this month which coincided with an equally undebated decision by the dying Bush administration to give a further $330m in three separate arms deals for Israel, including 28,000 M72A7 66mm light anti-armour weapons and 1,000 GBU-9 small diameter bombs from Boeing. Twenty-five Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets are likely to be approved before the election. The Israeli-American talks were described as "the most senior bilateral high-technology dialogue ever between the two allies". Nothing to write home about, of course.

Almost equally unreported in major US papers – save by the good old Washington Report – was a potential scandal in good old Los Angeles to which Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently returned after a $225,000 junket to Israel with three council members and other city officials (along with families, kids, etc). The purpose? To launch new agreements for security at Los Angeles international airport. Council members waffled away on cellphones and walked out of the chamber when protesters claimed that the council was negotiating with a foreign power before seeking bids from American security services. One of the protesters asked if the idea of handing LAX's security to the Israelis was such a good idea when Israeli firms were operating security at Boston Logan and Newark on 9/11 when a rather sinister bunch of Arabs passed through en route to their international crimes against humanity.

But who cares? 9/11? Come again? What's that got to do with the American taxpayer?