Robert Fisk

The last time I saw Edward Said, I asked him to go on living. I knew about his leukaemia. He had often pointed out that he was receiving “state-of-the-art” treatment from a Jewish doctor and - despite all the trash that his enemies threw at him - he always acknowledged the kindness and honour of his Jewish friends, of whom Daniel Barenboim was among the finest. Robert Fisk remembers Edward Said.

Israel is asking the United States for $8bn (£5bn) in loan guarantees — and has sent to Washington Amos Yaron, one of the former army officers implicated in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinian civilians to persuade the Bush administration to grant the money. Robert Fisk writes in The Independent.

On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind. “Just for the record,” the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV would never show such footage. The things we see — the filth and obscenity of corpses — cannot be shown. First because it is not “appropriate” to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war. Robert Fisk writes in The Independent.

Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth about the situation in the Middle East, especially American journalists, writes Robert Fisk in The Independent. What’s wrong and how can it be fixed?

Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel’s cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya’alon, Ariel Sharon’s new chief of staff, described the “Palestinian threat” as “like a cancer – there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy.” The Independent’s Robert Fisk continues on to note that meanwhile, mere criticism of Israel outside the country gets you labeled an “anti-Semite”.

Israel’s so-called Book of Terror designed to prove that Yasser Arafat is a master of terror involved in suicide attacks on Israel is riddled with errors, omissions and deliberate misinformation.

The eyes of the world are on Afghanistan, but today a Belgian appeals court is due to consider a case with disturbing contemporary parallels. Robert Fisk reveals shocking new evidence that the full, horrific story of the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982 has not yet been told.

Chilling new evidence suggests that more than 1,000 Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camp massacres in Beirut were “disappeared” within 24 hours of the slaughter, often in areas under direct Israeli military control.

“The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticise Israel is reaching McCarthyite proportions.”

In the filth and powdered cement of what the Israelis had left of his home yesterday, 81-year-old Mohamed Shaer found his Palestine passport but sought in vain for the only photograph of his wife, Mansoura. She died just three years ago, and Mohamed, in white beard and white robe, smiled when he conceded it was probably for the best that she had not lived to see this day; the home she had shared with him and their two sons, Ibrahim and Mohamed, and their own 17 children, ground into the mud by an Israeli bulldozer that came through the border fence, spitting fire from a machine-gun on the roof while two tanks sent salvoes of shells into the nearest buildings.