That his peers routinely fêted Robert Fisk (1946-2020) as a great Middle East reporter says more about the media echo chamber than the quality of his work. The Independent, for whom he wrote for three decades, praised his “courage in questioning official government narratives.” A more accurate assessment would highlight his frequent inaccuracies, his penchant for conspiracy theories, his malign obsession with Israel, and his use of antisemitic tropes.
Fisk’s posthumous book Night of Power offers selections from his last twenty years of reporting. Inadvertently, it clarifies that his hostility toward Israel was but a subset of his antipathy toward the West in general. Like so many others influenced by postcolonial thought, Fisk imputes responsibility for Arab and Muslim political dysfunction not to Arabs and Muslims but to the United Kingdom and the United States.
For example, his coverage of post-Saddam Iraq attributes its ills to the “trauma, chaos and stress” of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. He blames acts of self-immolation on the streets of Baghdad on the “West’s political and physical cruelty.” He also suggests, revealing his conspiratorial mindset, that the U.S. government actively coordinated the deployment of suicide bombers to provoke an Iraqi civil war. More broadly, Fisk responds to Islamist violence by asking, “What did we do to make them so angry?”
Those fond of Fisk’s takes on Israel and Jews will not be disappointed by Night of Power. “Israel’s friends in the US, American Jewish leaders, and the Israel lobby,” he claims, were most responsible for the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
Fisk’s chapters on Israel rely heavily on such anti-Zionist and antisemitic Jews as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy, and Israel Shahak. Shahak, for those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, argued that “Israeli Jews [and] most Jews ... are undergoing a process of Nazification” and also that Jews worship Satan.
Unlike armchair and fly-in journalists, Fisk did travel the Middle East but it did him little good, as he interpreted what he saw through a political lens corrupted by illiberal and toxic ideologies.
Adam Levick
Co-editor, CAMERA UK
