INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT FISK

In Beirut I had a drink and a talk with the one and only Robert Fisk, journalist and author of Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilization.

He starts off a bit grumpy and on autopilot because I readily said that I just made the appointment without any clear idea about what to do with it, other than publish it "somewhere" (it appeared today in the daily Klassekampen). But he seemed to warm to me after a bit. My kind of guy, great journalist, a Brit, no bullshit. Bob, as I now, naturally, call him, accused me of being, in so many words, very naïve. It's one of the few times in my life I've been accused of that. Anyhoo, this is the recording I did, transcript's below:




AFGHANISTAN

Q: Beginning with a question that is important for Norwegians, or at least should be important for Norwegians, which is Afghanistan, Norway has a contingency of soldiers there -

A: I'm aware.

Q: There was an election 3 weeks ago and they announced the results of first round of coalition platform talks today, and we've decided to stay the course in Afghanistan, as it were.

A: [rolls eyes]

Q: Our foreign minister has talked about staying in Afghanistan for decades.

A: [scoffs] Yeah, I know, we all do that nowadays.

Q: But it might seem that at this rate it will only be America and Norway left, cause there are so many countries dropping out, recently, of course, Italy dropped out.

A: We might stay a bit longer, but not that long. Ehm... yeah, I was just talking to Afghanistan three times today. Look, I think it's a bigger thing than this, I think first of all ... you know, I calculated months ago for our Sunday magazine that we now have in the Middle East twenty-two times as many military personell in the Moslem world as the Crusaders had in the 12th century. So when people like Obama bin ... Osama bin Laden [laughs], sorry, I'm tired, when people like Osama bin Laden start saying that, "They are the new crusaders", you know, he may have a point. I think we should leave militarily the whole Moslem world, we have no business being here, we should get out. Send our all doctors, our bridgebuilders, our educators, our teachers, but no soldiers. There is no future in having soldiers in these lands, it's not gonna work. I know that the idea is we're trying to bring Afghanistan into a form of statehood or democracy or ... now the phrase is, "Oh, we can't expect Jeffersonian democracy". Jeffersonian democracy wasn't very good anyway, but that's a different matter. But you cannot go to a place to Afghanistan and turn it into something it's not. With these great ideas like, "We'll get rid of the horrible Taliban." Well, at least, I was there when the Taliban was there, at least you didn't get robbed or blown up or have your head chopped off when the Taliban were there, they were in control. We want to see education for everyone, gender equality, et cetera. And the problem is, if you go into a village in say, Nangarhar province, capital Jalalabad, and you go and ask a village leader that you'd like everyone to have education, equality for women, et cetera ... You've got as much chance of persuading him of that as you would have to persuade Henry VIII of parliamentary democracy, or Cromwell to abide by the rules of law. You know, I mean, eventually through education, hopefully places like Afghanistan will reach a point where they will be ready to embrace the values that we feel we have but they don't. But you can't do it - and we're not beating the Taliban, the Taliban are stronger than ever, and it's not because they're crossing a "porous border", they live in Afghanistan! They're Afghans! Any more than the British Army used to say about the IRA "crossing the border" into Northern Ireland, but they lived in Northern Ireland. It was their land. You might not like them, you might hate them politically for what they do, and militarily, but that was the situation. And, ehm, we have these television aims, Hollywood aims, democracy, gender equality, standard of living, standard of health, hospitals, prenatal clinics, et cetera. But that isn't actually what's happening. Ehm ... when you have a batallion at strength attack on the Americans, as we had Friday [2 Oct.], with eight Americans dead ... I was there during the Russian occupation, that's what the Russians [had], Mujaheddin attacks battallion strength three hundred against fortresses and just breaking their way in. And you'll of course do it again, with more casualties for the West. Ehm ... you've got a government that's totally corrupt, which is backed by warlords, which we pay ... but we want democracy! These people are all in with the Taliban anyway. Now, look at the other big picture, politically - I hate that phrase "big picture," but I'm just using it - this isn't just about Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al-Qaida, that's the little picture, the big picture is this: America is frightened of China, as the new superpower, especially economically, I've just done a story about how China's one of the many countries that are gonna pull out of the dollar for oil trade - therefore, to counterbalance China, the US is supporting India - that's why, for example, they've given India all the nuclear facilities they need, don't worry about what they need it for, et cetera. Pakistan is outraged by this, because they are in a dispute over Kashmir. Before the whole Afghan thing started, there might have been a solution to Kashmir, there clearly were talks about a federal area and elections and so on. When Obama appointed Richard Holbrooke as the new Afghanistan-Pakistan ... "Af-Pak," that was the latest bullshit out of Washington - he specifically told Holbrooke, "You don’t touch Kashmir, that's an Indian issue." Right? Pakistanis were outraged. With that, they decided, "Well, were gonna keep supporting the Taliban." As long as Obama wants to play India against China, Pakistan will take its revenge by supporting the Taliban, through the ISI ["Inter-Services Intelligence," Pakistani intelligence], with Saudi money - which is what's happed. In other words, Afghanistan is not just about ... It's part of the great game - it's China, India, Pakistan, Kashmir, Saudi Arabia, Pakistani ISI, Washington ... and you think the Norwegians are gonna have any effect on this? [laughs] Forget it! Ehm ... you know, it's interesting the the International Red Cross is the only NGO [Non-governmental organization] left operating in Kandahar. I've been to see them there. No weapons, no protection, nothing. Because they talk to the Taliban, they talk to everybody. They tell the Taliban: "If you're wounded, we'll look after you." They'll tell anyone, Afghan, whatever their nature of their politics, if they're government soldiers, "We'll look after you. [But] you can't bring a gun into the hospital." And they abide by it. And when you have a situation like that, you can see that what you need is doctors, what you need is medical help. I was in Kandahar just before Christmas, on my own, not "embedded" - I hate that phrase - and I went to the main hospital, the Mirwais hospital ... leaking walls, water all over the floor, everything you believed about Kandahar was all there. There was a dying Taliban, he'd been shot in the stomach by a Canadian soldier, surrounded by all his "brothers", like this [imitates scowling, intense young men with pointy beards]. He didn't want to be interviewed, but I saw him and talked to him, said "Salaam aleikum, aleikum es salaam". And he was Taliban, he was Talib. In the next ward there were two children with acid burns on their faces. The Taliban had thrown acid at them because they were going to school. But what struck me was, all day parents where bringing in children that looked like stick figures, like famine victims - and they were. Doctors, Afghans, including women, putting them three to an incubator to keep them alive. Now this was seven years after we invaded Afghanistan -

Q: This was in Kandahar?

A: This is in Kandahar hospital, they're still putting babies three to an incubator, right? I thought we were supposed to rebuild hospitals and provide medical equipment! So I say to the nurse: "What on earth is wrong with these children?" She said, "They're starving. There's no food. The villages have no money and no food." And I thought, "Christ! I didn't know there was a famine in fucking Kandahar!" And we weren't told that, were we, by the presidents and prime ministers who were visiting? No American officer ever told us this, no Brit did. I had to go to the hospital and see dying children. You know? Obama had just said, this was before he became the president, he'd been elected but he'd not yet [been inaugurated] - he said, "We're gonna send eight thousand more troops to Afghanistan!" And I finished my piece saying,"Please no! Eight thousand doctors, please!" You know? So in my view the whole military thing is hopeless, cannot be won, is absolutely pointless, is exposing Afghan civilians to enormous destruction, pain and suffering and death, and is of course exposing the Nato armies to the same thing. That Nato should've hooked its reputation on being in Afghanistan is insanity! You know, I know that they don't have role anymore 'cause the Soviet Union is gone, and we're not waiting for the - what was the famous pass in Germany, they're always gonna drive their tanks through there, the Mulda [sic; Fulda gap] gap, wasn't it called? Ehm ... And then they were looking for a new role, and they found it by bombing Serbia, you remember that? That was in the Kosovo War. First of all, remember, most of the refugees, most of the Kosovans were in their homes, when we started bombing, they were driven out of their homes, and then we said we were bombing to get them back to their homes again. So Nato trying to find a role, it was gonna be nice and humanitarian. And Kosovo's not been a roaring success, as you know, nor has Bosnia. So now were going to to Afghanistan to find a raison d'etre for Nato. Well, excuse me - have you been to Afghanistan?

Q: No, I have not.

A: Well, you only have to fly over it in a jet plane and look down to realize that you will not win a war there! I mean, towering, craggy mountain peaks - you cant'! And we're Westerners? Clogging along, and we can't speak the language? And we think we're gonna fight the Taliban? I mean, forget it, just forget it. The only way you're gonna deal with Al-Qaida is by bringing justice to the Middle East. That's the only way you can do it. You will not [lightly bangs table] - win - the war - against Al-Qaida. It is - injustice - that feeds - them. And as long as there's injustice, whether it's in Kashmir, whether it's in Southern Lebanon, Palestine/Israel - that's the problem. And we will not deal with that, we insist on having military battle, and it won't work, it hasn't worked. It didn't work in Iraq, the Israelis haven't made it work in Gaza, it doesn't work in southern Lebanon, it doesn't work in Afghanistan. And it doesn't work in Pakistan. First the Pakistani army said, "We've liberated the Swat valley!". Now they admit they've got another valley to liberate. Of course! And you can just go back through all the books, you can read about the British occupation of Iraq in 1920. I mean, it's extraordinary. We besieged Fallujah. Surrounded Najaf. Shelled it, of course. British intelligence said that "terrorists" were crossing the border from Syria, and the prime minister Lloyd Geroge stood up in the House of Commons and said that, "If we if leave Iraq, now there will be civil war." I mean, excuse me. Go back through all the, the first Afghan war, 1842, second Afghan war, 1880, it's the same old story. Small British forces being overrun by masses of Afghans. If you actually read in 1880, the official British report on the defeat of the British army in the battle of Maiwand - I've got it. It actually has a British officer called Manoryn recording that among the Afghans attacking them, were "students with black headbands called 'Talibs.'" Taliban. Same people. This is in 1880! We're only, you know [laughs], a hundred and twenty years later ... and we're still gonna win, eh? In that context, I'm sorry, Norway as a nation has no idea what it's doing militarily out there, and nor do I. It's absolutely ridiculous. [pause] Sorry.

Q: That's ok.

A: Doctors! You know. Norwegian aid? Fine! But not soldiers.

Q: You perhaps won't be surprised to learn that Norwegian journalism as British and American journalism has as relates to Afghanistan -

A: My journalism doesn't have that problem, but I get what you mean.

Q: No, of course not. I was just gonna say that it’s very, "Norwegian officials say."

A: Yeah, like "American officials say." Have you been to any of my lectures in Norway?

Q: No, but I’ve seen them on YouTube.

A: Ok, so then you know. Have you read any of my books?

Q: Yes, I’ve read Pity the nation and The great war for civilization.

A: Did you read the English version or the Swedish version? Cause the Swedish translatin was supposed to be quite good –

Q: No, I actually have the American edition, which has quite a few typos.

A: Has it?

Q: Yes, well –

A: Anyway, you can show me later.

Q: The question was about being on patrol with armies. Norwegian journalists always travel with Norwegian soldier.

A: Look, if you wanna write about armies, you can do it. But if you wanna write about Afghanistan, you've gotta get clear of that, somehow, you've gotta break free of it. It's very dangerous and it's very difficult, but you cannot - if I'd have gone to Kandahar with the Brit army or the Americans I simply wouldn’t have learned what I learned. And they wouldn’t have told me even if they knew. But I don’t think they did know. And I don’t think they care.

Q: When journalists travelling with soldiers come under fire, that's the story more often than not.

A: Yes, "I watched on in horror as," and so on.

Q: And it's so bereft of context that it's almost impressionist. "We were there, we went to the top of a hill and someone shot at us."

A: Yeah, I mean, the other thing you see is that, in World War II the world was full of war correspondents, right. Wearing uniform! [Laughs] In the Gulf war in 1991 they were all wearing military costumes and wanted to be soldiers. Half the marines I met all wanted to be journalists. It was a very weird situation, they were all writing articles - but, even in World War II, the reporting had about it a sadness, sometimes. And a mournfulness that this was a terrible war they were involved in, however much we were on the right side, bla bla bla. You were occupied, we almost were. But I think that - see, the problem is, once you're a soldier and you're doing the, "I ran and ducked for cover besides sergeant ..." you know, Otto this, or Helga or Holgar or whatever - you're not recording the real story which is the suffering of Afghan people, which is much greater than the soldiers', who've got flak jackets and guns and radios and first aid equipment and medevac helicopters and so on. And it's a bit like, you know, having a giant who goes into a room full of little children and then someone fires a rocket at him and you say the story is the giant, - no, sorry, it's the children that's the story! Ehm ... That is a problem, yeah. And reporters want to be heroes, unfortunately - my theory is, that if reporters wanted to spend their time with soldiers, they should join the army and wear a uniform. and stop all this nonsense about "embedding" and all this rubbish.

Q: Are we really fighting the Taliban? Or whats the line between a Taliban and a farmer who wants to get the foreign -

A: I have no idea who were fighting. I mean, I do know, but if you ask me, what are we supposed to be fighting, I don’t know. Look, hah, there was an incident 2-3 years ago where the British minster of defense announced that we had the fiercest close fighting since the Korean war. Now I just finished a huge volume on the Korean war, what that means is hand to hand, you're coming under attack by hundreds of men. We're talking about the Chinese crossing the Yalu river, the Glouchestershire regiment and so on. And then I met a guy in London, a captain, I think, I knew him before, faintly, but I met him in the company of some friends. And he said that he was in a small village in Helmand province. And they were attacking on every street and they had to bring in, effectively, an American airstrike and destroy the entire village around them. And thus their compound was left alone. What happened to the people in the village? He didn’t know. Are you fighting the Taliban? Well, you're fighting Afghans, aren’t you?" "Oh, they're all paying drug money, they're intimidating the local villagers, they're hiding behind civilians ... I've never met an army that doesn’t take refuge behind the walls of houses. Excuse me. And when the Israelis were bellyaching away about how the Hezbollah used civilian shields, and I got into a village outside of Majdloun, they were hiding a tank behind a school. What is that if it isn’t hiding behind civilians? All military people take cover, and any cover they have. I'm just reading a book about the battle for Moscow in 1942, you know, when the Germans tried to take Moscow. And every civilian outside Moscow was getting butchered by both sides. The idea was, at one point the Germans were forcing crowds of Russian civilians to walk in front of their tanks. And Stalin said, "Kill everyone. We're gonna kill Germans, and if they're in the way they're in the way, sorry"

Q: The one thing that kills off rational debate, at least at home, is -

A: I know. "If we don’t get them there, they're gonna get us here". Is that it?

Q: No. No. It's ... slightly more sophisticated than that. You mentioned the girls with acid in their face, that the Taliban had thrown.

A: That's all true.

Q: But do we leave them? Shouldn’t they be able to go to school without being assaulted?

A: Yeah, but you see, that's not the point. I mean, I do go to places and talk to people. And we see the misogynist, patricarchal society, let's call it patriarchal, right. men are the doers and the deciders and women stay at home. And we say, "This is wrong!" Morally wrong, it upsets our values, human rights, right. Well - I'm sorry, but if you go to the average Afghan village, they'll say, "Human what? Sorry?" They don’t see, for example, the villages in Afghanistan, like all very rural communities, are very highly structured societies. Everybody knows them. Theres a new movie that's just been made called Act of dishonor, which is about honor killings in Afghanistan. It's not out yet. I've seen it. And the detail, the structure of the mulla, the former mujahed fighter, who's called the "Commander," ehm ... the girl who is the daughter of this guy and her fiancee is very sophisticated, you understand them, these are intelligent people, without education, of course. And we want to bring lots of education, won't we? The problem is, when you go stomping into this, you know, with our nurses and our doctors and stethoscopes and our nice little earrings, and you say, "Women have to go to school," the men in the village will say, "This is not the custom. This is not how we do it here." And this attempt to bring them into the the light of our wonderful post-World War II world of human rights, Geneva conventions, laws of war - which George Bush spent much of his time tearing up to pieces after 9/11 - this is not seen as an attempt to assist, it's seen as an intrusive, aggressive act against their personality and their culture. Whether they claim it's Islam that women have to be, you know, whatever, that's not the point. It's seen as an attack on them by us. This is not their value! Right? No, you can make fun of it, you can deplore it, you can point out with considerable self righteousness, but also accurately, that women should be educated. Of course. But I said to you earlier that that's like asking Henry VIII to accept parliamentary democracy! It is not a sophisticated, technologically sophisticated society. As the years go by, we must obviously hope that weve increased education by Afghans of Afghans, they will start to evolve in a way that we feel is correct. Lebanon is largely a Moslem country, women are educated equally with men here and it's accepted. Even in the most remote villages of southern Lebanon. 150 years ago that would probably not be the case. See? So - but the longer we're there, telling them that they must, it's not gonna happen. If as the years go by they will come to that decision, then, that's something we should give support, but it's them who have to make that decision, not us who come in with our little puppets, you know, our Malikis in Iraq and our Karzais in Kabul, it's not gonna work. And you know, every time a major power is fighting a a guerrilla army, whether the guerilla army is cruel, vicious, terrible or whaterver - they always set out to show how immoral they are. They fight behind women's skirts, among civilians, they throw acid in girls' faces, they execute village leaders who won’t do what they want, et cetera, et cetera. And that's easy to do. Its easy. Village leaders who are prepare to accept that a girl will be stoned to death because she looked at another man, et cetera et cetera. You're absolutely right. But these people come from Afghanistan and we do not. It is not our land. It is not our religion. These are not our people. We keep saying, "Oh, the Moslems want to take over the world!" But there's no Jordanian army in the streets of London, the Syrians are not in the streets of Washington. Excuse me. I was at a lunch, a very posh lunch in ... was it in Dallas? No, it was in Langton (sic?). Some months ago now, and this lady came up to me and she said, [old woman's voice, American accent], "Excuse me, Mr Fisk, do you think the Moslems are gonna take over the United States?" I said, "What?" And she said, "Well, they've already taken over France!" I did what I always do on these occasions, I looked at my watch and said, "Oh ... gotta go!" [laughs] She was quite unaware that quite a few people in the room were Moslem Americans. But you see, she's living in the fear that if we don’t stop them there, they're gonna come here. You see, that's the Bush thing: make them live in fear.

Q: That's what they say was the result of ignoring Afghanistan before Sept 11th..

A: But why did we ignore it before Sept.11th? After the Russians left, that would be the moment to go in and say, here are all our doctors - and we sent a few NGOs. But bascially we gave them no money. They couldn’t rebuild anything. So they went back to drugs. and then the drug lords fought each other. And it carried on. I mean, we shamelessly used the Afghan people when we wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. And we were quite successful in doing that. Afghanistan was the Soviet Vietnam and after that the Soviet army bascially cracked and the whole economy of the former Soviet Union started to collapse. I mean, it was Gorbatchov who had to make the decision to bring out the whole of the Soviet army, wasn’t it. And Gorbatchov is the end of the Soviet Union. And therefore the end of Eastern European iron curtain. Very successful. Zbigniew Brzezinsky [National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter] was one of the people behind it. But the cost of it we learned when planes started flying into tall builings later on. You see, one of the great problems to deal with, and this is a journalistic problem too, whenever you start to [talk about] when something went wrong, they always say to you, "Yes, but we can always discuss that later, what about now? If we leave, the Taliban will kill everybody!" You see? But why didn’t you think of that before? "Yes, but - but now, what do we do now?!" You see? And, I think the first thing you could do now is have a look at all the other fucking regimes in the region, those dictators, like in Kazahkstan, that we're supporting. Are you sure there isn’t an Al-Qaida gonna pop up there in the future? To defend the people from the dictators whom we're supporting? We're carrying on pouring money into all these little former Soviet muslim republics. What's happening in Tajikistan? I've been there quite a lot, it's a weird situation, its a totally cracked country, like all former Soviet republics. With its usual dictator [Emomalii Rahmon], who keeps writing huge books about the history of his country. He's got a new palace in Dushanbe, which looks even grander than the ice cream thing in the center of Rome, the Vittorio Emmanuele monument. I think it's built by Germans. We're building it, don’t worry. So, you no, you have to stand back and stop being sentimental. Stop being preachy. Stop thinking you're gonna give your soul to these people. They haven’t asked for it. If they don’t have water, give them water. Then they'll drink it and can survive. But they didn’t ask for our list of human values. And there's a strong missionary element to all of this, see. There's one force, the Canadian force, who has a major problem in Afghanistan. They've noticed that there is a strong element, and this is the case in that part of Afghanistan, unfortunately, there's a strong element of paedophilia between older men and little boys. It exists. It exists in the Taliban, it exists inside important people in government. I'm sorry to say. And the Canadian forces, for example, have a problem - what do they do? What happens when an older Afghan was trying to strike up a relationship with an underage boy in a native camp? It's happened. They've been told not to tolerate it. And the Afghans say, "What do you go interfering in our lives for?" Whoops - what do you do there? I would I agree, you can’t tolerate it, it's on your territory, anyway, in your compund you can’t, outside you can do nothing about it. But the Canadians feel that, well, they should, it's wrong. It's against all human rights. It is. But once you start interfering there's a pattern that goes across - I've been to warlords camps and found little boys wearing make up sitting on the roof. What do you do about that? I'm sorry, but there's no point in trying to keep it secret. Theres actually been messages back and forth between them and Candianan forces in Ottawa, "What do we do about this?" I know this as a fact. And - I've been with an Afghan UN guy who's outraged at some of the things we saw in the villages outside Meiwand, which is Kandahar province, which is west of Kandahar city. I'm getting involved in the issue of paedophiles or homosexuality or anything else, what I'm saying is, that here is a classic issue of, forget about, for a moment, womens education and gender equality - what do we do about this? Certainly in Afghanistan it's been a custom for a long time. And maybe it was the case in 13th century Germany, I don’t know, Ive no idea. But - who knows. Certainly there was a time when slavery was quite accepted, in ancient Rome, and even in the 18th century. If you witness something like this, you want to prevent it. But then the people turn around and say, "What are you doing, this is quite normal in our society." It shouldn't be normal, and in many areas of Afghanistan it is not normal, but it does happen. You see, yeah, I can see your puzzlement, I don't know what you do about that. If you're gonna go there and impose our human rights, and we're right to want to do that, but can we do that? And is it gonna work? You know? Or do we have to wait until a society reaches a certain level of education and society itself demands laws to protect itself. Which is what we, ultimately, did in Europe. I mean, I get very tired of hearing people, you know, Ive heard westeners in Kabul, in their compounds, outside which they hardly ever go. I go where I want, I go bookshopping in Kabul ... ehm ... saying that well you know, "We've reached a certain degree of civilization and we think that they deserve it too." To which I say, "Hang on a second. In the last century, my father went through two world wars! I don't think they were very high standard, were they?" They were the biggest, most titanic conflicts in the history of humankind. And that's part of our recent history, for chrissakes. The Afghans haven’t done that. I mean, they've lost a million dead or whatever, but not on that scale. You know? We make Al-Qaida out to be Hitler, what was it - 70 million dead in World War II? It isn’t that big. Excuse me for saying so, you know. And again, one of the problems is the Second world war. We're constantly being told ... [Anthony] Eden used to call Nasser the "Mussolini of the Nile". We kept having Baghdad, Saddam compared to Hitler. Or Khomeini compared to Hitler. And sometimes Blair and Bush thought they were Churchill and Roosevelt. You remember, just before the war, the very odd looking prime minister of Spain [Jose Maria Aznar] and Blair and Bush met on the Azores, and it was called "The big three", you remember? Sorry, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill are dead and so is Hitler, stop this nonsense. And the Israelis are always going on about ... Begin said when he was advancing on Beirut in '82, he wrote this crazed letter to Reagan saying ehm, "I feel as if I am advancing on Berlin with Hitler in his lair", Arafat , the pathetic Arafat being Adolf Hitler? You know. And Uri Avnery, the very leftist writer in Israel, he said, "Dear Mr Prime Minister," in an article, "Hitler is DEAD!" You know. But we keep recreating this because we know that with the very transitory and feeble brains that most of the West has about history, they'll remember World War II! The Blitz! You know. Wasn’t it after some London bombings, I think it was the July 7 bombings, all the papers were full of pictures of the London blitz! But you know the British lost 14 thousand in one year during the London blitz! And it was less than 60 in the tube bombings. Yes, forgive me, by all means, it was an atrocious act, as was the international crimes against humanity of Sept 11 2001. But it was not World War II. And its like .. and the other problem we have now is ... this applies to your government as well as all western governments. No Western leaders or ministers in any government in the West has ever been in a war. Not one! John McCain had been in Vietnam, but he didn’t get it, into government, did he? And Colin Powell had been in Vietnam, but not very spectacularly. But he's gone now. When I was growing up, there was, you know, Atlee,been in the First world war, then there was Churchill. Battle of Sudan, World War I, World War II. Then there was Eden, he was in the World War I, as well as being foreign secretary in the Second. Even when I was a reporter in Northern Ireland, the first secretary of state for Nothern Ireland was William Whitelaw, a Tory. And he crossed the Rhine in '45 under fire. These people knew that you took decisions that killed people. Blair! His experience of war is Hollywood, or television. We see war. That is why the relationship between journalists who are not embedded and government ministers is so fucking awful, because they hate us because we see what it's like. And they want a bloodless sandpit. You see. Which journalists, especially in television, will provide them with. We don’t show corpses when they've been blown to pieces, not on television. If they are obliged to die romantically on the side of the road and we have the sun in the background ...

Q: Or a shoe ...

A: ... with some blood, yeah. But when you have people with their faces burned off or women with their legs blown off, we don’t show. Blood squirting. I see it all the time. I write about that like it's a medical report. But this you see is a lethal form of journalism because its allowing people to believe, as Blair did when he refused a ceasefire here in 2006, that war is a policy option. In fact is represents the total failure of the human spirit. If you're there and you see it, it sure does. I mean, you can put Norway into this context if you like, but it's a very small bit of the machinery, but I see why you ask that question. At the end o the day, I mean, as the years go by, various thing pass through my mind and I see it and so on. When you cross the Mediterreanen and arrive in, say, Beirut - or even Alexandria - it's a comprehensible world. Clearly there's a big stamp of the west, you know, the French were here since 1815, they play beautiful music [gestures to piano bar in hotel], the serve up gin-and-tonics [holds up drink], you can have a good cup of coffee Downtown, a meal, a fine wine, whatever. There's a symphony orchestra in Beirut, right? So this is ... you can see this as being the West. Although, when you smell the coffee and see the palm trees, it's not. Its the beginning of the East, right. Then you move on across Syria. Very gentle, intelligent people, not so well educated. But you're moving deeper into the Umma, the Muslim world. Then you go right through the deserts and come to Iraq, with whole villages where they don’t know how to write. They have a lot of customs that we don’t like. I've mentioned some of them. Then you arrive in Iran, you know, the capital of Iran, and because of the religious hold, is a deeply spiritual country. The government is also deeply corrupt, but we know that. Then the next country is Afghanistan, at which point all the warm and cool waters that you've brought with you to bestow upon these people run away into the sands. [Pause.] And I haven’t even taken you into the Swat valley yet. You see? And I think we have to accept the world as it is, rather than try to constantly reform it by ourselves. Ehm ... and you see, I mean ... not only will the villager in Mandahar, many of the villagers in the villages of Afghanistan never leave their village. During the Russian period, a bomb had gone off under a bridge, an IED, of course, against the Russian convoy. And when I got there it was all, it was near a place called Salopi, where the French got attacked now and lost all those men [ten French soldiers were killed in August 2008]. This guy comes up to me and he says, "Shuravi?" Russian, he was asking me if I was a Soviet. I said, [emphatic] "No no no! I'm from London! Mrs Thatcher!" And he went off and talked to his friends and came back to me and said, "But London's under Soviet occupation!" Where does that leave me, right? I said, [panicking now] "No no no no no, Mrs Thatcher would never allow that!" But the point I'm making is that you're dealing with people who simply are totally cut off from us in a sense, and when we arrive, we are the enemy. "What are these people doing here?" Then you get some people there who have had education. But those people when they go into Kabul - what do they see, they see the Westeners in their compounds with armed guards. Some of whom shoot innocent people because they've got to protect themselves. And then what happens, they see these big hotels full of girls in miniskirts. "Is this what they're bringing to Afghanistan?" You see? I mean, there's nightclubs in Kabul. Now in a perfect world, why shouldn’t you have nightclubs? I have nothing against drinking or girls in miniskirts or men who have funny beards. but the problem is that the people of Afghanistan are not all living in Kabul and they look at this and going "Hmmmm ... hmmmm ... [scratches imaginary beard] and you're teaching us on how we should behave?" And then of course these people come loaded down with money, and everybody will say, "Anything you want, provided we get some of the money please. I've got this very good agronomy project," you know, "in Fisk-abad," or "Sven-abad" or whatever it may be, right? [stuffs shirt with imaginary dollar bills]. Look, you can’t in an hour or less go through all these issues, I see Palestine sitting there [in notebook], "Palestina", ehm - but I'm just trying to give you an indication of, I mean, don’t make the issue of pedofilia into the point of what you're writing. I'm putting it in as an example of a real problem that existed with the Canadian army. And I know it did, I go to Canada quite a lot. Ehm ... but that's the most obviously terryfing problem which you face as an individual when you see things like this. But I mean just the ordinary dealing with society where women mustn’t be examined by male doctors. I'm sure that Europe was like that long time ago. But ... there you go, still the case in Saudi Arabia today. But we don’t complain about Saudi Arabia, we're not gonna bring human rights to Saudi Arabia. Were not demanding gender equality in Saudi Arabia. Absolutely not. 'Cause they're our friends, aren’t they, they do what they want. We always want to bring human rights to countries that oppose us. We don’t want to bring it to countries that are on our side, take Mubarak where police force prisoners to rape each other in Cairo prison. I don’t see any human rights demonstrations outside, do you? Obama castigating Mubarak for this? No. Nor did Mr Bush.

PALESTINE

Q: My question about Palestine is, What do you make of Obama's efforts for -

A: Forget it. Look, we like to think that governments are about good guys and bad guys. Government is not, government is about power and the use of power. and as soon as you become the president or the prime minister or the chief dictator - what is it when dictators are on our side, what does the AP [Associated Press] call them? Strongman! - you learn the limits of your power. Obama said, "An end to settlements!" And Netanyahu basically said, "Fuck you." "Alright, then, we'll start the talks without an end to settlements." And then we'll put pressure on the colorless, cowardly man Abbas, and he not only accepted talk without an end to settlements, but says that he doesn’t want to help the UN with prosecuting Israeli war criminals in Gaza! To that degree do we cut their legs off. And Obama's gone along with this. Mrs Clinton is not going to fight the iIsraeli lobby in Washington. She wants to be the next president, does she not? And you're not gonna have a president that's prepared to commit political suicide by standing up for justice between Palestinians and Israelis. Mr Obama's not that good, I'm sorry. And what is Obama saying, he's saying that the real fight isn’t in Iraq, its in Afghanistan. "What?!" I heard him say that, I said, "Oh, there we go, he's over." [laughs]. I mean, it's nice to hear him talk about Palestinian rights, a Palestinian state, and "Israelis mustn't do this that or the other". But, remember, when Gaza was going on, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a word about Gaza! He wasn’t yet the president, but he'd been elected, he could've said something. "Watch out, here I'm coming, don't you -" He didn’t say a word. Had it been the other way round, had the Palestinians killed 1 300 Israelis and the Israelis had killed 13 Palestinians, he would've spoken, I promise you. And we all know that. Obama ... after Bush, you know, everything's gonna be better, you know, in theory, But the system of American power at the moment, and I go to Washington quite a lot, is such that you will not have justice in the Middle East. Certainly not for the Palestinians. They're not gonna get it.

IRAN, ISRAEL

Q: Do you think it will always be like that? That it comes with the job [presidency]?

A: Well, where do you start? Look, ehm ... nothing stays the same forever. The great Obama nightmare is, and I know it is because I've talked to military people about it - is: Israel is being pushed on the settlements, so it decides to destroy nuclear facilities in Iran. It can’t, but it think it can, like it was gonna destroy Hezbollah in 2006, like it was gonna destroy the PLO in '82. Hopeless military ambitions which can never be realized. "We're going to root out the weed of world terror," but we don’t, no more than were gonna do in Afghanistan. Ehm ... If Israeli attacks Iran, ok, will Iran attack Israel?

Q: Yes.

A: We don't understand the Iranians as well as they understand us, I don’t think they will attack Israel at all. If Israel attacks Iran, Iran will attack Americans in Iraq, Iran will attack Americans in Afghanistan, they'll attack Americans in the Gulf. "We're not even gonna touch Israel. Israel works for you, we're gonna attack you." America can’t fight a third war, it's got two already. The Americans have sent countless senior officers to the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv to say, "DON'T SHOOT AT IRAN! DON'T! DON'T DO IT!" And if Israel did that, and Iranians decided to attack the Americans, which they would - not the Israelis ... that's the kind of thing that starts to turn politics on its head. At the end of the day, Americans care about American boys. American congressmen may care more about Israeli boys, for all the reasons we know, the lobby, the politics in Washington, New York and so on. And believe me, the Iranians talk about this, they have thought it all through. They may not have thought it through well, and they may have thought it through cruelly, but they've thought about it. But you know I talk to, sometimes, immensely important journalists and analysts and they look at you like you're mad if you say this cause were not reading each other. It's like you go into a tv studio, everyone's reading newspapers, you go into a newspaper office, everyone's watching television. There's this sort of osmotic relationship between journalists, power, government officers, pr men, it all produces the same kind of bland mixture. Oh, we're all worried about Iran. I've been saying for years, "The problem is Pakistan, they've got a bomb! And it's full of Al Qaida! What are you worried about Iran for? At least it's under control." The only way there'll be peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a full abidance by UN resolution 242, a withdrawal to the 1967 borders in return for all states' security. And the Saudis have repeated it, the other Arab states have repeated it and accepted it, and the Israelis don’t want it. They wanna go on building settlements.

Q: The Israelis will say, we pulled out of Gaza and look what happened - rockets.

A: Then the Arabs point back that when they pulled out of Gaza, Sharon's personal advisor (Dov Weisglass) said, This is very good because now we can put the Palestinian state into formaldehyde. And put the Gaza people into settlements in the West Bank. Remember, the Judea and Samaria of ancient history, the Israel of which they speak, is in the West Bank. not on the coast. To which I once said to an Israeli, "So why don’t you rebuild Israel on the West Bank and let the Palestinians have the coast?" It didn’t commend itself to him, needless to say. Ehm ... you know, and as long as you stay in Golan, you won’t have peace in southern Lebanon, even if you do withdraw, because the only card that Syria can play is in southern Lebanon. Ok, it's a very dirty thing to do, it uses the Lebanese, sure - but that's politics, I'm sorry, it's about power. Why does America threaten Iran because it hasn’t yet got nuclear weapons, why doesn’t it invade North Korea, because it's got nuclear weapons. Well, that's not right morally, but that's power.

Q: Didn’t that break before the Iraq invasion? The North Koreans, in the middle of this whole buildup, came out and said, "We have a bomb."

A: That was before, yeah. I remember saying at the time, "First of all, I don’t even belive that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but, and probably we'll invade because we know deep down that he doesn’t." It was then changed to - Bush made this phrase in which he said, after there weren’t any weapons, "they were making plans for the war time production" or something like this. We certainly didn’t go into North Korea at the time. Did we?

GANDHI AND TOM FRIEDMAN

Q: I saw a lecture by Norman Finkelstein -

A: Oh god, yes, Norman, I know him very well.

Q: - and it was called "What we can learn from Gandhi" -

A: Look. Tom Friedman (New York Times columnist) was the first to recommend the Palestinians, my old friend Tom, that they should adopt Gandhi-like peaceful protest. Don’t throw stones, don’t throw bullets. Don’t resist. And then the Israelis built the wall, so the Palestinians and the other Arab states, did not set off bombs next to the wall, they went to the World Court in the Hague. And the ruling went against Israel that they had to dismantle the wall,. And the Israelis said, "Fuck you, we're not going to." So what did Gandhi do for them? They did excacly what Gandhi did, they protested peacefully, they went to the International Court, they went throught the international channels of human rights, which ruled in their favor, which did them no good at all. And now you're gonna tell them to be Gandhi again? No, they learn lessons, they're not stupid people. I'm not supporting violence, I'm against any violence anywhere, but you know, but that was a Gandhi-like thing to do, Gandhi was constantly appealing to international justice. Eventually it probably worked, but not witout strikes and everything else.

Q: But was Finkelstein was actually talking about, was for the Palestinians to use the world court ruling as a weapon of international legitimacy, to descend and the wall and tear it down in a popular movement -

A: Sure, sure. Look - I've had people come and say, "Why don’t all the Palestinians in Lebanon, all 270 thousand" - I think it's more than that, but anyway "why don’t they all march from southern Lebanon, march across the border?" Well, first of all, all the Arab leaders would go apeshit if that happened, they'd lose their American subsidies, and the Arabs would be infinitely brutal in putting down any such project before they even saw the Israeli border. And if they reached the Israeli border, we would be told that there were terrorists among them and they had to have airstrikes, which there would be. And when you see what they did to Gaza, of course they would. So it wouldn’t work.

THE WALL

Q: What about the Israeli argument that the wall works, that after it was built -

A: Many fewer suicide bombers, that's absolutely correct, that's true. Absolutely. That's correct.

Q: So -

A: But why wasn’t it built on the international frontier? Why was it built on Palestinian land? Excuse me, I've seen the wall, it's not been built necessarily along defensive lines, it's been built to take the maximum amount of extra territory it can. It's become part of the colonial project, this is the last colonial war in the world, and the wall is part of it. But it certainly did prevent further suicide attacks, it didn’t stop them, but it certainly cut them down, that's true, no doubt about it.

MOVIES

Q: Have you seen (Israeli animated documentary) "Waltz with Bashir"?

A: Yes, I have. I've also seen the new film, called "Lebanon", it's all filmed from within an Israeli tank, it's very good, I saw it in Toronto. It's a pretty brutal film, they kill civilians, it's not a whitewash for the Israeli army. "Waltz with Bashir", you know, I had mixed feelings about it, frankly. It could have been truly, damnably awful, and it wasn’t, but it was a bit too chic, I thought. I quite liked it, there are some quite interesting ideas from a film point of view. I mean, from the artistic point of view as well. And there was a film called "Beaufort", which was the last hours of Beaufort castle. Which wasn’t bad, ehm, and I was there a few hours after the real Beaufort castle fell and the Israelis withdrew (from southern Lebanon in 2000) and blew up their positions. Ehm ... but you see, these films tend to concentrate on the angst of the Israeli soldier.

Q: The angst of the invader.

A: They will accept the terrible civilian casualties they caused, in the sense that they'll say, "Yes we've done terrible things, it's true." But it's always going to be on the pain of the soldier, the terrible situation they're put in under their horrible government. I remember a documentary made by a guy who I actually later refused to make a movie with him. It was gonna be a film about Sabra and Chatila. Later a film was made by the BBC, a very good one. Not this one. And he has this researcher came out here, and she wanted my help, and wanted to meet refugees and so on, and I introduced her, of course. And he managed to get a couple of Israeli soldiers who'd seen the massacre of Sabra and Chatila, from their positions, from their rooftops and their ... I mean, I saw them, I went up and talked to them, at the time, I was here. I saw the massacre. There are a couple of clips of Palestinians going "Haram, haram, they came in, they shot my father," et cetera. But most of the film is these close up pictures of these to Israeli soldiers ... "Did you know what was gonna happen?" "Yes I did." "Could you have done anything?" "Yes, we could have done something, but we didn’t." Ok. But it was ultimately saying, Look at these poor guys and what they were put through. How could they have been put in such an immoral position? You know. Not that their army ... enclosed the area around the camps and allowed their own vicious allies to go in and slaughter and eviscerate 1,700 innocent people. It was missing. Later the researcher came out here for another film, nothing to do with me, I asked her, "What did you think about that film? That wasn’t the film you told me about." And she said, "I must admit that when I saw it, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be." (snaps fingers). "Good point ... There's a later film in which Fergel Keen, about the Sabra and Chatila massacre, which was actually very good. It was called "Guilty", I think. There was a rather horrible film, a German documentary called "Massaker", in which they interviewed Phalangists who'd done the killings, but I felt that it was, like a lot of German movies, I thought it was sort of introspective, slightly sadistic film, I didn’t like it, there was something tacky about it. It was like ... "Tell us some more. "

Q: Exploitative.

A: Exploitative, I thought, yeah. At one point, this guy picks up these pictures, and says, "Yeah, I remember this, and I was standing here," and I said, I was with the to filmmakers, "But you had those pictures, you handed them to this guy." But in the film it's like he pulls them out, like his secret treasure, you know. "Yes, but you know, we want him to comment on it ..." Yeah, but that's not what the film suggested, you see. The worst thing about a lot of modern documentaries, especially about the Middle East, is that the director thinks that they can take you for a ride. You know. And I've lived here for 33 years, I can spot when something is faked or not right - "he didn’t know that at the time!" You know. But if you have an audience who doesn’t know anything about the Middle East you can probably get away with it. So it's a form of conning people. I mean, these clearly were people who had taken part in the massacre, I have no doubt about that. Ehm ... those of them who could remember it. 'Cause a lot of the Phalangists we saw at the time were high on drugs. A lot of the Israelis I came over were clearly under the influence of something. I remember a patrol of Israelis soldiers in Gaza once, this before they left, long before they left. And all their eyes were yellow, and they were all dreamy and and ... they were slurring their words, you know. And I was filming with a film crew, with Mike Duthfield, who's dead now, and he said, "Robert ... these guys are on drugs! They have no idea what they're doing. They don’t know what they're saying to us and they've no idea what they're saying to each other." Of course the Israeli army denied this immidiately, well, I said, that's rubbish, they are on drugs. I got to Hebron at one point and I found a bunch of Palestinian collaborators who said to me, "Yeah, we do it for the drugs they give us." It was dirty.

Q: Is this "Beirut to Bosnia"?

A: (nikker)

Q: Is that footage in the film?

A: No, cause they stopped us filming.

IRAN

Q: I have a question about Iran. I read some place that 70 % of the population is under thirty. How much much longer can a country full of kids go on being ruled by a gang of rusty old clergymen?

A: They have power. They have power. They have the Basiji, they have the Pasderan, they have power.

Q: Can this go on indefintely?

A: Well, nothing goes on indefintely, but if you're saying the power of Iranian youth will rise up - well, it did, after the election, and look what happened to them, I was there. I followed them through the streets, a million strong. We've still got Ahmadinejad and he's dealing with us, we're talking to him. You see, a lot of the problems you have, forgive me, I'm not saying you -

Q: No, no.

A: - people come in from the West ... you perhaps, I dunno, and you've got these (ideas) ... "the power of youth! 70 % of the people is under 30 - this will not last!" You know. Well, won’t it? Why not? Are you sure about that? Because good is on the side of youth and bad is on the side of government, these rusty old, what's this you called them?

Q: Clergymen.

A: Clergymen - you think that there's gonna be change in Iran, I wouldn’t necessarily think so, no. Might be, but that is not ... Good and bad and right and wrong are not a guidance to politics in the Middle East. Avi Shlaim, who's a brilliant Israeli historian at Oxford and a friend of mine, he was writing about the birth of ... uhm, Israel. And the UN vote that created the state of Israel on part of the land that used to be the mandate of Palestine. And he said ... "It’s legal. It doesn’t mean it’s just. But it’s legal." And legal does not mean just.

Q: that's true.

A: Exactly. Think about it. So, when you arrive in the Middle East and say, (booming voice) "The forces of good will bla bla bla", excuse me, ehm, I don’t know if the government of Iran is legal, but the Islamic Republic is legal.

Q: Yeah.

A: Its flag flies at the UN, I'm sorry.

Q: You were there during the election -

A: I was there during the revolution as well.

Q: Yeah.

A: And in the war with Iraq.

Q: I know. It seemed that the language used in protests really escalated as the weeks went by, first of all, it was cheering for Moussavi, then it was "Death to Ahmadinejad" -

A: No, "Death to Ahmadinejad" came in right at the beginning, with everything else. There was no escalation in rhetoric, it was the same.

Q: What about "Death to Khamenei"?

A: That very rarely ... you know, I never saw that once, I never heard it. I - I saw it reported, but I never heard it. And I was on the streets for 12 days. All the time. Ehm. You see, that was totally misreported, the version that came out from the nomenclature, you know, the Tom Friedmans, the analysts ... who's that American war criminal, what's his name ... Kissinger! The whole line was, "The youth is rising up to overthrow the dictatorship of the Mullahs." Counterrevolution. Which is exactly what Khamenei and Ahmedinejad wanted to hear. It was never that. That's why they chose green! They didn’t want to destroy the Islamic Republic, they wanted to get rid of a crackpot called Ahmadinejad, 'cause they thought they'd been cheated on. As a people. They didn’t want, you know ... when the election was actually being held, they were so proud at the Islamic Republic that they could go and vote. And they could have change if they wanted. In the Islamic Republic! They didn’t want a counterrevoution, they didn’t want to overthrow the Mullahs! (Former president) Khatami is the most refined and a very fine clerical man, a very moral person, and he was there at the revolution. Moussavi was a senior member of the revolution during the Iran-Iraq war. As indeed Khamenei took pains to point out at the beginning, when he thought he could control it. Rafsanjani, well, he's like Karzai, you know - hah - if you're a peanut farmer you get rich, don’t you. Actually not a peanut farmer, pistachio, excuse me.

Q: Rafsanjani was a pistachio farmer?

A: His familiy, yeah. I think his son owns the metro system. Or he built it.

Q: About the nuclear thing ...

A: [sighs and moans].

Q: When you look at what happened with Iraq -

A: Look. I don’t see how anyone can worry about weapons of mass destruction after the comic -

Q: That was my -

A: (inaud) - of Iraq. And after Iran, no doubt, we’ll find another country with WMD, we’ll go on invading. Look, step back again, like I said again at the beginning on the Norway question. Step right back. What’s this whole thing about nuclear proliferation, are we going to go through generation after generation, your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, their great grandchildren ... nuclear power exists, it’s there. Are we gonna say, all, hundreds of years in the future, “Well, they can have nuclear facilities, but they can’t have nuclear weapons, ‘cause they’ve got turbans on. They’ve already got a bomb, and although they don’t wear turbans, they’re a Muslim country - Pakistan - but they're on our side in the War on Terror, so that's alright. We won’t look at that one. Whoops! The Saudis want a nuclear weapon – I’m making this up, alright? - well ... could it get into the wrong hands? Well, it certainly could in Pakistan ...” This is CHILDISH! This is ... these are stories to frighten schoolchildren! You know, we need a mature … I hate the world “dialogue” … we need to talk maturely to all the people who’ve got nuclear facilities, who want nuclear facilities, ... the genie’s out! You can’t switch it off by having these endless laws and sanctions and hate campaigns against people. It’s like I keep saying about Al Qaida – “Will we catch Osama bin Laden?” He’s irrelevant, he’s created Al Qaida! It exists! You can go around and arrest all the nuclear scientists, but you can’t get rid of the bomb right. Al Qaida exists. However many times Osama bin Laden falls over a cliff or gets shot. Or dies of old age, I dunno, whatever. But you can deal with Al Qaida through justice. Did you ever see a, read a book called the “Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham?

Q: No.

A: Well, it’s a very fine English novel that's a bit dated now, but basically ... ehm, there’s a particular night, and everyone who looks up at the stars will go blind, you know, trains crash into buffalos and so on. And only people who were in hospital or had head things on can still see. And shortly afterwards these horrible giant weed arrived to eat you, called triffids, plants, they’re nature, plantlife, and no-one knows how to deal with this. And eventually, on a remote peninsula, somewhere in England, I dunno, the triffids arrive at a lighthouse and start going up the side of a lighthouse to eat the lighthouse keeper’s daughter. And she’s so frightened she gets a hose of saltwater, and sprays them, trying to get them to fall of the lighthouse, and they dissolve. If you have saltwater you can make the triffids dissolve. Right? That's what you do with justice and Al Qaida. They will dissolve. Do you see the point?

Q: Yeah.

A: In the movie they fire guns at them, they get the army in, they get airstrikes, right, sound familiar to you, right? Doesn’t work. Salt water is what did it. And the salt water is justice. I mean ... It’s just ‘cause I’ve reread the book recently that I kept seeing obvious parallels, you know.

Q: Do you think it was written with that stuff in mind?

A: No, it was written in 1950 or something. This isn’t a new book, this is a very, very old ... ehm, there’s a great scene in the movie where the train which has been travelling through the night from Scotland, and the driver’s completely blinded, and he goes 80 miles an hour into Malladen [sic?] station - BANG! [laughs]

Q: It’s also a film?

A: It was made into a film, but you know, in the days of Techincolor, you know, the film must have come out in the 1950s.

THE INTERNET

Q: You refuse to use the internet.

A: I don’t want to. I haven’t got the time, I’ve got to much work to do, and I don’t use email.

Q: You don’t use email?

A: No.

Q: But doesn’t that save time, ideally?

A: No! Everybody I know has got email and spend hours and hours [types on table with haggard look on his face] answering people who don’t even write proper grammar. I use paper. I don’t have any ... I get about 250 letters a week. Real letters. That's enough. You think I want a thousand every fucking day on email? Forget it! From every raving loony? The internet is full of inaccuracies, mistakes, hate - not interested. Books, books, books, what’s wrong with books? You can’t sit in bed and read a novel on your computer. I was on a plane the other day, coming from Paris to here ... and the woman who was sitting next to me had bought ... I think it was a novel about World War II, but whatever it was, in Paris she’d bought a book. And she was sitting with the book ... next to me. Doing this ... [grabs my notebook and hurriedly leafs through it] And by the time we’d got to Beirut, she’d finished it. She was SURFING it! She’d lost the ability to deep read.

Q: That's a shame.

A: Yah. 'Tis. When people send me printouts, I got the printout the other day, a message sent to me via email from one deparment to another in a newspaper, I will not say who. And the spelling was so deplorable I was actually having to correct it so I could work out ... and when it got to the end, it was completely incomprehensible. I mean the grammar was so bad, things cut off in the middle – [hammers away at table] and in the end I actually sent it back to London, saying, “Sorry, I can’t do anything with this. This is ... Incomprehensible.” You know. “Do it again!” I have close friends who use the email all the time and they spend two-three hours a day on this rubbish. Why? Read a book! Go talk to people. I’m a reporter, I’m not a ... all these idiots. You go to an office in London, everyone’s going – [types]. I remember once ringing up a former foreign editor of mine, no longer on the paper, thanks be to God. And I'd say, “STOP looking at the screen! I’ve got something important to tell you. Please, please. SWITCH IT OFF! SWITCH IT OFF! Ok, forget it.” [mimes hanging up] Guy couldn’t concentrate.

Q: That’s true, you can truly hear it when someone’s on the computer while they're talking on the phone.

A: I don’t mind it if they’re taking notes but ... you know if they’re looking at screens, and you say, “No, concentrate, concentrate” ... First think you’re taught in school: “Don’t look out the window. Concentrate,” right. Looking at the screen is like looking out the window.

Q: But don’t you see the value of the internet for example after the Iranian elections, when they went viral, as it were.

A: I wrote an article about that.

Q: I did not read that.

A: It was in my Saturday column, I had an extended Saturday column about that very point. I was being rung up from Beirut, by a guy who’d seen things on the internet, or blogs, which I don’t... not interested. And I would drive him … one night about a blog that’d said that there had been a shooting and killing in Tehran University ... I said to him, “This has passed by.” It was all true. I got the story, I was the only one who got into the university compound. Because this guy rang me from Beirut, he’d been reading the blogs, right. Ehm ... look, as a means of getting info out, if it’s accurate, and remember, a lot of the time there he was telling me what he was reading and I was chasing [inaudible] from burning up my time on stories that didn’t exist. You see, there’s the problem. Yeah. But that one happened to be right. Well, good to know it’s there. Look, the problem with the internet is that it has no sense of responsibility, you can put anything you want out, you can mislead everybody you want, and there’s no provision against it, if I put up on mysterious blogs that you can’t trace, saying that you're a rapist, or you killed your son, and put your full name in, it will start whizzing round, name, rapist, murderer, prison sentence, right. We’ve got a case now, of Taner Akcam, who’s a very fine Turkish historian who writes about the Armenian Genocide. And Turkish bloggers have now constantly talked about him as being a supporter of PKK terrorism. Which is completely untrue. The guy is trying to tell the truth about what happened in the Ottoman empire. He arrives to give a public lecture in Toronto ... he’s pulled aside and doesn’t get his passport stamped because Canadian immigration picked up his name associated with terrorism.

Q: Really?

A: Yes. And he told me all about it, I’ve written about it, and when he passed back through Montreal, you know, when you go from Canada back to America, you pass through US immigration, in Canada, going back, like you do in Heathrow, and the Americans stopped him and said, we believe you've been associated with terrorism in some way. He said, “Look, this is ridiculous. This is Turkish bloggers trying to harm my academic career.” And the guy said, “If I were you I'd get myself a good lawyer.” Now that's the internet did that to him. And he said to me on the phone not many months ago that, he rang me on my mobile after he saw my article and he said, “What can I do? How can I defend myself?” I’ve had stuff about me on the internet, total lies. I had an example, a few weeks ago, a guy rings from London, says, “Mr Fisk, I want to know something. I read on the internet of the Jenin affair [2002]” - first the Israelis said there’d been a massacre, then the Palestinans said there’d been a massacre, then the Israelis said there wasn’t a massacre, anyway, you remember it – “I read on the internet that at the time of Jenin you called it a massacre, and you were in California at the time, and you said you could smell the stench of death. How dare you write that?” I said, “Excuse me. first of all I wasn’t in California, I was in Beirut. Secondly, the story was covered by our Jerusalem correspondent, who lives in Israel. Thirdly, I did not call it a massacre, though I should’ve done. Fourthly, I would never use a cliché like "smell of death", excuse me, I write better than that.” He said, “But it says so on the internet!” [incredulous pause]. “Good night.” [hangs up]. Now that's a problem. And if you're in this part of the world, you really get fucked over by it. If you try to tell the truth. I mean, you have to take the sticks and stones, sometimes literally [points to own scarred head], but I don’t need that. I’m sorry. So, my view is, I don’t want the internet to be part of my life, I’m sorry, I’m gonna stick with books and serious reporting, sending my stories to my newspaper ... and making movies, perhaps. And giving lectures! Or doing interviews with Norwegian journalists. And this is real.

9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Q: I have enormous respect for you, Mr. Fisk, but I feel the need to challenge you on a point -

A: I haven’t got a lot of time to get challenged, actually, I must go home pretty soon but -

Q: Well, I’ll try to make it quick. When I read your column about [believing in] 9/11-conspiracy theories, I was surprised, and I was really surprised when it popped up in your collection, The age of the warrior. It just seemed to recycle all those ravings that you read on the internet -

A: It began with the problems of ravers, didn’t it, who turn up at my lectures and start shouting at me. And they still do, I had a very nasty incident in Chicago, not many, not a long time ago, this year, in which two guys came up and just screamed abuse. That I wasn’t prepared to admit that I knew that Bush did 9/11. There was no switch-off button. And the end I said, “Gentlemen, please, I’m gonna have to ask to get you out, I’m gonna sign books and talk to other people.” “But you’re just as bad as Bush is!” Fuck me, you know. What I was doing, and I’ll tell you, it actually began, I’ve done a lot of work on Lockerbie [bombing]. When Lockerbie happened, I was certain, as I’m still certain now that the Iranians were behind it as vengeance for the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of the Airbus in 1988 and that the PFLP-GC [Popular front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Council] were behind it. Not the least of the reasons I thought that was because the head of the PFLP-GC turned up in Beirut and held a press conference where he said, “We didn’t do Lockerbie! They’re trying to give me a kangaroo court!” And I said, “Who ever said you did Lockerbie?” You see. And that's when all the nomenclature journalists close to intelligence community, they were saying it was Syria, but as soon as Iraq invaded Kuwait, we wanted Syria on the Saudi side, and it became Libya. And so it goes on to Al Megrahi and et cetera et cetera. Now ... ehm ... eh ... with the Lockerbie issue it was particularly stirred to me because the, ehm, sister of a young man who was on the Lockerbie flight with his girlfriend, they both, of course, died, were killed, murdered, let’s say these words. And she wrote to me that, “I cannot believe that Megrahi’s involved and I’ve read all the evidence and there’s something wrong and there must be something out there. My parents are getting older now, and my father is quite frail, and I would like to help him in some way to find out the truth before he dies.” That's not what the CIA and the Scottish police are gonna do, of course, or indeed the British government. And I actually wrote a piece about Lockerbie saying, “Look, there’s something smells here, I would urge anyone on the official side who’s investigated this and knows there’s something wrong, to send me the evidence and I’ll print it. And before Scotland Yard tells me that I’m urging people to break the Offical Secrets Act, if they're kept under the Official Secrets Act in order to lie, then that is a criminal offence by Scotland Yard, and if they want to tell me the truth, then they're not breaking the Official Secrets Act, are they?” That was just to keep the police off my back the next time I go through Heathrow. In London, you know, you can’t take a photograph of a policeman. Remember this, it’s a quite serious problem. I was with two Spanish reporters, doing an interview, near St Pancreas, they were talking about the Spanish edition of my book and they wanted to take a picture of me, and I’d been talking about how as a little boy I wanted to be an engine driver. And I said, “Look, we’re at St Pancreas, you can take a picture of me if you want to,” ‘cause they wanted to have one, they had a photographer, And I went, there was a little train going to Oxford, you know, a diesel train. Six carriages. So I stood next to it. [Immediately] Two policemen – “Excuse me, no photographs here, please! You may know there’s a problem of terrorism at the moment.” And I said, “This train?” You know? “Excuse me.” “I’m sorry, Sir, I have to say, stop taking pictures or we’ll have to take the camera from you.” I walk over St Pancreas, and there’s a huge advert. on the wall, for the new Eurostar terminal, taken from the air, showing every point, signal gantry, railway siding of the whole St Pancreas station. That's the world were living in now, you see. Anyway, the point I’m making is that, I think of protecting myself against false charges, I had policemen trying to arrest me in Northern Ireland on an Official Secrets Act charge. And I fled to the Republic and started publishing articles that they didn’t like. That was a long time ago, that was in 1975, but I remember it very well. Anyway, come back to the present, or almost-present. Ehm. I was very moved by this lady’s letter, I’ve still got it at home, of course, and I did, I got a lot, a lot of letters back, most of them from ravers, of course ... Two things struck me, one was that Megrahi’s lawyer sent me the German interviews with the Lebanese who’d been interviewed, about the man who was in the Bekaa valley, and was on the Lockerbie plane. And I’m pretty much convinced by the German police interviews that the man who was put on the plan was taken by a minder to Frankfurt airport, and his baggage was, he never touched it, it was put on [the belt] by the minder. Frankfurt, London, it was going to New York, wasn’t it, the Pan Am Flight. So there’s something very wrong. And so, I wrote a piece saying, “Look, we need to know what happened with Lockerbie, cause there’s something wrong”. And then when I'd had enough ravers - part of the ravers piece was written originally to stop them raving in my lectures – “ok, there are things we don’t know! I admit!” What I reflected upon was, not that, you know, not that these conspiracy theories necessarily have any content, but that there’s a whole series of things about 9/11 which the government will not reveal to us. And since 9/11 was the catalyst for the entire changing of all our military policies towards countries around the world, tearing up of - I don’t think 9/11 changed the world ... forever. I won’t let 19 Muslim murderers change my world, thank you very much. Bush was prepared to, and so was Blair, right. And the newspapers and television went along with it. Ehm. So, what I was trying to do, apart from get the ravers off my back, which it didn’t, well, it did a bit, actually, was to say, look, as long as there are bits to this story which the government will no tell us, like, why can’t we listen to the phone traffic of the United 93? That's a good example. As long as we don’t have a coherent explanation for what happened to the third building, which you can see going down, you know, the ravers are gonna continue to exist, so let’s hear what’s missing. Since this was such a catalyst for change in the military politics of the world. That's what the purpose of that article was and I thought it was important to say it. Now, the reactions to it were severalfold. [Unfolds panoramic headline in the air] “At last: Fisk admits there’s something wrong about the 9/11 story”. That goes in the ravers-bucket, right. The other one is to say , look, the job is of journalists is to investigate stories fully, and what’s happened is that the ravers have got so much power, I mean, there are books sent to me this fat, full of ... the guy obviously believes in Father Christmas and fairies at the bottom of the garden. You know. Ehm. But the only way to switch this stuff off, is to seriously look again, but journalists won’t do that because they're so frightened of being tarred with the ravers-bracket that they're not even prepared to say, “Let’s go back over this again." ”Oh, you're not one of these conspiracy theorists, are you?" Right? “No, but what happened to [flight United] 93?” Right? All I was doing in that piece was, apart from trying to get the ravers out of my way, was to say [that] it is the job of a serious journalist not to contribute to conspiracy theories but to spot in gaps in the official story. That's what we do with the Israelis over Gaza, that's what we do with Hamas, that's what I do in Lebanon in my stories, it’s what I always do over Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, and we should be doing it over 9/11. That's all I said in that piece. That's what it was about. And I put it in the book because it was an important question, I think that a journalist who’s working for a mainstream newspaper, not in the blogopops or whatever, the cyber-whatever you call it. Ehm, I thought that when I see things that don’t make sense to me I have the right to say so without being accused of being a raver myself. While at the same time being able to say to the loonies,” Look, I did raise these questions, excuse me, and I am a mainstream reporter. Don’t tell me I work for the CIA or the government, right.” That's basically what it was about.

Q: But still a lot of these things have been debunked, like, for example, the stuff about the melting point of steel -

A: Well, it hadn’t been debunked totally at the time when I wrote the article. Later on we’ve had more scientists – no, we haven’t, if you remember at that period, if you look at the date, we were still, people were still printing stories saying, “What does this mean? “Now, I’m not an expert on these things, but the fact of the matter was, if you remember, after I wrote that piece, there was a letter to the New York Times by the two senior 9/11 investigator appointed by their government, saying, “We were never told by the CIA that they had tape recordings of interrogations of Al Qaida people in which they gave answers to 9/11 questions.” What has happened to these tapes? They were destroyed. And they accused the state, the two of them, these are American civil servants doing the official investigation, which was set up by Bush, say[ing] that, “We were mislead and this undermined our investigation, now we learned that CIA had info they wouldn’t give us. Didn’t mention to us.” Now, excuse me ... there’s a problem there. Ok? Now, that I didn’t now at the time, but all I mean ... look, I remember very well, I was crossing the Atlantic at the time, as you know and the plane turned round, hearing that the body of a stewardess had been found in the Manhattan streets with her hands tied behind her back. And this went round all the wires. She didn’t exist. There was no body, at the end of the day, but I actually said in the piece, some of this could be apocryphal, it could be reporting at the time, didn’t have time to check, I mean, I do put in all the checks into it. Ehm ... but the United 93 is still inexplicable to me. I’ve been to all the various places, of course, since I’m interested in the story. Ehm ... and then people say, “Why don’t you investigate this?!” I’m sorry, I’ve got 29 countries, I’m in the Middle East, you know, take a look at the map, New York is way, way out of my area, ehm ... but the least I could do as a mainstream reporter who spends a lot of time investigating everything from, you know, civilian killings, helicopter blowing up children on buses and so on, is to say, as a reporter, I think there are some holes in this story, I'd like to clear them up. You know. And the government won’t do that, just like there are holes in the Lockerbie story, big holes on the Lockerbie story, they won’t clear up. As long as these holes exist, the conspiracy theories will grow and history will be distorted, not by governments, which may not tell the truth, that may happen, but it’ll be distorted by allowing people who have no right to overwhelm us with their hallucinations and fantasies, who will then bend the stories, saying, “Well, of course, there’s a lot of doubt about that ...” You know, ehm ... I mean, governments connive at this, remember ... right up until the fall of the Soviet Union, the British would never admit that the Katyn massacre was carried out by the Soviet KGB and not by the Nazis. And so it was the Nazis who exposed it in 1943, remember that. So that's a typical example of how governments will connive at total lies, total fabrications, the Germans got it right at that time - it was the Russians who did it, and Gorbachev admitted it, and indeed Putin mentioned it again, when he went to Warsaw for the commemoration of the beginning of World War II. He did. He mentioned it. He spoke of if specifically in his speech, I’ve got a copy of it, he did. He wasn’t perhaps quite as ... remorseful as he might’ve been, but he did say that it remains a blot and a shame on the history that this terrible crime happened. That's not bad. That's ok, you know, It’s better than the Israelis do. The Israelis have not once ever said sorry about civilian casualties.

Q: Well, they have, but they say, “We had to do it because -

A: “... the terrorists hide behind women’s skirts and pregnant women and blablablablabla.” We can all say that. The British said exactly the same on Bloody Sunday. And only now is the evidence coming out that everyone was unarmed.

MOVIES AGAIN

Q: Did you see the “United 93” film?

A: Yes, I did. I’ve seen it twice.

Q: Did you like it?

A: No, I didn’t, because, effectively ... you know, the problem with the United 93 film was that what they could establish was the truth they put in there, and what they couldn’t establish, they made up.

Q: Yes. Like the breaking of the neck of the hijacker -

A: Well, also ... I mean, there’s a whole lot of things wrong with it, for example it was obviously much more bloody than the film made it out to be, but then they constantly had to say, “Well, we’ve got to remember the families” and you know ... and at one point, you're in the flight deck and the guy sees the warning come up that says the planes have been hijacked. And he hears a knock-knock-knock on the door and he ... [turns head] - well, we don’t know that he did that, we’ve no idea ... uhm ... we see the plane, doing this [bobbing], and the guy looks up at it, with the smoke ... was it hit by a missile? I don’t know. So, for me the film didn’t – I’ll be honest with you, the way the plane bucks around the turbulence and they guy does this, and you see the fear on the people - that was pretty accurately, it was acted very well. And the fact that he brought some of the people from the day back into their official positions, the telephone operator ... “I’ll be on this line as long as you need me.” That's very moving, that was the [actual] person. And some of the flight controllers were the actual ones who handled the flights ...
Q: Yes, the main flight controller also ...
A: It was, it was - I mean, this was the same guy who did the Bloody Sunday film [Paul Greengrass]-
Q: Yeah, I was just gonna say -

A: Yeah, yeah.

Q: And you've seen that, too?

A: I quite liked that actually. Ehm ... but ... you see, the problem with filmmakers, I get very involved in the movie business because I have a very dear friend who’s in it, in movies, and I go to a lot of film festivals, and I think the problem with United 93 was that they wanted to come out and be the first people to come out with a 9/11 movie. The second one was that crappy one where ... they could only film for two minutes in New York and the rest of it was in LA, it was a firefighter story, wasn’t it?

Q: World Trade Center by Oliver Stone.

A: Yeah. Oliver Stone has just put out this terrible documentary about the Middle East and Palestinians and Israelis, God, it’s awful. Anyway, ehm ... I watched it, it’s called Persona Non Grata. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that ehm , eh, sorry, I’m half asleep now, I must go home soon, ehm ... they wanted to produce a 9/11 film, and they wanna get it out first. But the problem, you see, is that the 9/11 film was produced by Al Qaida. Al Qaida productions did it. You can’t beat it. I’m sorry. That's the problem. And they proved it by having to see people looking at the television and watch the al Qai- I’m talking of course about the planes and the fact that all, they got the first plane by chance ‘cause the French tv crew that was operating with the fire services, and of course everyone’s got their camera out for the smoke and they [smacks hands] got the second plane, live, round the world. That was Al Qaida Productions. They understood Hollywood better than Hollywood understood itself.

Q: I mean, we all of course watched it -

A: I mean, it’s the image in our mind. Much more than Kennedy doing this [nods off] on the assassination footage ... It’s too vague, too unclear, but this was crisp – it’s Technicolor, it’s Cinemascope! Brilliant, you know. I mean, in terms of artistic production, could you beat it? I mean, of course, it was an appalling, atrocious crime against humanity, but - and, that's what United 93 suffered from. It was trying not to admit that the movie had been made. I wrote actually at the time, and I wrote in my book, Great War for Civilization, which was before United 93 was produced as a film, “You can never make a movie of this, because Al Qaida got there first.” And it remains the case. It remins the case. Unless there’s something we haven’t seen. There’s a lot of amateur footage at the time, of course. After both planes had come in, which people stick together and say, “Hitherto unseen film of 9/11!”, I mean, sure, but it doesn’t reveal anything we don’t know already. There’s an awful lot of “unseen footage” of World War II but it’s not actually gonna change our view of events.

Q: They unearthed, actually, a second video of the first plane.

A: They did, yeah.

Q: It’s some guy driving filming out the window of his car. You really can’t see it, you have to know what you're looking for.

A: Well, you know, the second plane hit the other building, it hit the first building.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Well ... plane goes into building B or building A or ... building A, let’s say, you know. Second plane goes into building B, but as he went into building B, he clipped building A -

Q: He did?

A: - and sprayed one of the floors with burning gasoline and killed a lot of people, yeah. If you read ... uhm, the New York Times had quite a good verbatim account of it. If you read the official inquiry, it brings that in. And you can, if you go into the official inquiry site, it clips it with its wing. And Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, whose office was opposite, could see the flaps of the aircraft going like this [bucks wings] the guy was desperately trying to get it clear and it just hit the earlier building and then went straight into its target. He was fighting with the controls.

Q: I did not know that.

A: No, it’s right. I promise you. It doesn’t matter, you know. It proves he wasn’t a professional pilot. The one thing that nobody brings up about 9/11 - and then Iæm going home - is that we are still being tormented – “Please turn off your mobile phone as it may affect the navigation system of this aircraft.“ Everyone on 9/11 in those planes were using mobile phones and it clearly did not affect the navigational system, did it? Problem - hah. Unfortunately. If it was only true.

Q: Ok. Thank you so much.

A: I’m gonna, I’m gonna let you go, so I’ve gotta, I’m gonna go home, I’ve gotta walk home, I let my driver go, so he went up to Jounieh late last night, so I felt a bit sorry for him, so ...

Q: Thanks so much.

A: Ok. It's gonna cost you a gin and tonic.

Q: That's ... I ...

A: You’d be surprised at the number of people who ask to to talk to me for an hour or two, and then ...

Q: And then ...

A: ... ask me to pick up the tab.

Q: No, of course not!

A: No, I wouldn’t think it of you. But you’d be surprised how many do.

WIFEBEATER

Under omstendigheter for banale til å gjengi her, klarer jeg ved et uhell å smelle pannebrasken inn i ansiktet til Stalin og gi henne en diger blåveis under høyre øye. Det ser ikke bra ut for noen av oss. Men jeg tenker at det kan sette meg i respekt hos russerne og araberne her - jeg er en kar som setter grenser. Men betjeningen gir meg bare stygge blikk. "What happened to you?" spør kokken opprørt. Stalin setter i sving sin evne til å få sannheten til å høres ut som dårlig skuespill. "Det var et uhell, altså!"

SHARM

Masseturisme har hatt like mye innflytelse på det moderne Midtøsten som krig, sult og tørke. Turistbyen Sharm el-Sheikh må, for de fleste av backpackerne jeg har møtt på turen, framstå som den absolutte negasjon av hva de søker – isolasjon, autensitet og historisk tyngde. De som reiser her er kun interessert i å sole seg og spise buffetmiddager. På den ene side kan nordiske og slaviske turister anklages for å gentrifisere hele Sinai, på en andre må da Egypt få lov til å holde liv i den ene industrien de ser ut til å mestre.

Personlig er det ikke veldig stor anstrengelse å gli inn i pakketurens rutiner. Det finnes da allikevel ting å irritere seg over, momenter unike for slike ferier.

Hotellet vårt, Oriental Rivoli, er pent, men har tydeligvis hatt dårlig erfaring med gjester som forsøker å snike til seg ekstra goder. For å kunne vise at vi har betalt for frokosten vi spiser hver dag, må vi gå med rosa armbånd som det er regelrett forbudt å ta av. For å gå på stranden må vi løse en billett vi henter i respesjonen.

Fordi vestlige kvinner her, i motsetning til, kan jeg forestille meg, Kairo, kan kle seg slik de vil, må de også tåle tilrop fra de lokale mennene, grådige besvergelser kamuflert som kjærlighetserklæringer.

Oppfatning av hva som utgjør bra ”vestlig” musikk er en smule forvirret. Stranden har en egen DJ, som spiller sanger som ”YMCA” i øredøvende volum. En klase overvektige russiske turister deltar på morgentrim, men musikken vedvarer lenge etter at de har gått for å spise iskrem. Da vi spør om de rett og slett kan skru ned musikken, foreslår de ansatte veldig høflig at vi kanskje burde sette oss et annet sted.

Jeg hadde sett for meg at betjeningen skulle være sykt underdanig, og forberedte meg på å komme det i møte ved å slenge inn et par arabiske fraser over frokostserveringen for å – hey! – late som om vi er like mye verdt, omelettkokken og (den arbeidsledige) journalisten. Men de ansatte er langt fra kuede automatoner; de tar seg rimelig store friheter i tarvelig buddy-buddy-snakk med meg, og grenseløs, primitiv flørting med Stalin. De liker å spøke med rare ting, f.eks. med at de IKKE har funnet nøkkelen vi mistet ved bassenget, at jeg ikke får lese i boken min før jeg har bestilt noe å drikke osv.

Det er trivelig å slappe av en ukes tid, men jeg tror ikke jeg kunne vært her mye lengre, eller noensinne kommet tilbake under lignende omstendigheter (Stalins setenabo på flyet nyter nå sin tredje ferie på ett år på samme hotell i Sharm el-Sheikh).

DAGENS SITAT

Av alt jeg har sagt i dag, er det det du velger å slå meg for?

- Kristin

FAANS FINNJÆVEL

90 % av Èilats befolkning ser ut til å være finsk. Jeg ser lite annet enn finner hvor enn jeg går. Etter at den n'te finske familien har vraltet forbi, spør jeg servitrisen på en restaurant hvordan det kan ha seg, hvorfor det er så mange finner her. Jeg har ikke møtt en eneste finne i hele Midtøsten, unntatt i sørspissen av Negev, hvor det kryr av dem. Hun vet ikke, sier hun. Jeg sitter og tenker litt, før jeg får en eurekaopplevelse og leter henne opp igjen. I ettertid irriterer det meg litt, at hun sannsynligvis trodde at jeg drev med en sær form for sjekking; snakke om noe "rart" for å framstå som sjarmerende eksentrisk og original. Grøss. Uansett. Jeg fant ut hvorfor det er så mange finner i Israel. Flaggene er nesten helt like! Ikke si at det må være en bidragende årsak.

TAIVAS VAI HELVETTI?

Neste by er Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Den billigste måten å komme seg dit på, er buss til grensen sør i Israel, krysse over til Egypt ved Taba, så buss videre sør gjennom Sinai.

Fordi busser knapt går i helgene i Israel på grunn av sabbaten, må jeg tilbringe et par dager i Eilat, som er en tarvelig liten tivoliby i Israel. Det er hit israelere kommer for å sole seg.

Jeg bor på et hostel som heter The Shelter. Jeg har tilbrakt for mye tid i steder som Sderot, for jeg ser for meg at navnet er en ironisk tittel på et livlig ungdomsherberge hvor man fester til soloppgang. Men nei. Dette er et herberge i bibelsk forstand, med fellesgudstjeneste klokken åtte og portforbud ved midnatt. Merkelig nok for en påstått turistby, er de fleste barene stengt på grunn av sabbaten. Jeg finner bare en irsk karaokebar som gjør nytten. Jeg ser også en strippeklubb, men den åpner ikke før etter herberget mitt låser dørene.

Jeg deler sovesal med en groteskt overvektig mann som snorker sykelig når han sover, og stirrer rart på meg når han er våken.

Jeg tar morgenkaffen min i selskap med noen rare middelaldrende finske menn. De spør om jeg er kristen. Jeg sier nei. Jeg får allikevel noen brosjyrer, de fleste på finsk. "Taivas vai helvetti?" står det på den ene av dem. Hva betyr "Taivas"? Himmelen. Aha, himmelen eller helvete. "Det er ditt valg," opplyser finnen dystert.

Omslagsbildet er av en dresskledt mann sammesunket i tydelig depresjon. Over ham sperrer Jesus veien for en blå, sint demon. "Djevelen," forklarer den ene finnen.

Samtalen flyr i alleslags retninger. Hvordan går det for Norge, når det ikke er med i EU? Jeg sier at det går fint. De fleste er vel glad for at vi ikke lenket oss fast til den ekle valutaen og tvinges til å spise kjøtt dyrket i nederlandske laboratorier.

Finnen nikker sakte. "Motstand mot Israel er motstand mot Gud," sier han plutselig. Han stikker en finger under brillene sine og dulter i det ene øyeeplet. "Israel er irisen i Guds øye."

Gudbedre. I morgen skal jeg reise. I morgen skal jeg reise. I morgen skal jeg reise.

FORFATTERKLUBBEN

Gjennom Couchsurfing finner jeg en amerikaner som reklamerer at hun skriver bok om Palestina. Hun bor i Ramallah, jeg skriver til henne og sier at vi har noe til felles og bør treffes, om ingenting annet.

Hun heter Pamela, forresten, dette er bloggen hennes med utdrag fra bokprosjektet:

http://fasttimesinpalestine.wordpress.com/

Vi kommer ikke så godt overens som jeg muligens hadde regnet med, mest fordi vi har vilt forskjellige utgangspunkt og prosjekt på gang. Jeg hadde ikke allverdens tid til å forberede meg til vårt første møte, jeg rakk bare skumme gjennom bloggen for å etablere at dama ikke var helt på bærtur. Hun spør selvfølgelig hva jeg synes om det jeg har lest. Jeg sier at jeg likte det. Den eneste sterke følelsen jeg fikk var at jeg syntes tittelen - "Fast times in Palestine" - er skikkelig, skikkelig dritt. Siden jeg synes at ærlighet er en verdi i seg selv, leter jeg etter en anledning til å råde Pamela til å skifte tittel.

- Så, sier jeg, den tittelen din, er den endelig?
- Ja, sier Pamela, hvordan det?
- Jeg bare lurte. (pause) Er det en referanse til "Fast times at Ridgemont High"?
- Nei. Hvordan det?
- Jeg bare lurte.

Til neste gang leser jeg gjennom alle kapitlene hennes. Heldigvis finner jeg at de er ganske bra. Jeg blir spesielt truffet av ett kapittel, som er så velskrevet at jeg faktisk blir misunnelig. Jeg forteller Pamela at jeg virkelig likte det kapittelet om treplanting i øst-Jerusalem.

- Det var ikke jeg som skrev det.
- Nå tuller du?
- Nei.

Hadde jeg lest kapittelets overskrift, hadde jeg fått med meg at dette var et utdrag fra et amerikansk magasin, skrevet av en mannlig amerikansk jøde.

- Dette var jammen pinlig, sier jeg. Prologen da, har du skrevet den da?
- Ja.
- Jeg likte den også. Jeg kan ikke tro at du kjørte kristen-pilgrim-historien på grensen uten å vite hvor Jesus var født.

Hvis Pamelas bok har et problem, så er det er litt for mye ... ektefølthet. Selvfølgelig er ikke det et negativt trekk i seg selv. Men Pamela bruker annenhvert avsnitt til å fordømmme okkupasjonen, og israelerne, og muren, på randen av gråt, og blir litt mye. Jeg er enig i nesten hvert bidige ord, men som skriving er det ikke noe originalt grep, og ikke alle gidder å lese sidevis med struttende indignasjon.

Et utdrag, Pamelas palestinske venn forteller om en landsbygutt som har blitt skutt av israelske soldater.

"Anyway, the soldiers came through the gate with their guns, and Omar ran away with the others, but a soldier shot him twice in the back.”

I could feel the blood drain from my face. “My God.”

“Yes, and then they took him away to a hospital in Israel. We called and found the hospital he is in. It is in Kfar Saba. He is OK, he is alive, but he has had many surgeries. When we call the hospital, they are very rude and won’t tell us anything more. His parents are going crazy. They want to visit him, but the hospital says they cannot get a permit to visit him unless they come to the hospital and take a paper that tells about his condition. So you see…”

“Yeah, there’s only one catch,” I said with measureless disgust.
Skjønner dere hva jeg mener? Fraværet av litterære triks og, min svakthet, sarkasme og kødding, er tidvis en styrke, men ... aaaargh!

Jeg hadde opplevelse lik Pamelas i Nablus, jeg snakket med en student fra Jenin. Han spurte hva jeg syntes om israelere. Jeg trodde at han virkelig lurte, så jeg svarte ærlig, jeg har i utgangspunktet ikke noe i mot israelere, det finnes nok av jøder som er i mot okkupasjon, Tel Aviv er en kul by osv.

Studenten lyttet og nikket gjennom hele den slappe redegjørelsen, før han trakk på skuldrene og sa, "Israelerne drepte broren min."

Jeg tror ikke at jeg ble likbleik. Jeg husker bare at jeg syntes at situasjonen ble skikkelig klein og jeg håpet inderlig at fyren ikke begynte å grine eller noe. Det hadde blitt ulidelig for meg.

Det kan godt være at Pamelas hode virkelig tømtes for blod. Men det er heller ikke utenkelig at hun skrev det i sine memoarer fordi det er den reaksjonen man er ment å ha når man hører om noen som er skutt. Og det der er dødelig hvis man vil skrive noe som folk skal tenkes å lese med interesse, å skrive om alt det der tøvet man er ment å føle. Det er først når man har god kontakt med alt det rare rotet hjernen din finner på, det er først da at tiden er inne for å skrive bok.