LONDON,
May 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In an act described as
“incitement”, Hollywood actor John Malkovich has openly threatened
to kill Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the London-based
daily newspaper, The Independent, and a sharp
critic of the United States and Israel.
“It
used to be just a trickle, a steady drip-drip of hate mail, which
arrived once a week, casting me for reporting on the killing of innocent
Lebanese under Israeli air raids or for suggesting that Arabs-as well as
Israelis- wanted peace in the Middle East,” said Fisk in his article
entitled “Robert Fisk: Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?”,
published in the Independent Tuesday, May 24.
“It
began to change in the late 1990s,” he added. “Typical was the
letter which arrived after I wrote my eyewitness account of the 1996
slaughter by Israeli gunners of 108 refugees sheltering in the U.N. base
in the Lebanese town of Qana.”
“How,
I ask myself, did it come to this?” said Fisk. “Slowly but surely,
the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats,
the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a
reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of
an angry crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an
American newspaper, his life cheapened and made vulnerable by an actor
who - without even saying why - says he wants to kill me.”
“Much
of this disgusting nonsense comes from men and women who say they are
defending Israel,” he added.
Malkovich
might be denied any further visas to Britain until he apologizes for his
remarks, the British daily said.
Trying
to explain the reason behind the rise in hate mail, Fisk said that the
internet have turned those who do not like to hear the truth about the
Middle East into a community of haters, sending venomous letters not
only to himself, but to any reporter who dares criticize Israel or
American policy in the Middle East.
The
more objective coverage Fisk does in the Middle East, the more the
hatred increases and becomes more dangerous.
“In
26 years, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages
addressed to me,” said Fisk. “Many now demand my death. And last
week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the
Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.”
Fisk
has triggered all this hatred because he chose to say exactly what he
saw without thinking of who might not like it.
In
October 2000, he wrote about the incident of Palestinian crowds who have
beaten two under-cover Israeli agents to death, saying that “it is a
story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It’s about our inability -
after more than half a century - to understand the injustice of the
Middle East.”
 |
| Fisk’s
objective coverage of the Middle East triggered hate mail and
death threats |
“The
television news broadcasts - the most obsequious and deforming of
information dispensers - were diverting our minds from the truth. They
did not ask why the Palestinians should have lynched two Israeli
undercover men. Instead, they asked why Palestinian police had not
protected them. They did not ask why a suicide bomber in a rubber boat
should have bombed the USS Cole. Instead, they asked who he was, who he
worked for, and they interviewed Pentagon officials who denounced
‘terrorism’.”
In
December 2001, he was attacked by a mob of Afghan refugees in the border
city of Quetta and Charnan. He was assaulted when his car broke down on
the road between the two cities. He suffered head, face and hand
injuries after being pelted with stones by a group of up to 100 people,
But even this attack did not affect his objectivity.
"I
don't want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no
reason. They had every reason to be angry," said Fisk. "I've
been an outspoken critic of the U.S. actions myself. If I had been them,
I would have attacked me."
He
was rescued by a Muslim religious leader who forced the mob back and
guided him to a police wagon. "Without his intervention I would now
be dead," he said.
Fisk
said he could understand the mob's anger. "I later found out that
the village housed lots of Afghan refugees whose relatives had been
killed just last week in the American bombing of Kandahar," he
said. "It doesn't excuse them for beating me up so badly, but there
was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much."
Fisk
said he has worked in the Middle East for many years, described it as a
"warzone". Sometimes "you just have to accept that these
things happen," he said.
