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At Baalbek Nuts I bought pistachios from the Lebanese owners, who answered my request for their thoughts on the war with the typically Lebanese response of no problem. It's a lie, as we all knew.

Robert Fisk

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Robert Fisk
Age: 74 †
Born: 1946
Born: July 12
Died: 2020
Died: October 30
Historian
Journalist
War Correspondent
Writer
Problem
Nuts
Owners
Bought
Response
Pistachios
Thoughts
Lebanese
Knew
Typically
Lying
Request
War
Answered

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Whatever the political injustices are that created an environment that brought this about, it was not Americans who flew those planes into those buildings. And we should remember that. The crimes against humanity were perpetrated by people who were Arab Muslims.
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Some of the guys in the Northern Alliance are war criminals. One of the Northern Alliance commanders ran a slave girl network in Kabul in 1994. Remember that there was a period when every woman on the streets was at risk of being raped. This was the Northern Alliance period of glory.
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I do not make stories up, full stop.
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The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.
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Osama Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do in response to this attack 9/11. I'm sure he wanted America to attack Afghanistan. Once you do what your enemy wants, you are walking into a trap, whether you think it's the right thing to do or not.
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And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.
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President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a 'world order' dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
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In Palestine, the Israelis claim they found a land without people,' a Syrian officer explained to us. 'Now they will take southern Lebanon and claim they have found another land without people if these refugees do not return.
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When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
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Individuals in various countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia listen to the tapes of bin Laden. They gather in groups of four or five. They feel they want to do something to express their support for what they've heard. The idea that they were taking orders is a particularly Western idea.
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At the end of the day, bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud.
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And history`s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.
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Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy.
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War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.
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I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.
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Bin Laden was constantly revolving in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians therefore, the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in the country where he knows how to fight?
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The Americans may think they have 'liberated' Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea what liberation means.
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Bin Laden was very keen to point out to me that his forces had fought the Americans in Somalia. He also wanted to talk about how many mullahs in Pakistan were putting up posters saying, We follow bin Laden. He even produced a sort of Kodak set of snapshots of graffiti supporting him.
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Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.
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It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.
Robert Fisk