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.
Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.
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.
Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute – an illusion of course, but that’s what Assad thought.
Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama’s empire is called a terrorist.
The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez’s interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.
And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority – all authority – especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
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.
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.
In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers.
The word ‘democracy’ and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.
People turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left.
A businessman admits that he ‘let go’ an employee because he was a Sunni Muslim. You simply have to look after yourself, he explains. I am shocked, like a good Westerner should be.
The Syrian army is tired of corruption. It is tired of party nepotism. It is becoming very angry with those it blames for the war.
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.
I wouldn’t say I was part of an anti-war campaign.
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.
Israel lost its war. Will Assad’s enemies lose, too?