He documented the violations of international law by Israel in Lebanon, offering a personal record of the nature and scale of war crimes as more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians died in Israel’s aerial bombardment of the country, hundreds of thousands more were made refugees, and most of the country’s infrastructure -- its roads, bridges, power stations, oil refineries and factories -- went up in flames. For this he deserves our thanks and praise.
But possibly in an attempt at even-handedness, Fisk has also muddied the picture in relation to the actions of Hizbullah and thereby contributed towards the very mythical narratives he seeks to undermine.
This was done -- in a predictable hiatus in each of his stories that over time developed into a writer’s tic -- by repeatedly accusing the Shiite militia of both provoking the war with Israel and intending Lebanon’s destruction. Uncharacteristically, Fisk failed to offer us the evidence on which these conclusions were based.
I take this failing -- maybe small compared to the far grosser distortions presented by other mainstream commentators -- seriously because of Fisk’s past achievements in countering the distortions in almost all Western reporting on the Middle East and the "war on terror".