Robert Fisk: Through A Glass, Darkly

Anyone wanting to understand the complex issues of our current world should see international journalist Robert Fisk in conversation with Australian journalist Peter Greste for Through a Glass, Darkly: History, Lies and ISIS, at the Queensland Conservatorium on Thursday August 31.

The award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster is being presented by Griffith University: Integrity 20 - a group that gathers people together to examine and discuss global challenges, with high importance on ethics and integrity. The full title of the event is Through a Glass, Darkly: History, Lies and ISIS - how we fail to tell the story of the Middle East, and it's guaranteed to be thought-provoking and eye-opening.

We can all probably agree that many parts of the world are in a mess and that policies regarding the Middle East and the terrorist threat are lacking. Fisk says that our failure to understand the Middle East's history and its violence can be blamed on our refusal to grasp the fact that these lands do not belong to us and that we constantly misreport and misrepresent the situation. Part of this is that the West insists the Arab world wants western democracy. He will also speak about the seemingly catastrophic influx of a million Muslims into Europe recently, and compares it to the disaster that might have been if they had instead headed for the lands of the so-called Islamic State. 

The English Fisk has been a Middle East correspondent for 41 years, based in Beirut, for The Times of London and since 1989 for The Independent. He's reported from many of the region's wars, gaining incomparable on-the-ground knowledge and insights. He even interviewed Osama bin Laden three times - something which he says was "an albatross which will never fly away" regarding his career. He's an author of the first-person histories titled Pity the Nation, and The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, and is writing the companion volume, Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East.

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By Vicki Englund

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