plenary

This program will feature a talk by Robert Fisk, followed by a question and answer session. During the thirty years that award-winning journalist Robert Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East, he has covered every major event in the region. During his talk, he will bring his knowledge, his firsthand experience and his intimate understanding of the Middle East to an audience interested in learning about the complexity of the region’s political history and its current state of affairs.

Robert Fisk will discuss the history of injustice, which has condemned the Middle East to war. Laying open the role of the West in the seemingly endless strife in the region, he will trace the growth of the West’s involvement there over the past one hundred years, and outline the West’s record of support for some of the most ruthless leaders in the Middle East. Fisk will connect the ever-more-powerful military presence of the United States to an increasingly virulent anti-Western–and particularly anti-American–sentiment among the region’s Muslim populations.

As one of the world's best known journalists through his distinguished work as Middle East correspondent for the UK based The Independent, and author of Pity the Nation, and The Great War for Civilization, Fisk has informed the world about the Armenian Genocide more widely and thoroughly than any other journalist. He led the effort in Britain at The Independent to change the policy of not calling the events of 1915 genocide. As a result, other major British papers have followed suit. He has documented first hand evidence of the genocide by reporting on the existing remains of its victims in Syria, where the Young Turks used fires and caves in the world’s first gas chambers.

In his latest book, The Great War for Civilization, Fisk dedicates an entire chapter to the Armenian Genocide, which he titles “The First Holocaust.” He provides the historical details of the genocide, reveals interviews with survivors in Lebanon and decries the Turkish, Israeli and U.S. governments’ complicity in denying the genocide today.

A book signing will follow the event.