Soon after September 11, 2001, Robert Fisk was beaten by a crowd of Afghan refugees near the Pakistani border. Only the 11th-hour intervention of a Muslim cleric saved the veteran foreign correspondent from death. But Fisk, who has lived in Beirut for 33 years - reporting first for The Times and then, since 1988, The Independent - felt no rage towards his assailants, only at himself for fighting back. 'What had I done?' he wrote after recovering. 'I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees ... the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country - among others - was killing.' He referred to one attacker as 'truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world' and saw the mob's brutality as 'entirely the product of others, of us'. If he were an Afghan refugee, Fisk wrote, he would have responded to the presence of a westerner with equal bloodlust. In an age of carefully impartial media coverage of the Middle East, Fisk's empathy with the Muslim world and moral indignation have won him an avid global following. But some see his treatment of Arabs as patronising: even while trying to kill him, they can do no wrong. His critics charge him with promoting a Manichean vision in which the west is the Great Satan and the Arabs are mere victims of its imperial designs. But even they often grudgingly admire his courage and experience. Named British International Journalist of the Year seven times, Fisk has provided dispatches from 11 major Middle Eastern wars and innumerable insurgencies and massacres. While many fellow commentators unleash opinions from London or New York, spoon-fed by Washington think-tanks and recycling news agency reports, Fisk testifies from the ground and gives a voice to the people affected by western foreign policy. He has interviewed most of the region's main power brokers, including, on three occasions, Osama bin Laden. In The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005), Fisk recounts how bin Laden, who has praised his 'neutral' reporting, tried to recruit him. The al-Qaeda leader told Fisk a 'brother' had a dream in which 'you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and were a spiritual person'. Terrified, Fisk replied: 'Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim, and the job of a journalist is to tell the truth.' To which the satisfied jihadist remarked: 'If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim.' Fisk makes no apologies for favouring the downtrodden. 'It's not a football match, where you give 50 per cent to each side. At the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you wouldn't give equal time to the SS.' His outrage at the duplicity of western politicians - and the media's complicity in their lies - burns throughout his new book, The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings, a collection of columns from five years. To Fisk, the balance-fixated objectivity of the press masks its collaboration with oppression, because competing views of well-documented facts are weighed with weasel clauses such as 'opinions differ among Middle East experts'. 'People reading newspapers want to know what the bloody reporter is thinking or knows,' he says. Nowhere does Fisk identify more skewed semantics than in the press treatment of Israel and Palestine. Israeli-occupied territories are recast as 'disputed territories', Jewish settlements become 'Jewish neighbourhoods', assassinations of Palestinian militants are termed 'targeted killings' and the separation wall is described as a 'security barrier'. His prognosis for Israel and Palestine? 'Eternal war, unless we go back to UN Security Council Resolution 242 - withdrawal of security forces from territories occupied in the 1967 war,' he says. 'But I see no eagerness for it.' Fisk rejects the allegation his work reflects a pro-Arab bias, noting: 'I've been excoriating in my views of Arab dictators.' Though fluent in Arabic, he hasn't lost his Englishness or 'gone native' like some foreign correspondents: 'I eat Lebanese food, of course, but I also eat pizzas and French food.' Lebanon is the most well-educated and cosmopolitan Middle Eastern society, he claims, and is also a convenient base for his work: 'Beirut is a bit like Vienna after the second world war - everybody is here. Iranian agents and - I'm sure - the CIA. If you want to meet someone from Somalia or Sudan, they're here.' He was born in Kent, southeast England, the only child of Bill Fisk, who served as a lieutenant in the first world war. It is not lost on Fisk that he has devoted his life to chronicling the failures of the states created artificially by his father's generation when Britain carved up the Middle East after 1918. Bill was an authoritarian father who called blacks 'niggers' and hated the Irish. By the time he died in 1992, aged 93, his racism had become intolerable to his son, who refused to visit him in his final days. In The Great War for Civilisation, Fisk devotes a chapter to his father's wartime experiences, partly as an attempt 'to apologise to him for not going to see him'. Despite their differences, Bill supported his son's choice of career. When the Israeli government warned journalists to leave Lebanon during its siege of Beirut in 1982, Fisk's mother, Peggy, called to say she and Bill came to the same conclusion as he had: he should stay put, because it was merely an attempt by the Israeli government to stop reporting of civilian casualties. The only western male journalist who stayed in Beirut throughout the 1980s, Fisk survived two kidnap attempts. 'I'd end up spending 90percent of my time trying to avoid being kidnapped and 10percent working for the paper,' he says. 'We westerners love routine and kidnappers know that. You have to break up your western thinking and think like them.' So he drove through Hezbollah areas where the terrorists would never suspect he might travel. Fisk was 29 when The Times 'offered' him the Middle East after a few years of covering the conflict in Northern Ireland. In The Great War for Civilisation he recalls anticipating what his foreign editor promised would be 'a great adventure with lots of sunshine'. 'I wondered how King Feisal felt when he was 'offered' Iraq or how his brother Abdullah reacted to Winston Churchill's 'offer' of Transjordan.' The romance soon vanished, however. 'Once I was with the Iraqi army in the front line and the Iranians in the trenches, and watching people get killed around me, the Hollywood excitement wore off. It's not been a happy time.' Nevertheless, he displays the excitement at danger that once led William Dalrymple to call him a 'war junkie'. 'If I rush to southern Lebanon and manage to get back safely and file my story, I can go out to dinner at a French restaurant and say, 'I made it, I made it!'' Fisk exclaims. Preferring the term 'foreign correspondent' to 'war reporter', he suggests 'people who call themselves 'war correspondents' are promoting themselves as romantic figureheads'. Seeing Alfred Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent (1940) at 12 sparked Fisk's desire to become a journalist; but he muses on the possibility of retiring to write feature films about the Middle East. Now collaborating on his first screenplay, he says: 'I'm keener to write screenplays for movies than anything else at the moment. I think that cinema - I don't mean DVDs or TV - is probably the most persuasive medium that exists.' His next book - titled Night of Power, in reference to the evening of Mohammed's ascent to heaven - will centre on the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. The indifference of western powers to Serb 'ethnic cleansing' of Bosnian Muslims galvanised the Arab world's resentment towards the west, he says. 'Looking back, I should have been much more alert at the Middle Eastern end of the Bosnian story than I was,' he says. The Middle East has never looked so bleak to Fisk: 'Every morning I wake and ask myself, 'Where is the explosion going to be today?'.' From his apartment on Beirut's fabled Corniche he heard the blast that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. Fisk didn't recognise the burning body of his friend. 'I thought it was a man who sold bread,' he says. Next to his front door is a postcard reproduction of a 1914 photograph showing the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife leaving a town hall in Sarajevo, five minutes before they were assassinated. It is there to remind him that 'you never know what will happen when you leave the front door'. Fisk stresses he has lasted for more than three decades in the Middle East because of fear, not the lack of it. 'If you're not afraid of danger, you'll die,' he states. 'I want to live to at least 93, my father's age.' Writer's notes Name: Robert Fisk Age: 62 Born: Maidstone, England Lives: Beirut, Lebanon Family: divorced from Irish Times foreign correspondent Lara Marlowe; no children. Genre: reportage Latest book: The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays (Nation Books; Fourth Estate) Current projects: collaborating on a film screenplay; next book, titled Night of Power, about the Middle East and the Bosnian War. Other books: The Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster (1975); In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-1945 (1983); Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990); The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005). Other jobs: Belfast correspondent with The Times (1972-75) What the papers say: 'Robert Fisk is probably the most celebrated foreign correspondent in Britain, and rightly so. This selection of his journalism finds him at full throttle as he inveighs against a host of familiar, but wholly deserving, targets.' - The Independent on The Age of the Warrior