TV Review : ‘Beirut to Bosnia’ Warns of Hatred of West

British correspondent Robert Fisk’s territory is a world of laptops and notebooks, suicide truck bombs and sniper attacks. His 18 years of dispatches for the Times of London and the Independent make him a genuine survivor among Beirut-based reporters.

Words, Fisk suggests, aren’t enough to convey the pain, frustration and terror of the people who live with war in the region. Maybe sound and images can do a better job: thus, “Beirut to Bosnia,” his three-part film report for Channel Four in England and picked up for U.S. broadcast by the Discovery Channel.

Reporters must react to events, and the developing event that has captured Fisk’s attention is the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and its militant armies of faithful. He sees his reports as warnings to the West of a collecting rage against the West, and especially the United States.

Tonight’s segment begins with haunting images of a shattered Beirut and the Iranian and Syrian-supported Islamic sect Hezbollah, which has grown since the 1982 Israeli invasion.

Fisk struggles to decode the martyrdom ethic of the terrorizing believer, who views his death as marking the entry into Allah’s kingdom--a death made even greater if it comes while destroying Allah’s “enemies,” namely Israelis and their allies.

But it’s death as an escape from the slums and poverty that director Michael Dutfield’s camera vividly captures, especially in the desperately poor neighborhoods of Gaza where Fisk travels in the second segment. The Israeli military’s demolition of apartment buildings where a sniper was hunted down smacks of the worst of Vietnam to an American viewer.

And yet, Fisk isn’t out to condemn the Jewish people. In a moving segment, he likens two refugee tragedies--an elderly Israeli in an old Palestinian home is himself a Holocaust survivor. Fisk even travels to the old man’s hometown of Trzebina, Poland, where no Jews now live.

The final segment travels even further: from Egypt, where a militant Islamic terror campaign has driven tourists out of the country, to Bosnia, and the Muslim victims of Christian Serbs.

* “Beirut to Bosnia” airs at 10 tonight through Friday; repeats at 1 a.m. and on consecutive Saturdays beginning April 30.