'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

CSM column on Syria

Today's CSM has the column I wrote for them about (and from) Syria.

Again, I'm not really happy with the title they chose. Plus, in the CSM's own version of the piece, they annoyingly misspelled my name.

I'm generally, though not completely, happy with the way the text came out. I wrote it really fast, on Tuesday, while battling jetlag and continuing to pester Air France for news of our four lost bags.

(Three of the bags got delivered yesterday evening, completely gone-through by Customs and repacked in a shockingly shoddy way. The fourth one was "impounded" by Customs for a while, but an officer in the Customs office at Philadelphia Int'l Airport assured Bill yesterday that it was being released back to Air France for onward delivery to us. Right, so now I'm expecting another three-day wait from AF's less-than-efficient baggage-forwarding service... Why d'you think it got impounded? Maybe something to do with the nice sticky candy from Qom, Iran that was in there? Or the book in Arabic on the history of Hizbullah? I guess we'll have to wait and see what contents it still has when it gets here...)

On a broader note, what with having now published a bunch these past few weeks about Palestinians, Syria, and-- still to come!-- Iran, and then Lebanon's Hizbullah, do you think I'll make it onto CAMERA's watchlist of individual journos??

People like those who work at CAMERA seem to think, in general, that ignorance is bliss; that it's far better for the reading public not to actually get any kind of a nuanced picture of life in Arab and Muslim countries... Especially, not to get the idea that Arab and Muslim people might be (gasp!) just regular human beings like you and me.

I guess that from their point of view, I suffer from a deep flaw: I generally happen to lik most of the people I meet, whatever national or religious community they happen to come from. Indeed, I've often had the experience where I get to meet someone with whose politics I deeply disagree-- but I end up really like the person whose views and actions I abhor so strongly. The most evident encounters where that's been the case were a leading Israeli settler activist on the Golan Heights, whom I interviewed in 1998, and the former head of the Renamo spcial-operations forces in Mozambique (2003).

I should note-- for whatever it's worth-- that this does not always happen. When I met and interviewed Ariel Sharon (1987), I was revolted by the bullying, "big-man" nature of his personality-- the kind of arrogant affect of a guy who thinks he's irresistible to women. Yuk. I guess it worked for Oriana Fallaci. It certainly didn't for me. (Bashir Gemayel, by contrast, had a puppy-like aspect to his personality that, I could see, might be attractive to some people.)

Anyway, of course I know as a journalist or researcher that I should always work to set such extremely subjective aspects of my interview encounters firmly to one side and "just report the facts". It's a generally useful myth of both journalism and social-science research that this is a possible, as well as desirable, thing to do. Don't believe it for a moment! Every journo brings to her or his work a full personality; none is simply an information-vacuuming automaton.

So I announce my personal predilections: I generally happen to like the people whom I meet in my work. I'm interested in their always-complex stories, and how they got to hold their present positions and their present points of view. That's the case whether I'm interviewing righting or leftwing Israelis, rightwing or leftwing Arabs, or anyone else.

I think that being interested in other people's stories means you get to understand them, and their societies, better than if you're not. And then, after the interview encounter, I try to write any subsequent articles using my own judgment and being as fair to everyone concerned as possible... That's how I work. I was trained in this by, more than anyone else, some great earlier editors at the CSM back in the 1970s who encouraged me always to try to find "the story behind the story", and the wellsprings of other people's motivations.

Doing this does, however, mean that you can't rule "beyond the pale of human intercourse" any whole group of people-- "Arabs", "fundamentalists", "Jews", "Iranians", or anyone else. Sure, in any of these groups, as in any other group, there will be a number of people who do fairly despicable things and behave in fairly despicable ways. That's a different issue. (And even for those people, I continue to work to try to "hate the sin while loving the sinner.")

... And on the general topic of fairness, I should add here that I just now got a call from Charlottesville aorport, and our fourth bag should be on our doorstep "within forty minutes". Once it's arrived I'll be quietly grateful to Air France.

(Final update on the riveting lost-bags saga: Bag #4 arrived. The repacking done by Customs was once again really a crap job. None of my crucial research materials are missing, however, and at least three of the packages of Iranian sweets were still in there. They took a couple of the others, however, and left two fliers saying "Agricultural goods" get impounded and destroyed by US Customs. The small notebook w/ my contact numbers etc in Syria and Palestine that I had foolishly put into the bag was there, though evidently rearranged. Anyway, as promised, my thanks to Air France for getting the bag to me. I don't blame them for the tardiness on this bag, at all... Only the others. But all is now forgiven.)