Hugh Pope

‘Dining with al-Qaeda’ Book Tour II (Washington DC)

May 5, 2010

Working in America is completely different from trying to get anything done in the Middle East. In five hyperactive days, only once did something go wrong. Spring rains flooded the rail tracks on Rhode Island, and when I arrived at New York’s Penn Station, my train to Washington DC was running at least 90 minutes late. That would have made me miss two interviews and delayed a key presentation too. So I stirred up some reporting tradecraft and dodged my way at the last minute onto another late but different category of train heading to Washington DC. Phew. It wasn’t as scary as the time in 1993 that I fought my way onto a clapped-out Tupolev plane as Georgia’s control of Sukhumi collapsed, ending up with two armed men on my lap with bullets spilling out of their pockets. But as the train accelerated out of the tunnel, I felt the same sense of relief and of a need for gaze-out-of-the-window reflection on recent encounters.

Next to me at one stage of my Penn Station adventure I found myself chatting to a lady who was in television cosmetics marketing. Apparently, unless one is booking 10,000 dollars of sales of lipstick and highlighters per minute, it’s not worth doing. This was impressive of course – if I’m lucky, it will take me a year or more to earn that from all my hours of blogging, interviewing and standing up and telling people about Dining with al-Qaeda. Clearly I had much to learn.

“What’s the secret?” I asked.

“The best is when you use celebrities,” she said.

“But that must cost a lot to get them onto the show with you.”

“Oh no! People don’t want to see a real celebrity. What you have to do is associate the product with a celebrity. Then you get a real spike in sales.”

As I sat watching the waterlogged wastelands of the New Jersey shore I wondered how I could use this golden nugget of wisdom. What would work for me? Then I remembered. I had once had a slight acquaintance with a certain famous actor. Now I knew what to answer the question that interviewers often asked:

The British Hugh who isn't an actor in romantic comedy films but once knew an actor of the same first name (Photo: Mohamed Elshinnawi)

‘Why did you go to the Middle East to become a correspondent?’

I would now answer: ‘Well, I couldn’t get another job. And it seemed obvious to that I wasn’t going to become an actor like someone in my year at university, Hugh Grant, have you heard of him?’

‘What? No way! You were at college with Hugh Grant?! ‘

‘Oh yes, when we met in the street we’d both say at the same time ‘Hello, Hugh, Hello Hugh.’

‘Wow.’

The television cosmetics lady was right. Revealing this fragile link to a celebrity always had a far greater impact on the average American acquaintance than the fact that I spoke Middle Eastern languages, wrote books, or had been in tight corners in wars. And not just Americans. I was once in the back of a Turkish taxi whose driver became convinced that I was actually Hugh Grant himself. The more passionately I denied it, the more he became convinced that I was the famous actor. “But Hugh Grant doesn’t speak Turkish!” I remonstrated. “Ah, yes, but you would say that. You don’t want to be recognized!” he replied, his admiring eye still fixed on me in the mirror. “Your secret is safe with me.”

I suppose that Dining with al-Qaeda would surely fly out of the bookshops if I could pull off this classy act of celebrity association as effortlessly as Hugh Grant himself would be able to. Unfortunately, no subsequent interviewer asked me the right leading question again. The route to best-sellerdom is surely hard to find. The tough reality after arrival in Washington DC was a stressful taxi ride and a late arrival at the studios of Voice of America for a discussion of the state of EU-Turkey relations, for which my Turkish grammar was all stressed and back to front from the rush of events.

VOA's website chose this image (by Stephen Glain) after I sacrificed my hair to interview a barber who said he'd trimmed the last King of Iraq and once had the young Saddam Hussein in his shop

Luckily VOA interviewer Hülya Polat then let me talk about Dining with al-Qaeda, which was more fun (here), before handing me on to VOA’s veteran Egyptian broadcaster Mohamed Elshinnawi to talk about it for VOA’s English-language outlets. Elshinnawi is one of those soft-spoken, gentle interviewers that makes a guest feel like a million dollars — and that they’re talking sense too. (The interview is here, although the voice-over is not Elshinnawi’s). But I realized he was drilling down on something not many people notice: there’s not much about Egypt in the book, even though I lived and worked in Cairo for nearly a year as a student, English teacher, reporter and guide for Frenc h tourist groups up and down the Nile. I explained that Egypt was obviously a big Middle East country, but that I felt that the limitations of authoritarian military dictators since 1952 had deprived the country of much socio-political meaning beyond its own borders. Aha, Elshinnawi replied, and brought me up to date on the rise of the digitally-empowered opposition of Mohamed ElBaradei.And I have to admit that it is a fascinating new turn of the Middle Eastern kaleidescope.

As a good Middle Easterner, Elshinnawi gallantly drove me to my next destination, the New America Foundation. Here Amjad Atallah of the think-tank’s Middle East Task Force introduced me before I was interviewed by Foreign Policy magazine editor Susan Glasser (Middle East Channel’s transmission of the event can be watched here or here; Foreign Policy also ran an excerpt of Dining with al-Qaeda, in which I seek out a Yezidi fortune teller during the Iraq war, here). The genuine enthusiasm for the book expressed by both Atallah and Glasser – the latter a former war reporter for the Washington Post, who tramped up to the Afghan heights of Tora Bora during the 2001 war – was thrilling. It certainly communicated itself directly to the relatively large audience, resulting in the only time on the book tour where all available copies of the book sold out. Adam Cheny of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reckoned it was done with ‘intelligence and wit’ in his review of the event here.

A really good crowd turned out in the evening for a talk at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose bookshop, including many old friends. I realized how lucky I had been to get this fixture – the venerable owner said she turned away three out of four applicants. C-Span filmed our proceedings. Afterwards retired Brooklyn congressman and early Crisis Group fund-raiser Stephen Solarz and his wife Nina took me out to dinner — Solarz having just finished his own book full of insights into his 18-year career as an activist member of the Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee, where he used his position to travel the world and do remarkable work in seeking ends to conflicts.

I then went over to have drinks with another friend who’d come to the book launch, and who was just off to Afghanistan to join USAID. Opposite me was a U.S. Navy officer, a Navy Seal decorated so often in seven years’ service in Afghanistan and Iraq that his dark uniform jacket seemed to be weighed down to one side (it still seems strange to me that the navy would send its best men to the deserts of Iraq’s al-Anbar province and to Afghanistan, which barely has any water let alone access to the sea). It turned out to be one of the most remarkable conversations I had in the U.S. He had fully understood how the U.S. must now take responsiblity for Muslim symbols since it is in charge of Muslim countries, saw the price the U.S. pays for Israeli actions against Palestinians, and had an articulate and clear-eyed view of the dead end that Israel’s own policies are in. If he is as high up in the Pentagon as he looked as though he must be, things are really changing. For sure, in the future, American Middle East experts are also going to be very thick on the ground.

The next morning I headed straight after breakfast to MSNBC’s TV studio to appear on the Joe Scarborough Show. I’d forgotten it would be one of those TV link-ups. This wasn’t quite the tiny cupboard of some TV studios, but still it was disorienting. Luckily a bright intern from Crisis Group, Melissa Haw, was there to keep me on track. The biggest trouble I find in these dehumanized studios is not looking at myself on the monitor, which shows the interviewee making his panicked hand-wavings after a distracting second-long delay. So I got Haw to stand right beyind that deep, dark, all-swallowing eye of the TV camera, so that I had a pair of real eyes to lock onto as I told my story and keep my mind focused on the questions coming through a tinny earpiece. It was the usual high-pressure business and I remember nothing of it – save that in the corner of my eye I was happy to see the television station making intelligent insertions of pictures from the book.

My next engagement was to do a formal speech on Turkey’s relations with the EU and Cyprus at the Brookings Institution. Professor Ömer Taşpınar introduced me and then set me loose (the 1h17min audio can be heard here or a transcript skimmed through here). Since I was due to talk about Turkey’s relations with the Middle East the next day at the Middle East Institute, here I was able to do full justice to Turkey’s westward-facing side. It’s always difficult to explain how a country can be two things at once, but I guess that’s easier than Iran, which I sometimes think is trying to be half a dozen countries at the same time.

Kojo Nnamdi

I then headed out to do a live discussion with one of Washington’s best-known intellectual radio hosts, Kojo Nnamdi. His gentle, off-beat Guyanan accent framed quietly probing questions, slowed me down and the recording is one of my favorites from the trip (on line, on CD, or in transcript here). “Now a lot of us are listening,” Kojo said of the new American readiness to consider alternative perspectives in the Middle East, “and a lot of us might be reading Dining with al-Qaeda.”

Juliette Tolay, Joshua Walker, Kemal Kirişçi, Nathalie Tocci & Hugh Pope in a 2002 Baghdad necktie (photo courtesy Anna Murphy)

My next stop was one I’d been looking forward to most, in fact it had been the first place to offer to host an event. In the Fall of 2009 I briefly enjoyed the longest title in my career – Bosch Public Policy Fellow of the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States – and was looking forward to seeing my fellow Fellows again at the Academy for a book presentation and celebratory drinks. I was not disappointed. In the longest, warmest and most strikingly empathetic introduction of the whole tour, my presenter and fellow Academician, Kemal Kirişçi, showed he had clearly read and completely understood the principal aims of my book – to humanize the Middle East for American readers, to take people alongside me into all the places I’d been and to show what exactly life as a foreign correspondent is like. I was especially touched that Kirişçi should have found new perspectives in it, since is of Turkish heritage and is an expert who has devoted an important part of his career to studying the Middle East and its influences on Turkey.

Afterwards I rode the Metro out to Rosslyn for an interview on News Channel 8, the Washington DC affiliate of ABC where I was to appear on a local show called Federal News Tonight. The shiny building had a giant screen outside, silently transmitting to the traffic what transpired within. I was early and was asked to settle down in the pleasantly laid-out lobby by Frank, the African-American doorman, tall as a basket-ball player and half as broad as a bus. He had taken along the role of enaging in jocular repartee with nervous guests waiting to go on. Intentionally or not, this certainly broke the ice. We were soon joking about the headline in the Washington Post that morning about a ‘political-military offensive’ in Afghanistan. I joked: “What are they going to say when the F-16s come over? ‘It’s okay, don’t take cover, that’s just a political-military warplane!’” Frank gave as good as he got in an extraordinary, coherent mix of tight jive language and intelligent college education. “That’s right, don’t you worry, it’s of them po-litical bombs. Oh my.” I had some of the best fun I had all week until he guided me onto the set. Federal News first told its audience about the ‘gunslinger,’ a new weapon for America’s Middle East wars. When the clever, sympathetic newscaster brought me on (here), I referred back to the ‘gunslinger’, making the point that fancy weapons that could wipe out an Afghan village without having to put one’s head out of one’s tank were all very well, but a bit of thought and empathetic understanding of the human dimension of the place would probably be a better long-term plan. All went well, but my book tour was beginning to feel a bit of a blur. Looking forward to a cheery fairwell from Frank, I left all my speaking notes for the rest of the week at a sidetable at TV8.

The next morning was a double bill with Gönül Tol’s Turkey programme at the Middle East Institute. First up was a talk about Turkey in the Middle East, in which I suggested that the West might consider adopting elements of Ankara’s new approach to build stability, interdependence and free trade first, and leaving magical flips to democracy until later. Then came another chance to talk about Dining with al-Qaeda, and enjoying the agreeable sense that most of the MEI audience, well versed in the reality of the region, were sympathetic to my point of view. The talks are posted on MEI’s site on YouTube, directly visible here in most countries, but not in Turkey, which chooses to show its Eastern side by banning the film-sharing platform.

Lunch was in a private room in Johnny’s Half Shell, a restaurant just over a lawn from the grand white dome on Capitol Hill. Maia Comeau of the German Marshall Fund had invited me to present the book to some 20 staffers for congressmen and senators who came to hear me speak over some unusually excellent roast chicken. Among many of those who came, however, I found that the real hunger was for fresh approaches to the Middle East. I noticed especially focused note-writing when I tried to set out why I thought sanctions and America’s 30-year-old blood feud with Iran were so counter-productive – and showed how much there was to say for Turkey’s policy of engagement, including visits by an annual 1.3 million Iranians to see a prosperous Muslim democracy (mostly) at peace with the world.

Three more television shows wound up the tour. The first with America Abroad Media, which supplies in-depth programming to a wide range of television stations around the world. It was a bit hard to be truly wise since I felt so bad for one of the cameramen awkwardly nursing his arm — he was in great pain after falling off a table as he tried to block a noisy air-conditioning duct. Cameraman Javier Barrera later wrote in to post a comment (below) to say he had “broken my elbow and wrist on my left arm and thumb on my right hand, but I didn’t want a few broken bones to disrupt our interview with you for our program”, injuries that are far more severe than I ever managed to clock up in the Middle East. That seems pretty heroic commitment to our trade, and Barrera kindly also forwarded the AAM interview here.

Hugh Pope and Chris Isham

Then I joined CBS Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Isham for an interview about Dining with al-Qaeda for the ‘Washington Unplugged’ webcast (here) that he introduced to the network. The show proved how the Internet allows a traditional broadcaster can now spend quality time (14 mintes in this case) presenting a non-mainstream point of view. Isham – the man who organized the first major network interview with Osama bin Laden in 1998 – called my book “very intriguing”. He then let me sink or swim, allowing me to say things about Israel, Iran and U.S. policy that would have had me shooed off screen not so long ago. Too bad I fluffed my line about the cat and mouse games of dictatorship in the Middle East! For the record, the old Arabic proverb is ‘The tyranny of the cat is better than the justice of the mouse.’

The book tour’s last media stop was Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN called the ‘Situation Room’. I got there half an hour early and spent it waiting in what several TV stations seem to call the ‘Green Room’, where guests anxiously cool their heels and rehearse their lines. I watched the ‘Situation’ as portrayed from a studio set that gives the impression that one is in a spaceship hovering over Washington. First up was a scare-story on how Iran was supplying weapons blowing up Americans in Afghanistan – a Pentagon-sourced bill of fare full of pictures of mines and weaponry, and, of course, a subtext of how justified it was to see Iran as the mortal enemy of the U.S. Then banners under the screen announced my later appearance as a Middle East explainer. But how could I counter the cumulative impact of the on-screen accompaniment? The show kept up a rolling loop of that unfocused, tired old film of that al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, with all those misguided young men doing their paces around a 19^th century obstacle course. For the folks in the ‘Situation Room’, the whole world beyond Washington seemed to be an al-Qaeda training camp.

Amid the many high-powered cameras, bright lights and tall handsome stage hands exchanging coded hand-signals, Blitzer was kind enough to put me at my ease. Indeed, he was to prove tolerant and honestly permissive, if not quite encouraging, about my point of view that the West was also part of the Middle East problem. He began by telling viewers it was a ‘good book’, and then asked me to look a picture on the light-box wall to the left. Oh no! I thought. But yes, Blitzer’s first question was about that recent Moscow metro bomber again. All I could do was slide to the question of what originally motivates such people to get involved with terrorist groups. As the picture I put in the book of pro-Hamas graffiti in Gaza depicting an exploding Israeli bus showed, I tried to explain, the motivation was not usually global jihad or 72 virgins in paradise, but what was written next to the blasted bus: Revenge!

Hamas graffiti in Gaza – 'Revenge' (Photo: Hugh Pope)

Blitzer bid me a gentlemanly farewell – modestly spelling out his famous name for me while I signed his copy of the book – and the tour was over. Time for a celebratory party at my hosts Christina Balis and Stephen Glain — my remarkable predecessor as Middle East correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, and soon to publish a new book called The Sixty-Year War on the scourge of militarism in U.S. foreign policy. Writing these lines four weeks later, I realize I still have not really recovered from the concentrated intensity of those five days of talking all the time. But many thanks once again to everyone who helped me to put the word out so energetically and to make it so much fun!
‘Batı’ya Türkiye’yi ve Ortadoğu’yu anlatmak’ – Hülya Polat, VOA Türkçe

May 4, 2010

This interview about Dining with al-Qaeda with Hülya Polat of VOA’s Turkish service features a photograph in 2002, taken as I sacrificed my hair to win insights from a whip-saw handed barber in central Baghdad. He claimed to have trimmed the locks of the pre-1958 King of Iraq, to have had the young Saddam Hussein in his shop in al-Rashid Street, and to have done the hair of British officers from the days of the monarchy … unfortunately my sartorial sacrifice was pretty much in vain since reasons for his survival clearly included his eccentric vagueness.

Hugh Pope’dan Yeni Kitap: “Dining with Al-Qaeda”

Hülya Polat | Washington

06 Nisan 2010

Hülya Polat | Washington 06 Nisan 2010

Foto: Stephen Glain

Uluslararası Kriz Grubu Türkiye/Kıbrıs Direktörü olan ve 25 yıldır İstanbul’da yaşayan Hugh Pope, uzun yıllar Wall Street Journal, New York Times gibi büyük Amerikan gazeteleri için muhabirlik yapmış. Pope karşılaştığı en büyük zorluğun Batı’ya Türkiye’yi ve Ortadoğu’yu anlatmak olduğunu söylüyor. Amerika’da piyasaya çıkan “Dining with Al-Qaeda/El-Kaide’yle Yemek Yemek” adlı yeni kitabını tanıtmak amacıyla geçtiğimiz günlerde New York ve Washington’da konuşmalar yapan Pope, Hülya Polat’ın sorularını yanıtladı.

Gazeteci-yazar Hugh Pope’un yeni kitabı “Dining with Al Qaeda” “El Kaide’yle Akşam Yemeği” (El Kaide’yle Yemek Yemek) piyasaya çıktı. Ortadoğu’da Arapça, Farsça ve Türkçe öğrencisi ve araştırmacı-gazeteci olarak 30 yıldan fazla süre geçiren Pope, yıllardır İstanbul’da yaşıyor.

Hugh Pope’un son kitabına “El Kaide’yle Akşam Yemeği” adını vermesi, reklam ve pazarlama hilesi değil. Pope, gerçekten de 11 Eylül 2001 terör saldırılarından kısa süre sonra El Kaide üyelerinden biriyle yemek yemişti. O zaman Wall Street Journal gazetesi için muhabirlik yapan Pope, uçakları kaçıran Suudi vatandaşları hakkında daha fazla bilgi edinmek için Riyad’a gitmiş ve intihar saldırısı düzenleyenleri ölüm misyonuna hazırlamakla sorumlu genç bir militanla görüşmüştü. Pope bu olayı şöyle anlatıyor:

“Afganistan’daki kamptan gelen militanlardan biriydi. Bana Amerika’daki misyona hazırlanmadan önce Afganistan’daki kampta eğitim alan militanları anlattı. Yarısından çoğunu tanıyordu ve yaptıkları saldırı için onları takdir ediyor, ‘harika çocuklar’ olarak tanımlıyordu.”

Courtesy: Hugh Pope

Hugh Pope, militanın kendisini öldürmemesi için Kuran’dan ayetler okumak zorunda kaldığını, oldukça gergin bir ortamda başlayan söyleşinin sürpriz bir şekilde samimi bir akşam yemeğiyle son bulduğunu söylüyor. Pope, bu yemekten sonra Ortadoğu’daki farklı dünyaları Amerikan halkına tanıtmak için duyduğu isteğin yeniden alevlendiğini belirtiyor:

“Amerikan halkına gazetecilerin büyük çoğunluğunun dürüst olduğunu, gazetelerde okudukları haberlerin çoğunun doğru olduğunu, ancak hikayenin burada bitmediğini anlatmak istiyorum. Başka bilgi kaynaklarını da araştırmalı, elinizdeki verileri başkalarıyla karşılaştırmalı, duyduklarınız hakkında düşünmeli ve konulara farklı bakış açılarından bakmayı öğrenmelisiniz.”

Hugh Pope, “Bölgede geçirdiğim 30 yıl boyunca öğrendiğim en önemli şeylerden biri, Ortadoğu’nun sadece İslam dünyasından ibaret olmadığını anlamaktı,” diyor.

“Dünyanın neresi olursa olsun insanları tek bir etiket altında toplamanın zararlı olduğunu düşünüyorum. Örneğin kitabımda kullandığım tekniklerden biri, İslam kelimesini kullanmaktan mümkün olabildiğince kaçınmak oldu. İslam kelimesini kullandığınızda herkes farklı bir anlam çıkarıyor. Bir ülkeyi, hatta İslam dünyasını sadece tek bir özellikle tanımlayamayacağımızı göstermeye çalıştım.”

Gazeteci-yazar Hugh Pope, hukuk sistemi şeriat olan ülkelerin şeriat kanunlarını çok farklı şekillerde uyguladığına dikkati çekiyor. Yazar, Amerika karşıtı İslam rejimi tarafından yönetilen İran’da tanıştığı birçok İranlı’nın Amerika’yla çok daha yakın ilişkiler kurmak istediğini gördüğünü belirtiyor.Pope kitabında ayrıca nüfusunun çoğunluğu Müslüman olan Mısır ve Türkiye’deki laik hükümetlerin geldikleri farklı noktaları da değerlendiriyor.

“Türkiye’nin Avrupa’ya açılan bir penceresinin olması ve İsrail’le komşu olmaması büyük şans. İsrail’in Mısır’daki gelişmeye sekte vurduğu çok açık. Albay Nasır 1952’de Mısır’da niçin başa geldi? 1948 İsrail Savaşı sırasındaki yenilgi ve İsrail’le olanlar nedeniyle ulusal çapta bölünme duyguları hakim olduğu için. Ne yazık ki Mısır’daki baskıcı yönetim, Mısır halkının neler başarabileceğini göstermesine engel oldu.”

Hugh Pope, Ortadoğu araştırmalarına hakim olan tipik akademik yaklaşımın ve gazetecilerin bölgeden geçtiği haberlerin Amerikan halkına Ortadoğulular hakkında olumsuz ve gerçekdışı bir tablo sunduğunu söylüyor.

“Herkes artık Ortadoğu’yu sanki bir hayvanat bahçesi, karmakarışık yabani hayvanların toplantığı bir yer gibi görmekten vazgeçmeli. Hepimiz insanız, hepimiz aynı şeyleri paylaşıyoruz. Örneğin her yerde erkek çocukları arabaları sever, kızların da benzer zevkleri vardır. Ortadoğu’ya olan bakışımızda eksik olan, insan unsurunun görünmemesi. Medya hep en garip, en korkunç haberleri, hikayeleri aktarıyor.”

Hugh Pope, Amerikan kamuoyuna bölge hakkında daha doğru ve eksiksiz bilgi vermek için medyayı kullanan eğitimli Ortadoğulular’ın sayısının artması nedeniyle iyimser. Yazar ayrıca Başkan Obama’nın İslam dünyasıyla diyalog kapısını açarak Amerikan halkının Ortadoğu’nun birçok yönünü görmesini sağladığı için de memnun. Başkan Obama, bir yıl önce Türkiye’de yaptığı konuşmada Amerika’nın İslamiyet’le savaşmadığını, İslam dünyasıyla ortaklık kurmak istediğini söylemişti. Türkiye ziyaretinden iki ay sonra Mısır’a giden Başkan Obama, Kahire’de yaptığı konuşmada da, Amerika ve Müslümanlar arasında yeni bir başlangış arayışı içine girme sözü vermişti. Hugh Pope Başkan Obama’nın İran’a da açıkça el uzattığını söylüyor.

Deneyimli gazeteci, yeni kitabını okuyacak Batılılar’ın Ortadoğu ülkelerini yeni bir bakış açısından görecekleri, Ortadoğu halklarının sesini daha yakından duymaya başlayacakları konusunda umutlu.

“Kitabımın Ortadoğu’nun ne anlama gelebileceği konusunda fikir ve bakış açıları sunan bir kaynak olmasını istiyorum.”

Hugh Pope’un “Dining with Al Qaeda: Three Decades of Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East” “El Kaide’yle Akşam Yemeği: Ortadoğu’daki Birçok Dünyayı Keşifle Geçen 30 Yıl” adlı kitabı, St. Martin Yayınevi tarafından piyasaya sürüldü. Hugh Pope da Amerika’da Washington ve New York’ta imza günleri yaparak kitabını tanıttı.
‘A very intriguing book’ – Chris Isham, CBS news

May 2, 2010

An interview about Dining with al-Qaeda with Christopher Isham of CBS news for the network’s ‘Washington Unplugged’ webcast (here) shows how the Internet allows a traditional broadcaster can now spend quality time showcasing a non-mainstream point of view (14 minutes in this case). Isham – Washington bureau chief for CBS and the man who organized the first major network interview with Osama bin Laden in 1998 – called my book “very intriguing”. He then let me sink or swim, allowing me to say things about Israel, Iran and U.S. policy that would have had me shooed off screen not so long ago. Too bad I fluffed my line about the cat and mouse games of dictatorship in the Middle East. For the record, the old Arabic proverb under the title of Chapter 12 (‘The Central Bank Governor Has no Socks’, about Afghanistan and Pakistan) is ‘The tyranny of the cat is better than the justice of the mouse.’
‘My Dinner with al-Qaeda’ – Prospect magazine, UK

May 1, 2010

The May 2010 edition of Britain’s leading intellectual magazine Prospect has run a three-page excerpt that its editorial staff cleverly adapted from a chapter in Dining with al-Qaeda. In it I tell of my encounter in Saudi Arabia with a missionary from al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan. Editor David Goodhart sent me a copy of the magazine with a kind note of thanks saying he thought the episode was ‘spine-chilling’. Here’s how it starts:

It was a couple of months after 11th September 2001, but it never occurred to me that I was at risk from al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. I was there as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and I still believed in the cloak of innocence: the idea that my reporting represented an honest, universal right to know…

The rest of the excerpt is available to this excellent magazine’s subscribers here, or of course if you buy the book!

This is the story I’ve been asked to retell to audiences most often while presenting Dining with al-Qaeda. Naturally, people focus on the way the missionary said he would kill me – as I did at the time, unsurprisingly. But beyond saying it was because I was an ‘infidel’, I don’t delve much deeper in this excerpt into why he would even consider such drastic action. The ‘Islamic’ explanation has never satisfied me. As I try to show elsewhere in the book, Middle Eastern actions, even inexcusable ones, are often better explained as the result of Western actions upon them over decades, which Westerners just don’t understand because it hasn’t been done to them. If you poke someone, you always feel it less than if that person pokes you.

Prospect illustrated the excerpt with the first photo from Dining with al-Qaeda, taken by my great-aunt Phyl in Petra during my first trip to the Middle East
‘Una critica composta ma ferma al sistema d’informazione americano’ – Il Riformista

April 30, 2010

An interview with Nicola Mirenzi of Il Riformista, one of the few Italian newspapers with a correspondent in Istanbul. Along the way Mirenzi taught me another lesson in points of view: for me, his great countryman and 19th century forerunner, Edmondo de Amicis, is a favorite travel writer (Constantinople, Holland); for Italians, he is apparently now only remembered as the author of children’s schoolbook. Mirenzi quickly understood what I was trying to say in Dining with al-Qaeda. As the title of his 29 April 2010 article says ‘America didn’t want to know/but now something has changed…’

«L’America non voleva sapere»

Ma adesso qualcosa è cambiato

————————————–

HUGH POPE. Firma del Wall Street Journal dalla guerra, lasciò per eccesso di bavagli. Al Riformista spiega lo strabismo mediatico americano, che ha raccontato nel suo “Dining with al-Qaeda”.

DI NICOLA MIRENZI

Istanbul. Due mesi dopo l’11 settembre sedeva in un albergo di Riyadh, Arabia Saudita, di fronte a un affiliato di Al-Qaeda. Il quale, dopo un cortese invito a raccontare la sua storia per un quotidiano americano, gli disse: «Dovrei ucciderti?». Hugh Pope, allora corrispondente dal Medio Oriente per il Wall Street Journal, se la cavò attingendo al Corano. Spiegò, sudando freddo, che il libro sacro dei musulmani consente agli infedeli che hanno un permesso regolare di passare sani e salvi tra gli islamici. E alla fine il timbro apposto dalle autorità saudite sul suo passaporto britannico fu preso per un sigillo inviolabile.

L’intervista si fece. Il missionario saudita, che apparteneva agli ideologi dell’organizzazione, raccontò il suo addestramento nei campi dell’Afghanistan. Dove conobbe i «fantastici ragazzi» che avevano dirottato gli aerei sui grattacieli di Manhattan. Il Journal però non pubblicò l’intervista perché, ufficialmente, era impossibile identificare il qaedista. Che, ovviamente, si era rifiutato di dare nome e cognome.

Senza gridare al bavaglio, Pope si è allora convinto che il rifiuto abbia anche un’altra ragione, più sottile: gli americani non vogliono scalfire gli schemi con I quali guardano a questo mondo. E per riuscire a mettere al centro la realtà, quella che ha visto nei trent’anni di corrispondenza giornalistica, ha scritto un libro in cui raccoglie questa e altre storie. C’è dentro l’Iran di Khomeini e l’Iraq di Saddam Hussein. Il wahabismo dell’Arabia Saudita e la rudezza che avvicina Israele a tutti gli stati che lo circondano. È uscito di recente negli Stati Uniti e s’intitola “Dining with Al-Qaeda”: una critica composta ma ferma al sistema d’informazione americano. Disattento alle cose che accadono in questa parte di mondo. Diseguale nel considerare i torti e le ragioni. Timoroso di rompere le rassicuranti certezze con cui gli americani interpretano questo universo.

Il Riformista lo incontra a Istanbul, dove vive e lavora. Non più come giornalista, ma come analista dell’International Crisis Group. Lo vediamo – in un caffè vicino alla Torre di Galata, nel quartiere una volta genovese della città – appena di ritorno dagli Stati Uniti, dov’è andato per lanciare il suo libro.

Ha trovato gli americani pronti per uno sguardo vero sul Medio Oriente?

Abbastanza. Quando sono diventato il corrispondente mediorientale del Wall Street Journal mi è stata affidata la copertura di tredici paesi ma nemmeno un assistente.I miei predecessori avevano lasciato l’incarico per la frustrazione di non riuscire a pubblicare le storie che raccoglievano. Sa, è veramente difficile raccontare seriamente questo mondo. All’America non interessa.

Ma poi c’è stato l’attacco alle Torri Gemelle.

L’interesse allora si è moltiplicato. La gente ha cominciato a chiedersi: «Perché ci è successo questo?». E noi abbiamo potuto raccontare da dove veniva la rabbia che gli statunitensi non sapevano spiegarsi. I legami con Israele, il sostegno politico che l’occidente ha dato ai regimi autoritari, eccetera. Quest’apertura è durata quattro settimane soltanto. Presto, con la Guerra all’Afghanistan nell’aria, il dibattito è cambiato. Si è smesso di chiedersi perché e si è cominciato a pensare che se li picchiamo abbastanza duramente, i musulmani obbediranno.

Cos’è successo quando è iniziata la guerra in Iraq?

Io sono stato l’unico a seguire il conflitto per il giornale. E sa una cosa? Quando scrivevo dall’Asia Centrale mi invitavano spesso a New York per tenere discorsi, per parlare con il pubblico e raccontargli i percorsi degli oleodotti. Con l’Iraq niente di tutto ciò. Eppure ero l’unico del Journal sul campo.

Come se lo spiega?

Pubblicavano i miei articoli. Ma non volevano veramente sapere. Ora sono stato in America cinque giorni. Ho tenuto quattordici discorsi. Sono stato invitato in cinque show televisivi e sei programme radio. C’è un interesse mai visto. Obama ha mutato l’ordine del discorso – oggi è legittimo parlare di un cambio di politica nei confronti di Israele, per esempio. Inoltre l’America è a capo di due grandi nazioni musulmane. L’Afghanistan e l’Iraq. E deve stare molto attenta a ciò che fa e dice.

A proposito di Iraq. Newsweek di fine febbraio titolava: «Alla fine, vittoria». Condivide?

L’incredibile distruzione dell’Iraq non può essere in nessun modo definita una vittoria. Probabilmente la situazione è più positive oggi di quanto lo fosse nel 2005. Ma non credo si possa usare la parola vittoria. È il linguaggio sbagliato.

Quella all’Iraq è stata una guerra per l’esportazione della democrazia…

Guardi, la dottrina di George W. Bush e i suoi è stata pura propaganda. Loro pensano che tutti possono essere come l’America. Ma le cose non stanno così. Quello che provo a spiegare nel libro è proprio questo.

Come sono gli iraniani?

Negli anni della rivoluzione islamica, ho potuto constatare di persona l’amore popolare e diffusissimo degli iraniani per un poeta persiano del 300, Mohammad Shams al-Din Hafez. Edonista, per certi versi libertario, eppure islamico. Il contrario esatto del puritanesimo dei mullah. Vuol dire che loro non sono come ce li rappresentiamo: bigotti e impermeabili. E significa che se vuoi parlare con loro devi conoscere il loro linguaggio. Che è fatto di metafore e allusioni. Perché rifiutano il discorso diretto. Lo considerano inelegante, rude.

Come dovremmo interpretare il desiderio di dotarsi della bomba atomica?

Quella del nucleare è una politica popolarissima in Iran. Anche sotto lo shah l’Iran voleva la bomba atomica. È un modo per bilanciare la loro debolezza, mostrando al mondo di avere una forza. Nessuno mi ha ancora spiegato come impedirgli di averla. Le sanzioni – l’abbiamo visto nel caso di Saddam Hussein – servono solo a rafforzare il regime. E l’attacco militare creerebbe una situazione di gran lunga più drammatica di quella attuale. Possiamo solo prendere tempo. Uno, due anni. La soluzione è provare a cambiare la società. Indirizzare il loro desiderio di potenza. Coinvolgerli nel mondo. Farli aprire. Già oggi, un milione e trecentomila iraniani all’anno arrivano in Turchia e vedono con i loro occhi la possibilità di coniugare Islam, laicità, pluralismo e democrazia. Non è una cosa da poco. Fino a pochi anni fa gli iraniani disprezzavano i turchi. Ora vedono che ce l’hanno fatta. Non lo ammetteranno mai, ma considerano la possibilità di essere come loro.

Ma la Turchia ha affrontato cambiamenti terribili.

È proprio per questo che non si può pensare di trasformare le nazioni con la forza. Non lo faranno mai. Occorre puntare sui mutamenti di fondo. Solo così si scioglieranno gli altri nodi.

Per fare questo, però, c’è bisogno di tempi lunghi. La bomba atomica invece si può fare velocemente.

Io non vedo altre soluzioni. Se qualcuno ha qualche buona idea: si accomodi, buona fortuna. Io non vedo altre vere possibilità.
‘The Hurt Locker’ – war is a dangerous drug for film-makers too

April 23, 2010

Having persuaded myself that America under President Obama is becoming more sophisticated in its approach to the Middle East — opening its eyes to the complications of Afghanistan and Iraq, questioning its blanket support for Israel, renouncing the legacy of the neocons — watching the film ‘The Hurt Locker’ was an unexpected reality check of how slowly some things change.

Within minutes, I was believing nothing that I was seeing. By half way, I was wondering why some intelligent friends could like a movie that seemed so absurd to me, and why there was such unanimity among top film critics to love it — “one of the great war films” (Time), an “unqualified triumph” (the Los Angeles Times) and uniquely “honest” (amazon.com). By the time the credits started rolling, I was furiously puzzling about why Hollywood granted six Oscars to what seemed to be a screenplay more suited for retooling as a clever parody of B movie war films. ‘The Hurt Locker’ clashes with almost all aspects of my experiences of Iraq, war zones and American soldiers, and, I believe, has an insidiously militarist subtext.

Hollywood’s imagination takes flight – but there’s more to be defused in ‘The Hurt Locker’ than just Iraqi IEDs

Take the opening sequence: it is unthinkable that an Iraqi would casually come up to an American unit engaged in high-tension bomb disposal to exchange peculiar pleasantries about California. A middle-aged man appears at a butcher’s shop fiddling clumsily with a cellphone. If he’s deliberately triggering the bomb, why does he come outside where he will be seen and is in direct range of the blast? Or if he is an idiotic butcher trying to make a call, which coincidentally triggers the bomb, then any cellphone could set off an explosion. Every house in that street would have had people busily phoning each other.

It gets worse when the hero, war junkie Sgt. James, appears on the scene. The first confrontation is again totally implausible: no Baghdad taxi driver would ever speed into an obvious area of tension and large-scale U.S. military operations. After that we are shown an Iraqi behind a balcony grill watching Sgt. James drag up seven booby-trapped 155mm shells with one hand (wish I could do that – that’s about 300kg, the weight of three big men). The implication is that this Iraqi laid the trap. If so, why doesn’t he detonate the blast? And when he comes face to face with Sgt. James, bomb-maker meeting bomb-defuser, why does Sgt. James, the wild man who has just shot up an apparently innocent taxi, do nothing except impotently wave the detonator in his face?

Then comes an emergency after a suspicious-looking car is abandoned at a UN building. Apparently, this is all about a suicide bombing that’s been aborted. I suppose this because Sgt. James finds a detonating switch next to the steering wheel, and an insurgent tries to blow up the car with a desperate shot from a balcony. This is an assumption, since the mumbled dialogue reveals little about the details of what we’re watching. A statue-like man menacingly films the action. Is he an insurgent readying a video for YouTube, as the soldiers plausibly debate? But that’s impossible, too. He’s too close and would have been incinerated in any blast, with his camera. A group of three middle-aged men, apparently co-conspirators, make obscure signals to the cameraman – from the balcony on top of a nearby minaret, exactly where no conspirators would have stood in full view of the Americans and in range of the massive bomb. And even if they were part of the plot, as the soldiers say they believe, why don’t they shoot them?

After Sgt. James has finished his dramatically mad bomb disposal, a senior officer appears. The commander’s crescendo of praise seems to be setting Sgt. James up to be slapped down for reckless behaviour, as would certainly have happened in real life. But no! The commander seems to be congratulating Sgt. James for 873 successful bomb disposals. The scene ends with a whimper of Sgt. James’ homespun wisdom that the trick of the game is all about not getting killed. Yet all we have seen so far is evidence that Sgt. James must have used up his nine lives ninety times.

Then comes the scene in the desert. Ah, the burning desert! We must be in Iraq, Arabia, the evil, hostile otherland. For some unlikely and unexplained reason, our heroes are out there all alone in this heart of desertness. Another amazement: they stumble across an SUV that has been carrying four fully armed Englishmen, who, by an extraordinary coincidence, not only have a seriously big machine gun in the trunk but have just that day captured two former top officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime! And they’re all alone too! They have a punctured tyre, but their wrench is out of action because one of them “threw it at someone”. Say again please?

No time to puzzle out this latest improbability: out of nowhere, the insurgents attack! An Englishman breaks cover to charge across open ground — where the unseen enemy has already shot dead one of his men — just to take pot shots at his two escaping captives. They’ve had a long time to get away, but he drops them nevertheless. Just as well, because this gives him the chance to hack away ruminatively at more of the wooden screenplay: “I forgot … it’s 500,000 quid dead or alive.” In the end the insurgents shoot dead three of the Anglo-US party, even though the film makes clear that they are 850 meters away and only have primitive equipment. Few trained snipers would be able to achieve such a result, even on a rifle range.

I’ve gone on long enough without even starting on Sgt. James’s impossibly bizarre solo mission into the back streets of Baghdad. Real veterans of the Iraq War have already taken issue with such details (here in the Atlantic, for instance). Of course the film is fiction, as it states. But it does everything to make us believe it is representing reality. The script, the film’s hype often boasts, resulted from work by an embedded freelancer who wanted to show the soldiers’ war. The shaky camerawork is supposed to make us feel that we are watching an edgy documentary. The extras are real Iraqi refugees, being filmed in Jordan, sometimes as close as possible to the Iraqi border.

This brings me to a point I try to make about journalism in Dining with al-Qaeda. Having an audience believe in the reality of a story is critical to triggering a strong emotional response. It’s the same whether telling stories round a camp fire or writing for the New York Times. And this is where the ‘The Hurt Locker’ does a real disservice to Americans. Although the film is shot with no overt politics or discussion among the soldiers about why they are in Iraq, there is a clear agenda behind all those brilliantly filmed slo-mo pressure waves, sinister improvised explosive devices and the jaunty, hips-thrust-forward gait of Sgt. James as he cockily lopes into action in his bomb suit.

Take the film’s portrayal of Iraqis, for instance. I can accept that ordinary American soldiers don’t have the access to ordinary people that I was lucky to have as an Arabic-speaking civilian, and I too witnessed some of the soldiers’ frustrated interactions with the ‘hajjis’. But nothing justifies the film’s total negativity towards the inhabitants of the country, and it does not match my experience of the overall U.S. military work with Iraqis. One by one, ‘The Hurt Locker’ portrays Iraqis as cowardly, poor, inadequate, base, stupid, treacherous, dangerous, wild, wily, living in filthy cities or most commonly just blank-faced and threatening. The only half-positive character is a cheeky DVD-selling boy on the base who is befriended by Sgt. James (note to casting director: when developing world kids pick up perfect jive-talk, they pick up perfectly fluent accents too). But other Iraqis, those inhuman nihilists, murder the boy or someone like him and then booby-trap his body.

Having thoroughly transferred this most primitive view of Iraqis to the audience, the film also trashes the idea that they understand anything other than the language of force. The vehicle for this is the unit psychiatrist, portrayed as an other-worldly ivy-league man who means oh-so-well but is utterly out of his depth. This ‘doc’ rides along with the disposal squad on a mission and is somehow left in the wasteland outside, mocked by the locals and the scriptwriter as he says absurdly ‘I love it here. This is a beautiful place.’ (Another military disconnect: never would four lone soldiers take on a vast, newly discovered insurgent base and bomb-making factory.) His naïve and wimpish approach no doubt represents the ideas of silly liberals like me who believe that engagement is better than the use of force. It earns him the right, immediately granted by the director, to be blown away by the very people he’s been foolish enough to try to be friendly to.

For any who think I’ve been touched by too much of the real Middle Eastern sun, read on. The scene with the suicide bomber clinches it. Here, the forces of jihadi darkness have encased a man in a bomb jacket and he’s begging to be defused, since, as he says, he’s a decent family man with children and just wants to go home. The good American, Sgt. James, decides to risk his own life to free him from his fate. For those uninitiated in the doctrines of American Middle East militarists, this is the gloss: at great cost to ourselves, we are ready to liberate you from Saddam Hussein, we are idealistically struggling to bring you democracy, we want to free you from the cage of your tyrannical and/or Islamofascist regimes. But here’s the problem: this Iraqi is locked into his bomb, and even Sgt. James’s miracles can’t release him. So on to the next step of the doctrine: ultimately, it’s all the Middle East’s fault. America has done its best to help, but the region is incurable. The bomb obliterates the Iraqi.

To ram home the point that violence is the only way to deal with the Middle Eastern labyrinth, the film then sacrifices the only credible main character, the African-American Sgt. Sanborn. Having rightly resisted and criticized Sgt. James’s antics for most of the film, Sgt. James’s act of lunatic bravery with the suicide bomber inexplicably flips Sgt. Sanborn from being the common-sense foil into the accomplice. The subtext here is the shared ground between war-hungry Republican neocons and Democrat hawks — the conceit that they are liberals “mugged by reality”. It’s the Bernard Lewis doctrine again: ‘hit those Muslims hard and they’ll soon obey’. This message also lies behind by the early scene where Sgt. James’s willpower and readiness to fire his pistol is all that forces a supposedly stubborn Iraqi to back down from a confrontation.

It’s possible that the film-makers have no agenda and were just mugged by common American prejudices about the Middle East’s troubles. These are the same misconceptions about the traumas of ordinary peoples trapped in extraordinary circumstances which I go to some lengths to try to defuse in Dining with al-Qaeda. The reason I find an innocent explanation of ‘The Hurt Locker’ hard to accept is that the reality that is doing the mugging here is so artificial. I have rarely seen a more undignified and unbelievable character progression as when the sensible Sgt. Sanborn suddenly salutes Sgt. James’s lethally mad “courage”. To add insult to injury, the director forces the face of the previously focused, four-square Sgt. Sanborn into an expression of dog-like devotion.

This is of course a film told from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, to whom the situation in Iraq did seem pretty baffling. There are moments where the film does ring a faint bell, when we see the hesitant team specialist’s terrors, or Sgt. James’s sudden kindnesses to his companions under extreme pressure. But that doesn’t go anywhere near justifying all the other distortions. And the film fails utterly as a story: the crazy and mostly repetitive events of the film work no change in the hero, his family’s needs do not melt him and he just goes back to the war. So the film ends more or less where it started, with Sgt. James doing his trademark I’m-the-king-of-the-hill walk, somewhere between keep on truckin’ and fuck-’em-all.

That’s because the film’s principal theme is that “war is a drug”, as journalist Chris Hedges put it in a compelling and self-critical book on his addiction to war reporting. Almost as if the director suspects that viewers won’t get the point, the quote is spelled out not once but twice right after the opening credits. Friends whose views I respect say that this exciting representation of a war junkie is what keeps them thrilled to the end. They dismiss as unimportant the idea that the Middle Eastern context is distractingly misrepresented, and wave away my argument that a similarly unrealistic, dice-with-death film could never have won such praise if it was filmed against an American backdrop. But even on these narrow terms, I question the artistic value of a continuum of unchanging illustrations of Sgt. James’s recklessness. There’s no subtlety about it. The director seems to feel this weakness towards the end. When the film’s quiet, nervous third main person is injured due to Sgt. James’s folly, the film suddenly has him scream super-sophisticated blame of the danger-seeker’s motives: “Looking for trouble to get your fucking adrenaline fix, you fuck!” That’s character development?

If this film is really going to be studied in 20 years time as “a classic of tension, fear and bravery”, as the New Yorker suggests, I hope the emphasis will be on finding out why film-directors, movie-goers and war-makers all seem to fall for such nonsense so easily.

Postscript 1

If you enjoyed this rant, have a look at this splendid deconstruction of Katherine Bigelow’s subsequent film Zero Dark Thirty in the blog The Feminist Wire, where writer Sophia Azeb points out that the faceless brown hordes of Pakistan are often made to speak not their native Urdu, but Arabic.

Postscript 2

Here are real U.S. military bomb disposal people, explaining their work in Iraq to the excellent Matt Ford and telling him what they think of the film “Hurt Locker”: “Grossly exaggerated and not appropriate” … “Our team leaders don’t have that kind of invincibility complex and if they do they are not allowed to operate” … “It makes us look like a bunch of reckless cowboys, and that’s not how we want to be portrayed.”
“Unique” – Mohamed Elshinnawi, Voice of America

April 23, 2010

Mohamed Elshinnawi is one of those old-style foreign affairs reporters who speaks softly but carries a big memory stick. Luckily he used it sparingly on me during an interview here.

It was heartening to see that at least this 32-year Middle East veteran survived the Bush administration’s abolishing of Voice of America’s solid Arabic-language news reporting in 2002 in favour of music and entertainment on the lightweight Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV station (ProPublica has a good series on this here). The old Arabic service cost $7m a year, and was a real contribution to a region where substantive news reporting is rare. Since then the U.S. has instead spent hundreds of millions of dollars on adding a not particularly significant layer of Arabic-language entertainment to the hundreds of channels available in the Middle East’s satellite era.

‘Dining with Al-Qaeda’ Serves Up Unique Reflection of Middle East

Journalist Hugh Pope takes readers beyond customary impressions of Arabs, Islam

Mohamed Elshinnawi | Washington, DC23 April 2010

Titling his book “Dining with Al-Qaeda” was no publishing gimmick for Hugh Pope.

The author actually did dine with a member of the terrorist group shortly after its September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Pope — then a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal newspaper — had travelled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to learn more about the Saudi hijackers. He met with a young militant who had helped to prepare most of them for their deadly mission.

‘Dining with Al Qaeda’

“I did meet a da’ia; a missionary from the camp in Afghanistan, where the Saudi young men had been before going on the mission to America, and he told me about them,” says Pope. “He knew more than half of them and he called them wonderful boys because he thought they were great, of course.”

VOA- M. Elshinnawi

Hugh Pope, author of ‘Dining with Al-Qaeda’

The rather uncomfortable interview — during which Pope says he had to quote the Koran to persuade the missionary not to kill him — ended with a rather cordial dinner and a renewed desire on Pope’s part to introduce the American public to the many worlds of the Middle East he had come to know.

“The main thing I am trying to tell them is that most journalists are honest and what you read in the newspaper is mostly right, but it is not the whole story,” says Pope. “You do have to search for other sources of information to compare and think about what you are hearing and take a variety of points of view.”

No one ‘Islamic World’

Pope has spent more than three decades in the Middle East as a traveler, journalist and student of Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages. He says one of the most important things his experience in the region has taught him is that the Middle East is not a monolithic “Islamic World.”

“I find it very bad to lump everyone together anywhere. One of my things in the book is for instance, the question of Islam. I try to avoid even using the word, because I think everybody understands something different when you say ‘Islam.’ I tried to show that one can’t just label a country as being one thing or even the Islamic world as being one thing.”

VOA – M. Elshinnawi

In ‘Dining with Al-Qaeda,’ journalist Hugh Pope takes readers beyond the customary impressions of Arabs and Islam.

Pope points to countries that have adopted Islamic law as the basis for their legal system, but have implemented it in very different ways.

He notes, for example, that while Iran is run by a fundamentalist Islamic regime, the Iranian people he met yearn for a closer relationship with the U.S.

He also observes how secular governments in two majority Muslim countries — Egypt and Turkey — have gone in very different directions.

Unrealistic picture

“Turkey has had the great fortune of having a window to Europe and not being right next to Israel. Israel, for sure, has disrupted the progress of Egypt. I mean why did Colonel Nasser in 1952 take power in Egypt? Because of his personal experience of defeat at the hands of the Israelis (during the 1948 war) and the national sense of dislocation because of what happened with Israel,” says Pope. “Unfortunately, the authoritarian streak in Egypt has not allowed the full blossoming of what Egyptians can achieve.”

VOA

Author Hugh Pope signs copies of his book at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C..

The author says the typical academic approach to studying the Middle East and news reports from the region are giving Americans an unrealistic and largely negative picture of its people.

“I feel that people have to stop looking at the Middle East like it is some zoo, a collection of completely incomprehensible wild animals, because we are all people. We all share the same things. The boys like fast cars and girls. It is the same everywhere. That is so missing in how the Middle East is treated in the media with all their focus on unusually horrible stories.”

Social media bridge

Still, Pope is optimistic that the growing number of educated Middle Easterners using social media can convey a more accurate account of the region to the American public.

He is also pleased that President Obama is helping Americans distinguish among the many facets of the Middle East by opening the door to improved Western dialogues with the Islamic world.

A year ago, in a speech in Turkey, the president said the U.S. is not at war with Islam, and called for a greater partnership with the Muslim world. Two months later, President Obama was in Cairo, where he pledged to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims. Pope notes that the president has also publicly reached out to Iran for engagement.

The Middle East scholar and veteran journalist says he’s hopeful that Western readers of his new book will come to see the countries of the Middle East in a new, less confrontational light, and hear more clearly the voices of its people.

“So I really hope that my book will be a source of some ideas and different points of view about what the Middle East can be.”
“Surprisingly frank” – The Morningside Post

April 21, 2010

One of my presentations of Dining with al-Qaeda‘s messages about Mideast coverage in the U.S. had a good showing in The Morningside Post (1 April 2010 post here), the news and opinion site run by the students of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Seeing in cold print that I had said that a “great lie” pervades stories about the Middle East made me wonder if I was using the wrong word. After all, I keep saying and believe that we did a lot of honest work as well. If I had my time again I’d probably underline that it was not intentional and call the cumulative effect of all those subtle distortions and omissions that were part of our work a “great error”.

Media Coverage of the Middle East: A Varnished Truth

Hugh Pope Talks to SIPA About Three Decades of Middle East Reporting

By Marie O’Reilly

Former journalist Hugh Pope was surprisingly frank in his discussion of American media coverage of the Middle East last Monday at the School of International and Public Affairs. The IMAC event took the form of a brown-bag lunch, the first of many stops for Pope as he tours his new book “Dining With Al Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring The Many Worlds of the Middle East.”

After earning his BA in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1982, the British reporter spent 25 years covering the region for a variety of publications. In 2007, however, Pope left journalism behind to work for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization.

It was in his last 10 years in the field, working as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, that he began to see what he calls the “great lie” that pervades media coverage of the Middle East.

Working at The Journal, as he calls it, “We would get 80% of the story out,” he says. “20% wouldn’t be there, because it was considered that it would be discomforting to the American reader or would stop them reading the story.”

He also spoke about the influence of strong Israeli lobbies in the US on these “editorial sins of omission.”

Mail campaigns would flow in to the Journal if Pope wrote that Palestinians were “forced to leave” in an article, instead of using the word “fled.” If he called the 3 million Palestinians living outside of pre-1948 Palestine “refugees, barred from return” he would find himself under pressure to correct this ‘error’ and refer to “original refugees and their descendents.”

The persistence of these campaigns force writers and editors to err on the side of caution, according to Pope. With each omission or white lie that resulted during his time as a journalist, he writes in his book, “we laid another brick in the great wall of misconception that now separates America and the Middle East.”

This wall is characterized by tendencies to view the Islamic world as one monolithic bloc and a lack of understanding of the diverse cultures and realities on the ground.

Pope maintains that it is also one of the reasons that the US stumbled into the war in Iraq and is finding it so difficult to get out of Afghanistan.

When first year student Stephen Gray (MIA ’11) asked whether the sanitized representation of violence in the American news media also plays a role in such foreign policy decisions, Pope agreed that policymaking might be different if there was a clearer emphasis on the destructiveness of war in the news media.

He used the point to underline the distance between American viewers and the current wars on the ground in the Middle East. During the Vietnam War, on the other hand, “there was no such inhibition and that—along with the draft of course—made everyone party to what was going on,” he said.

Anya Schiffrin, the director of IMAC, recalled attending a panel on media coverage after the Iraq War began, where a TV producer made it clear to her that they viewed showing dead American soldiers in the same way they viewed nudity. They said it was not a political decision but was based on conventions about unsuitable content , “which is amazing,” she added, “when you think of all the dead bodies we saw after the Haiti earthquake, and the lack of compunction about showing foreigners who are dead.”

One could add to this the barrage of images of massacred bodies from seemingly generic African civil wars in the news media, reinforcing perceptions of the civility of the West and the brutality of the rest.

Pope is not shy about the role that journalists themselves play in contributing to a sugar-coated version of the truth for American audiences, and his own culpability as a result.

When he first reported on Israel in the early 1980s, he did not censor his views, he says. And he quickly learned his lesson. While responding sincerely to a US radio host’s question about why US troops were being attacked in Lebanon, the line went dead.

“To be acceptable,” he admits in his book, “we had to varnish our version of the truth. The problem was that most people mistook the varnish for the truth.”

Pope spoke of a variety of publications afflicted by the need to oversimplify, appeal to readers and appease the lobbies.

More broadly, however, he is calling into question the medium of the newspaper and the news broadcast for accurately reporting on complex conflicts in far away places, where the truth can be difficult to explain as well as difficult to hear.

Newspapers have to sell the news afterall, and thus seek to please their audience. In addition, people have a tendency to engage with media that reflect and reinforce their own views. With few challenging questions from his audience, this may also be true of brown-bag lunches.

Pope now feels that researching and writing for a non-profit allows him more room to present the story as he sees it, unpalatable as that may be. He writes policy-focused reports on Turkey and Cyprus, their relationships with the Middle East and factors that may influence armed conflict in their neighborhood.

“This work that I’m doing at Crisis Group is really everything I thought journalism was going to be when I got into it, but really never was,” he says.

“We’re lucky that we got Hugh first,” says Anya Schiffrin, naming some of the next prestigious stops on his tour: The Brookings Institute, The Council on Foreign Relations and The Foreign Policy Institute.

No longer a journalist, and carrying three decades of Middle East explorations under his arm, it seems that Pope is now worth listening to.
Two podcasts of stories told to Crisis Group’s Kim Abbott

April 15, 2010

International Crisis Group has a great series of podcasts on all kinds of subjects and posted a ten-minute interview in which I tell stories from Dining with al-Qaeda to my colleague Kim Abbott (direct link to the first one here). Below is a picture of the Baghdad doctor whose fight against rising cancer rates — a hopeless struggle due to both Saddam’s cynical tyranny and the callousness of Western policy — I describe in the book and in one of the main scenes in the recording.

The second podcast here focuses on what it was like to be a reporter in the Middle East, the problems we faced with editors in far away Western capitals and the growing role of NGOs in reporting news.
“Highly readable and informative” – Library Journal Review

April 14, 2010

I guess the title Dining with al-Qaeda was always going to attract attention, at least that was the idea! But as the Library Journal reviewer cited below says, it might make some people that I was going to give an inside scoop on terrorist mechanics or perhaps even a good recipe or two (thus competing with the new book ‘Tea with Hezbollah’ or another volume with the inviting subtitle, ‘Recipes from the Axis of Evil’).

I even had a reader from Canada write in and say he’d taken Dining with al-Qaeda off the shelf because he was a foodie, but that when he discovered its real ingredients he began enjoying it anyway.

I settled on the title because of the core chapter in which I meet a missionary from an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan where the Saudi hijackers of 9/11 trained, and secondly, because a major theme of the book is a personal look at what gives rise to Islamist extremism in the Middle East and why anyone there would want to join such a group.

I actually wanted to call the book ‘Mr. Q, I Love You’, but everyone told me that was too vague to give any message to anyone (it’s the title of the first chapter instead, describing the scene in an Aleppo brothel when I learned that my name Hugh is often pronounced Q in Arabic-speaking countries). Then it was ‘Eating Chinese with al-Qaeda’, but my former Journal colleague Andy Higgins, now of the Washington Post, persuaded me that would make it sound like a handbook for cannibals. So it became ‘Eating Out with al-Qaeda.’ Then my theater director daughter Vanessa Pope declared that it could only be ‘Dining with al-Qaeda’, and that was that.

As intended, lots of people have said the title does seize their attention — and so far two have told me they bought the last copy in a bookshop. However that, I suppose, is what every author wants to believe.

Review by Library Journal Review

Pope (former staff correspondent, Wall Street Journal; Turkey Unveiled) is an Oxford-educated scholar who has worked and lived in the Middle East. Using a storytelling style and avoiding theoretical cliches and confusing jargon, he presents everyday life in the Middle East to general readers, introducing the nuances of Middle East culture, politics, and society in the first few chapters of the book. He then delves into a detailed description of his own travels and explorations in key parts of the Middle East. He also discusses the process of state formation and the rise and persistence of authoritarian dictatorships in parts of the region as well as the broader issues of effective governance there. The final five chapters cover Iraq, both during Saddam Hussein’s regime and after the U.S. invasion and occupation. Ultimately, the choice of title is perplexing: with the exception of a brief talk Pope had with an al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, this book has nothing explicitly to do with al Qaeda. VERDICT This is a highly readable and informative book, recommended for interested general readers so long as they understand that it has a misleading title.-Nader Entessar, Univ. of South Alabama, Mobile Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.