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TALK: Khaled Hosseini on How the Iraq War Hurt Afghanistan
The famous author of The Kite Runner speaks about his life as an author and his luck. This is a good, short interview that speaks volume. Worth reading.
“Incredible. Even publishing was banking on an Iraq invasion?
You expect to be rejected, but what upset me about it was what it meant for Afghanistan. That was a foreshadowing of what happened — that Iraq would overshadow the campaign and absorb military resources. I landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan.”
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Letter from Damascus (2006): Captured on Film
An important feature in the New Yorker written in 2006. Lawerence Wright goes off into the secret world of filmmaking in Syria to discover more about the society that at the time had limited press freedoms. It is fascinating to read it and assess that with events taking place there now.
“Although many foreign critics have portrayed Mohammed and other Syrian directors as symbols of artistic victimization, he defiantly rejects that role. “Do you want me to play the hero?” he asked. “Do you want me to repeat two hundred times each day that my films are forbidden? This is my society. I belong to this world. I am not a victim.”
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Opinion: The Arab Spring Started in Iraq
This is a controversial oped arguing that the Arab Spring began in Iraq.
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“Saddam Hussein’s fall put the entire Arab authoritarian system under scrutiny,” writes Kanan Makiya. “The Arab political psyche began to change as well. The legitimating ideas of post-1967 Arab politics — pan-Arabism, armed struggle, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism — ideas that undergirded the regimes in both Iraq and Syria, were rubbing up against the realities of life under Mr. Hussein.” -
“The Shooter”
With the rise of the popular movie Dark Zero Thirty, this is a great feature about the shooter who killed Osama Bin Laden.
“The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.”
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Mideast women beat men in education, lose out at work
This is an interesting development that I have observed over the years. During the past decade, there was so much focus on the importance of education for women but not enough on work after graduation. This article lays out important statistics and graphs on the reality of women employment in the Middle East.
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Jihadists’ Surge in North Africa Reveals Grim Side of Arab Spring
A great article by Robert Worth on the dangers and consequences of events taking place in North Africa. It is indicative that even countries like Mali have become havens for Jihadists and their reach is wide as crossing borders and chaos increases.
“The crisis in Mali is not likely to end soon, with the militants ensconcing themselves among local people and digging fortifications. It could also test the fragile new governments of Libya and its neighbors, in a region where any Western military intervention arouses bitter colonial memories and provides a rallying cry for Islamists.”
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Fresh Air: Ben Affleck & Dustin Hoffman
Ben Affleck is interviewed by Fresh Air’s host Terry Gross. The movie has won awards at the Golden Globes. “The film, which Affleck produced and in which he also stars, is the mostly true story of the CIA operative who helmed the rescue of six U.S. diplomats who managed to escape at the outset of the 1979 Iran crisis that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days after militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran. Affleck, a Middle Eastern studies major in college, was a child when the crisis happened and does not remember the news coverage.”
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Fair Observer
Fair Observer is a website that offers analysis on the Arab Spring, especially on the developments in Egypt. The website is easy to navigate and you can search for analysis by region or topic.
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Tunisia: ‘Did We Make the Revolution For This?
The New York Review for Books has been publishing some great features on the Arab Spring and this is the most recent one on Tunisia. Get a glimpse into what is taking place there and the larger consequences for the region. Have we stopped to assess the goals of the revolution that all began in Tunisia?
“What were those goals? To move swiftly and in orderly fashion from fifty-five years of homespun dictatorship (following on from four and a half centuries of Ottoman and French colonization) to a popular form of government. To unite Islamists of various stripes, left-wing trade unionists, economic and social liberals, and French-style secularists of the headscarf-banning variety—all without coercion. To correct the historic economic imbalance between the prosperous littoral and the neglected interior. And finally, to find an accommodation between two Tunisian cultures: the first, bucolic, heir to the Mediterranean civilizations whose amphorae litter the country’s archaeological sites; the second, harking to Arabia and Islam—for Tunisia boasts one the oldest places of worship in the Muslim world, the Mosque of Uqba in the holy city of Kairouan, as well as a thriving hard-line Islamic revivalist movement.”
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Branded a Betrayer for Embracing Syria’s Rebels
This is a great profile story by NEIL MacFARQUHAR. It not only captures the character in the story but it’s one of those pieces that take you to the place as well.
“Ms. Yazbek, 42, collapsed, only to be yanked to her feet to continue the butchery tour, which competes for the most harrowing day detailed in the book, a rare early chronicle of the revolution from inside.”
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How to edit your story for accuracy
12/10/12
by Rana F. SweisAs a reporter, you must gather information and interview sources quickly, then explain what you’ve learned concisely and clearly. Once that’s done, it’s tempting to ship the story to your editor or hit “publish” on your blog.
Resist that temptation. You need to do one more thing to ensure your story contains only accurate, unbiased and verified information: edit your story line by line.
Investigative reporter Nils Hanson shared his advice for line-by-line editing at the recent Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) conference in Cairo. More than 200 journalists and academics, mainly from the Middle East, attended the conference, which included training sessions and networking opportunities with international investigative reporters and trainers.
Hanson, who reports for the popular Swedish TV news station SVT, and is a member of ARIJ’s board, offered these tips for editing for accuracy:
Have your address book and notes handy
Make sure your list of sources and their contact information, as well as notes from your interviews, are close at hand. There may be facts you will need to double-check as you edit.
Keep an open mind
“Are you hit by tunnel vision? That’s the big trap,” Hanson said. Tunnel vision is the tendency to hold on to a certain belief even when evidence points elsewhere. Reporters sometimes do this without realizing it, Hanson said, so stay open-minded when reporting and editing your story.
“Listen to the skeptical, examine the expert and question the victim,” Hanson said. Think of the recent BBC scandal, in which an alleged sex-abuse victim admitted to wrongly accusing a former politician of attacking him. “Can victims prove their allegations?”
Examine each fact
Ask yourself if there is essential information missing and if all assertions are grounded in fact. Mark each fact, name, figure and quote in your story, and then verify it. “Watch out for overstatements, such as ‘everybody says’ or [that] they haven’t done anything,” Hanson said.
Verify all data, including statistics. “Even data presented by interviewees must be verified,” he says.
Evaluate your sources and decide if you need more interviews
Do your sources make conclusions that others might criticize? Point that out.
Reporters need to make sure they talk with many people, including those they don’t like or who don’t like them. They should also include people who are controversial or who may seem a bit odd—or just wrong—to the reporter.
“Did the people criticized in your story have a chance to reply to all serious criticism aimed against them?” Hanson asked.
“Look at the overall picture and check if it is unbiased or if it is written in an accusatory tone,” he explained. “Who or what could give a different picture?”
Protect sources and check copyrights
Make certain that a source you have promised not to identify will not appear in published documents or in photos or video. Also examine graphics and copyrights, including logos and statistics revealed in charts or graphs.
Check your gut
After examining your report line by line, Hanson says to ask yourself two final questions. First, ask yourself, “Are you troubled by anything?” If the answer is affirmative, be honest with yourself and your editor about what that is.
Finally, ask yourself, “What might generate criticism?” Don’t automatically take those parts out. Instead, address those critiques in your story.
If you follow these steps, you’ll be much less likely to need to issue a correction—or to regret publishing the story at all.
Rana F. Sweis is a freelance journalist and media researcher. She writes mainly about political reform, refugees and social issues in the Middle East. She is also the lead researcher in Jordan for the Open Society Institute-sponsored Mapping Digital Media Study. You can visit her website and follow her on Twitter.
Photo courtesy of Rogue Sun Media, used with a CC-license
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Reporters, like diplomats, can’t work in a fortress.
This is an excellent oped in the New York Times on the importance of reporting from the field and ‘being there’. To go where the story is. Sounds simple but as violence, chaos and kidnappings become increasingly common in places where reporters must go, the risks are high. The writer argues that reporters have to be there and working from fortresses can come at a high price.
“the occasional price of a noble but risky profession” — struck rather close to home. It is a calculus familiar to the tribe of foreign correspondents who work, as Bobby Worth often does, in places that can blow up in your face. If diplomats are withdrawing behind blast walls and armed escorts, and if that is costing us some useful understanding of the world, is the same thing happening to those who cover the news, and with what consequences?
“Like the truly committed diplomat, the truly committed foreign correspondent is something of an endangered species. News organizations began their retreat from the world long ago, driven by economics and a wrongheaded belief that Americans don’t care that much about foreign news. The American Journalism Review, which began charting the decline of foreign reporting in 1998 (that first article was entitled “Goodbye, World”), reported two years ago that 18 American newspapers and two entire newspaper chains had closed every one of their overseas bureaus. Other news outlets, including most TV networks, have downsized or abandoned full-time bureaus in favor of reporters or anchors who parachute in when there’s a crisis. They give us spurts of coverage when an Arab Spring breaks out or Hamas fires rockets into Israel, but much less of the ongoing attention that would equip us to see crises coming and understand them when they erupt.”
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The Arab Awakening, By Tariq Ramadan
This article reviews Tariq Ramadan’s book on the Arab Spring. Was the Arab Spring planned or staged? Was it a revolt by the people with no plan the day after?
“Half of this slim volume is spent examining whether the uprisings were staged or spontaneous. Ramadan counsels against both the naive view that outside powers are passive observers of events, and the contrary belief that Arab revolutionaries have been mere pawns in the hands of cunning foreign players. Certainly the US and its allies helped to guide events by collaborating with the military hierarchies which removed presidents in Tunisia and Egypt, and by full-scale intervention in Libya – for a variety of obvious reasons. An agreement signed by Libya’s NTC last year, for instance, guaranteed France 3 per cent of future oil exports.”
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What’s going to get MENA’s young people to work?
“ver the next decade, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) faces the challenge of creating 40 million jobs for its youth with an estimated 10.7 million new entrants expected to join the labor force. With nearly one in five people between the ages of 15 and 24, the region has one of the youngest populations in the world. Caroline Freund, MENA Chief Economist, notes that the employment response must be well above average to employ the current and future jobseekers.”
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Why social media – not violence – could bring change to Oman
“The Arab Spring left the Gulf state of Oman relatively unscathed, with long-term ruler Sultan Qaboos moving to quieten discontent by introducing reforms, but how long can tradition hold back calls for change?”
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Viewpoint: How Obama secures his legacy
“Obama ran as a two-term president, and has the potential to make the next four years transcendent. But only, as Ellis Cose explains, if he rolls up his sleeves and gets to the hard work of governing.”
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Crowdfunding Citizen Journalism in Cairo
“Mosireen, a media collective in downtown Cairo that has become a vital source of video reports about life in post-revolutionary Egypt, is engaged in an online crowdfunding campaign.”
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The death of Arab secularism
The death of Arab secularism is the story of a country that no longer exists and a world almost impossible to imagine. That world can be glimpsed in old newsreels from the Arab cities of the 1950s and 1960s. The cities of the post-war period – Cairo, Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Aden – look much the same as many developing countries of the time: American-built cars, European-style suits, a certain easy mingling of men and women…
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Chronicling Lives After Guantanamo Bay
“Shephard has followed the stories of several prisoners after they were released, including Salim Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden’s personal driver, and Canadian Omar Khadr, the youngest Guantanamo prisoner. Recently, she traveled to Albania to meet with Abu Bakr Qassim, one of several Muslims belonging to China’s Uighur minority who were captured in Pakistan and mistakenly detained at Guantanamo.”
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Syria’s rebels fear foreign jihadis in their midst
“In early summer, Abu Ismael, a six-year veteran of al-Qaida, left the insurgency still blazing in his homeland of Iraq and travelled to what he believes is the start of the apocalypse. He secured cash from a benefactor in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, then approached a weapons dealer in Anbar province, a desolate corner of the country that was not long ago a staging point for jihadis arriving from Syria and is now a gateway for those going the other way.
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“It was easy,” he said, in the sitting room of a house in the Syrian city of Aleppo. “The money was no problem, neither was the weapon, or the motivation. This will be a fight against the great enemy.” -
Dreams to despair for Egypt’s young
“Nabil Ali’s tuktuk is his pride and joy. The 21-year-old polishes the hub cabs to within an inch of their life and he carries three bottles of dashboard polish on board, in case he needs to spruce up the tuktuk between passengers.
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No attention to detail is spared – the windscreen wipers have silver skulls on each blade and to really make his vehicle stand out, he fitted it with an extra-large double exhaust pipe – in pink.
Nabil paid about $800 (£500; 620 euro) for the extras but for him, it is money well-spent. It means more people want to ride with him rather than his fellow tuktuk drivers in Egypt. And that’s important. The past year or so – especially during the revolution – has been tough.” -
Review: The Army’s Role in Israeli Politics | The National Interest
“AS PART of its negotiations with the United States, Israel promised to freeze “all settlement activity” (including natural growth of settlements), a pledge later enshrined in the “road map” agreed upon in 2003. Later, Israel argued that it had arranged a private deal with the Bush administration, in exchange for its withdrawal from Gaza, to allow settlement growth within the “construction line” of such settlements—in other words, to build up but not out.
Daniel C. Kurtzer, then the American ambassador to Israel, denies discussions between the United States and Israel resulted in what he called “an implementable understanding.” But I have a vivid memory of a conversation with him in his ambassadorial office in which an exasperated Kurtzer complained that he had been unable to get any satellite photos or detailed maps from the Israeli government or army showing where these construction lines were.”
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This Is Not a Revolution
“Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories. Elections are festive occasions where political visions are an afterthought. The only consistent program is religious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or endpoint. It will not stop with regime change or survival. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.”
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Hairdressers say former militant group members in Iraq turn ‘emo’
“After victimizing dozens of teenagers for donning “emo” hair styles, members affiliated with al-Qaeda and other militia groups in Iraq are turning into “emos,” a local news website reported on Saturday.
“Emo” is short for “emotional” and in the West generally identifies teens or young adults who listen to alternative music, dress in black, and have radical hairstyles and body piercings. While they are sometimes stereotyped as “gay,” to Iraqis, “emos” are widely synonymous as such and were targeted by extremist groups who smashed their heads with concrete blocks early this year. In March, Hana al-Bayaty of Brussels Tribunal, an NGO dealing with Iraqi issues, said the current figure of “emos” killed in Iraq ranged “between 90 and 100.” But for local hairdressers, who have witnessed a change in style among their extremist customers in the eastern province of Diyala, an “al-Qaeda emo” has started circulating as a joke, according to Al-Sumaria News.”
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Book: The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings
“The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings sheds light on the historical context and initial impact of the mass uprisings that have shaken the Arab world since December 2010. The volume documents the first nine months of the Arab uprisings and explains the backgrounds and trajectories of these popular movements and regime strategies to contain them. It provides critical analysis and at times first-hand accounts of events that have received little or superficial coverage in Western and Arab media alike. While the book focuses on those states that have been most affected by the uprisings, including Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, it also covers the impact on Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.
As the initial phase of the uprisings subsides, counter-revolution sets in, and grand narratives crystallize, it is important to take note of the diversity of reactions that emanated from activists, scholars, and others as the uprisings were first unfolding. In this sense, the volume archives the realm of possibilities, both imaginative and practical, optimistic and pessimistic, that were opened up as people sought to make sense of the rapidly unfolding events.”
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