They're Muslims, aren't they? What more do you need to know? (Still catching up with yesterday's edition ...) Let's place Patrick Tyler and Don Van Natta's shabby report on European Islamic extremists ("Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam") alongside Neil MacFarquhar's ugly and insensitive response to last week's Riyadh bombings ("Ha, Ha, Saudis, Terrorism's Not So Much Fun When You're the Targets," though I may be misremembering the title), to take note of a disturbing little flowering of Muslim-hating on A1.

What's shabby about the Tyler and Van Natta piece? Let's start with their standards of evidence. All it takes are the recent arrests of a handful of bomb conspirators in Britain, the statements of two radical clerics (an unnamed third is paraphrased in a quote from a "senior official"), mixed with the unverified and anonymous quotes of "counterterrorism experts," and just like that Europe is about to run red with Christian blood:

The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say. ... A small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street. They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. ...

On working-class streets of old industrial towns like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open. ... Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of militant groups affiliated or aligned with Al Qaeda, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.

Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" — communications among people suspected of terrorism and their supporters — has markedly increased since Mr. bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning for another strike in Europe is advanced.

[The highlighted phrase is especially telling: Tyler and Van Natta are deliberately eliding the difference between Al Qaeda agents in place and the young European Muslim sympathizers who are the subject of the article. They do the same thing a bit later, when they mention that the "anger" of those sympathizers is being stoked by "some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks"—or did it slip their minds that the 9/11 attackers were not European Muslims? Similarly slippery, that plural of "clerics" resolves in the reporting to a single example, Abu Hamza, who has been accused of "tutoring" would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid.]

Tyler, who is credited with reporting from Slough, appears to have been present when the other clerical subject of the article, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke at a community center there:

On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce — provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months — Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.

"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death — that is what they are looking for."

I find it interesting that Tyler seems not to have bothered to count the number of young men listening to Sheik Omar, who presumably were right there before his eyes—just as neither reporter asks any of the anti-terrorist Muslim community leaders they quote how many young punks they think they're dealing with. Or attempts to develop any other way of accounting for this supposed tide of radicalism, other than repeating the vague, scary "hundreds" or "thousands" in the claims of unnamed counter-terrorism officials.

One thing Tyler and Van Natta are quite certain of, though, is what they'd like to see happen. The article is unapologetically slanted toward a preferred course of action:

Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God. ...

In an interview on the BBC over the weekend, Mr. Blunkett advocated a stronger deportation policy ... The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.

That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. "In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not easy," an official said.

Damn civil liberties! How can we fight this menace with one hand tied behind our backs?

Articles like this give me a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Is the Times really preparing to take its readers down this path?

posted by michael  5:50:31 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Honesty about the limits of one's ability to report—a willingness to acknowledge dubeity in dubious situations—is not something most journalists are good at doing, and something Times journalists seem schooled at avoiding. So, very big props to Ian Fisher, who yesterday wrote one of the best articles I've seen in the Times in weeks ("Attack in Iraq: Many Versions, Obscure Truth"), on the death of an American soldier Sunday morning, killed when his Humvee was blown up by a roadside bomb, and the subsequent firefight that killed at least one Iraqi teenager. "The kind of attack so common in this war that it no longer makes headlines," as Fisher puts it, but an object lesson in how narratives cohere—and fail to cohere—in the swirl of guerilla war.

In recent weeks, it has become harder for Western reporters to sift through conflicting accounts of incidents like this one. They venture outside only briefly. Many are afraid, mostly ensconced in hotels and houses protected by huge concrete blast walls, because of the recent wave of kidnappings and killings of foreigners. (And this reporter, who arrived at the attack scene about six hours afterward, stayed only about 45 minutes — far less than he might have several months ago.)

Fisher's depiction of himself on scene is rare enough for the Times, rarer still his acknowledgement that his ability to observe and draw conclusions is compromised by the deterioration of security in Baghdad. Most impressive, Fisher makes this graf the article's pivot point, and creates journalism out of his compromised platform. Having led the article with a clear, routinely unambiguous narrative of the incident, Fisher then takes that story apart, piece by piece, to reveal just how many ambiguities the authoritative voice of his lead has concealed, and deliberately concealed.

Reality, at this pivotal moment for the Americans in Iraq, is a kaleidoscope of versions.

Iraqi witnesses said not one child, but four, possibly five, had been killed. The American military had no count. But according to the military, gunmen fired on the soldiers from rooftops, provoking return fire. No Iraqi witness mentioned that.

Several Iraqis there did say [that] children had been incited to jump around the burning Humvee by a cameraman for Al Arabiya, an Arab news channel, which American officials say is guilty of stoking a much broader anti-Americanism among viewers around the Arab world. The station denies that its cameraman did anything but film.

With real art, Fisher moves concentrically outward, from his nearest witnesses to the incident through to neighbors and parents and aid workers, finally to the relevant authorities: the Baghdad bureau chief for Al Arabiya, and Gen. Mark Kimmitt, who Fisher places "inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified command center for the American occupation," both denying their respective responsibility in provoking or inflaming the incident. Only in the voices of those latter respondents, the furthest removed from the action, does ambiguity disappear—and by the time it does, the pattern of Fisher's narrative has already provided all the critique needed to understand how and why.

This isn't just a question of Fisher's skills deserving praise, as much as they do. This is ethical journalism, in a deep sense. Structuring his story as he does, Fisher gives his readers a chance to see how stories like this inevitably are structured, and he invites his readers to maintain their skepticism about any pronouncements of authority on the war in Iraq—even those that might come under Fisher's own byline. Brilliant work; A1 needs a lot more where this came from.

posted by michael  1:05:26 PM  
tell me about it []