Quil Lawrence writes: I met Anthony Shadid on a ruined airstrip in western Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-’02. He was sporting a beard and longer hair in those days that made him look a little like a crusading Arab warrior. We spoke briefly and exchanged a few bits of useful news about the place. As I recall his face now, I realize Anthony’s secret: His sincerity was piercing, disarming and infectious.

Over the next decade, I got to watch Anthony’s genuine curiosity overcome the suspicions of refugees, ambassadors and warlords, as he soaked up their stories and rendered them with great generosity of spirit. His writing could inspire kinship between Americans from his native Oklahoma and the terrified people of Baghdad, the demonstrators in Cairo, the rebel fighters in Libya and Syria.

The year after we met in Afghanistan, I saw Anthony in Washington, D.C. — he was just back from a stint in Israel and the Palestinian territories. I asked him how it went, and he replied with unfeigned nonchalance, “Not that good. I got shot.”

Anthony had been reporting in Ramallah in 2002 and took a bullet in the back of his shoulder. He believed it was fired by Israeli Defense Forces. The wound was complicated because Anthony refused to leave Ramallah unless his Palestinian colleague could cross the checkpoint with him. Over the years, Anthony was beaten and abducted while covering the news. He knew he was taking risks. But he also knew (though his unassuming nature would have never let him say it) that he was fulfilling his life’s mission, explaining the Arab world to Americans with a fluency and empathy perhaps no other reporter could match.

Steve Coll writes: Anthony Shadid’s third book, “House of Stone,” is due to be published in several weeks. It is described by the publisher as a “a memoir of home, family and a lost Middle East.” The project, when Shadid talked about it occasionally, was more personal than that sort of subtitle can easily convey. Shadid grew up in Oklahoma, in a family of Lebanese origin. He attended the University of Wisconsin and went into newspaper work. Like many American writers whose families arrived here from somewhere else, he was drawn gradually to the landscape of his family’s origins. “House of Stone” tells the story of Shadid’s efforts to rebuild — and excavate the history of — a family property in Lebanon. When he spoke about that project, and the life he had forged in Lebanon to carry it out, he mentioned a theme that was always present in his newspaper correspondence: that the “zone of crisis” frame that so often surrounded reporting from the Middle East was frustrating and inadequate. The Arab world, like any other, was not best understood by focusing exclusively on its wars and conflicts (although he did not shy away from any of those, or whitewash their ugliness) but through its longer, subtler narratives of family, time, and transition. “House of Stone” is such a narrative.

Shadid, who died on Thursday at the age of forty-three, while covering the conflict in Syria for the Times, apparently of an asthma attack, was, over the last decade or more, the most intrepid, empathetic, fully engaged correspondent working in the Middle East for American audiences. He had many gifts and was an exceptionally graceful, easy, and generous man, but among the qualities that distinguished his work was the sheer commitment of it. When he came to the Washington Post about a decade ago to serve as a correspondent, I was working as an editor at the paper. I asked a standard job interview question about his goals in the years ahead, and he provided one of the most striking, emphatic answers I can recall from countless discussions of that type: He intended to move to the Middle East, to chronicle in every dimension possible the upheavals in Arab societies that would inevitably follow the September 11th attacks, and to do nothing else, professionally. If we, the Post, would facilitate this ambition, he would be grateful, but that was the only job he was interested in or would be for years to come, he said. It is rare for anyone — never mind a writer — to possess such clarity. And Shadid carried out his plan exactly as he said he would, just not for the full measure of years that we would have wished.

On November 8, 2011, Anthony Shadid wrote: The House of Assad evokes an imperial sense of power, or at least its trappings, with iconography that one scholar described as infused with “laudatory slogans and sempiternal images.”

But my first impression of Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and one-time confidante, was of his unassuming quality. Here was a tycoon, a figure as rich as he was loathed, who eschewed formalities and ceremony. I had seen it before, in men like Saad Hariri, a former prime minister in Lebanon, lavished with so much privilege and so much wealth that pretensions become unnecessary. Even his most brazen threats seemed more pleading than menacing, as if I should understand the logic behind them. Don’t the Israelis know that they will suffer if we do; don’t the Europeans; don’t the Americans realize that we are the bulwark before forces that they can’t imagine — Islamists, chaos, wars roiling an already combustible region?

By the end of several hours interviewing Makhlouf in May, it was not pomp, not imagery and not detachment that denoted the imperium. It was the pronouns. The way he used them said much about how power has been exercised in the Arab world and why it has finally begun to crumble.

“We believe there is no continuity without unity,” he told me. “As a person, each one of us knows we cannot continue without staying united together.”

He echoed an Arabic proverb – alaya wa ala aadai’i ya rab.

Translated loosely, it means that we won’t go down alone.

“We will not go out, leave on our boat, go gambling, you know,” he told me at his plush, wood-paneled headquarters in Damascus. “We will sit here. We call it a fight until the end.” He added later: “They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.”

What Makhlouf, a businessman with no title, no official capacity save his membership in the president’s family, suggested was that Syria belonged to them: its property and people, their aspirations and fate, their history and their future. In essence, consciously or not, he gave voice to the sign that has long marked the crossing for visitors across the rocky wadis dividing Lebanon and Syria.

“Assad’s Syria,” it reads. [Continue reading…]

From Baghdad on March 30, 2003, Anthony Shadid wrote: On a cold, concrete slab, a mosque caretaker washed the body of 14-year-old Arkan Daif for the last time.

With a cotton swab dipped in water, he ran his hand across Daif’s olive corpse, dead for three hours but still glowing with life. He blotted the rose-red shrapnel wounds on the soft skin of Daif’s right arm and right ankle with the poise of practice. Then he scrubbed his face scabbed with blood, left by a cavity torn in the back of Daif’s skull.

The men in the Imam Ali mosque stood somberly waiting to bury a boy who, in the words of his father, was “like a flower.” Haider Kathim, the caretaker, asked: “What’s the sin of the children? What have they done?”

In the rituals of burial, the men and their families tried, futilely, to escape the questions that have enveloped so many lives here in fear and uncertainty. Beyond some neighbors, family, and a visitor, there were no witnesses; the funeral went unnoticed by a government that has eagerly escorted journalists to other wartime tragedies. Instead, Daif and two cousins were buried in the solitude of a dirt-poor, Shiite Muslim neighborhood near the city limits.

The boys were killed at 11 a.m. today when, as another relative recalled, “the sky exploded.” Daif had been digging a trench in front of the family’s concrete shack that could serve as a shelter during the bombing campaign that continues day and night. He had been working with Sabah Hassan, 16, and Jalal Talib, 14. The white-hot shrapnel cut down all three. Seven other boys were wounded.

The explosion left no crater, and residents of the Rahmaniya neighborhood struggled to pinpoint the source of the destruction. Many insisted they saw an airplane. Some suggested Iraqi antiaircraft fire had detonated a cruise missile in the air. Others suggested rounds from antiaircraft guns had fallen back to earth and onto their homes.

Whoever caused the explosion, the residents assigned blame to the United States, insisting that without a war, they would be safe. “Who else could be responsible except the Americans?” asked Mohsin Hattab, a 32-year-old uncle of Daif.

“This war is evil. It’s an unjust war,” said Imad Hussein, a driver and uncle of Hassan. “They have no right to make war against us. Until now, we were sitting in our homes, comfortable and safe.”

As he spoke, the wails of mourners pouring forth from homes drowned out his words. He winced, turning his head to the side. Then he continued. “God will save us,” he said softly.

At the mosque, hours after the blast, Kadhim and another caretaker prepared Daif’s body for burial — before sundown, as is Islamic custom.

Bathed in the soft colors of turquoise tiles, the room was hushed, as the caretakers finished the washing. They wrapped his head, his gaze fixed, with red and yellow plastic. They rolled the corpse in plastic sheeting, fastening it with four pieces of white gauze — one at each end, one around his knees and one around his chest.

Kadhim worked delicately, his gestures an attempt to bring dignity to the corpse. He turned Daif’s body to the side and wrapped it in a white sheet, secured with four more pieces of gauze. Under their breaths, men muttered prayers, breaking the suffocating silence that had descended. They then moved toward the concrete slab and hoisted the limp body into a wood coffin.

“It’s very difficult,” said Kadhim, as the men closed the coffin.

On Friday, he had gone to another mosque, Imam Moussa Kadhim, to help bury dozens killed when a blast ripped through a teeming market in the nearby neighborhood of Shuala. The memories haunted him. He remembered the severed hands and heads that arrived at the Shiite mosque. He recalled bodies, even that of an infant, with gaping holes.

“It was awful and ugly,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Anthony Shadid, a gifted newspaper correspondent whose graceful dispatches for both The New York Times and The Washington Post covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in eastern Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.

Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is now nearly a year old.

The Syrian government, which tightly controls foreign journalists’ activities in the country, had not been informed of his assignment by The Times.

The exact circumstances of Mr. Shadid’s death and his precise location inside Syria when it happened were not immediately clear.

But Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Shadid, who had asthma and had carried medication with him, began to show symptoms as both of them were preparing to leave Syria on Thursday, and the symptoms escalated into what became a fatal attack. Mr. Hicks telephoned his editors at The Times, and a few hours later he was able to take Mr. Shadid’s body into Turkey.

Jill Abramson, the executive editor, informed the newspaper’s staff Thursday evening in an e-mail. “Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces,” she wrote.

The assignment in Syria, which Mr. Shadid arranged through a network of smugglers, was fraught with dangers, not the least of which was discovery by the pro-government authorities in Syria. The journey into the country required both Mr. Shadid and Mr. Hicks to travel at night from Turkey to a mountainous border area adjoining Syria’s Idlib Province, where the demarcation line is a barbed-wire fence. Mr. Hicks said they squeezed through the fence’s lower portion by pulling the wires apart, and guides on horseback met them on the other side. It was on that first night, Mr. Hicks said, that Mr. Shadid suffered an initial bout of asthma, apparently set off by an allergy to the horses, but he recovered after resting.

On the way out a week later, however, Mr. Shadid suffered a more severe attack — again apparently set off by proximity to the horses of the guides, Mr. Hicks said, as they were walking toward the border. Short of breath, Mr. Shadid leaned against a rock with both hands.

“I stood next to him and asked if he was O.K., and then he collapsed,” Mr. Hicks said. “He was not conscious and his breathing was very faint and very shallow.” After a few minutes, he said, “I could see he was no longer breathing.”

Mr. Hicks said he administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation for 30 minutes but was unable to revive Mr. Shadid.

The death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two children, abruptly ended one of the most storied careers in modern American journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq reporting. He also was a finalist in 2007 for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by The Times for his coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for the past year.

In December, during a brief break from reporting in the Middle East, Shadid was interviewed by Terry Gross and reflected on the Arab Spring.

Newsweek’s current cover looks like a promotion for a Glenn Beck special: The War on Christians. No doubt the magazine’s editors thought they could get away with such a provocative headline because the byline lends it a token of authority.

Were this declaration to come from Beck or anyone of his ilk, it would be dismissed by Newsweek’s editors and many of its readers as conservative hysteria, but spouted by a celebrity former Muslim it suddenly demands serious attention. There also comes a side benefit — “The War on Christians” is a conservative mantra, from their lips referring to a war supposedly being fought by President Obama against Christians, so perhaps Newsweek felt like it might be doing some useful and surreptitious rebranding, decoupling Obama from this slur.

At GetReligion.org, Terry Mattingly observes that Newsweek these days is short on news.

As a rule, under super-editor Tina Brown, it has been an at times lively but ultimately confusing mixture of commentary, commentary and more commentary…

And the NEWS in Newsweek? That’s the strange part. The goal of the magazine seems to be to handle serious news topics (mixed with entertainment topics, of course) but in a way that it is impossible to take seriously as journalism. Newsweek is becoming the land of the unattributed fact.

To see this process at work, please read the Ayaan Hirsi Ali cover story discussing “The War on Christians in the Muslim World.” In this case, the cover’s zinger quality is provided by the author’s identity as a Muslim apostate, atheist, militant secularist and defender of old-fashioned human rights — such as religious liberty and free speech. Ali is so liberal that she is now considered, by many, to be a conservative.

In an interview with MSNBC, Newsweek executive editor Justine Rosenthal draws on one of the unattributed “facts” provided by Hirsi Ali: “In Egypt, for example, 200,000 Coptic Christians have fled their homes and very little is being done to stop that sort of violence.”

On what does Hirsi Ali base her claim that 200,000 Copts have fled?

The only reference I can find to this number of Copts fleeing is a Washington Times report in October last year which said:

A report released last month by an Egyptian nongovernmental organization estimated that 93,000 Christians already had fled the country since March, a figure some are predicting could top 200,000 by the end of year.

It would appear that this prediction made by persons unknown got turned into a “fact” by Hirsi Ali and now Newsweek is happy to cite this as a piece of evidence upon which it wants to buttress its cover story.

As for the cover itself, no doubt the magazine’s editorial team found the blood-stained image of Christ an irresistible piece of iconography, but I wonder whether they delved at all into the story behind the photograph.

On New Year’s Day, 2011, the Coptic al-Qiddissin (Saints) Church in Alexandria, where the photo was taken, was the target of a bombing that killed 23 people, Christians and Muslims, while 97 more were injured. The attack was internationally condemned and widely perceived as evidence of sectarian tension. The Interior Ministry blamed “foreign elements,” and the Alexandria governor accused al Qaida of being responsible, yet in a foretaste of the nationwide protests that were to erupt three weeks later, Christians unleashed their rage not at their Muslim neighbors but at the authorities.

Former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly in the U.S.-backed Mubarak government was later accused of having instigated the bombing.

In the following days, fearing that Churches might face similar attacks, Muslims formed human shields in order to defend Copts going to worship.

There’s no question that in Egypt and elsewhere Christians have been the targets of sectarian violence, but what Newsweek is doing is shamelessly promoting the view that Christianity is under attack by Islam. We’re back in the territory of a clash of civilizations — but no mention of another phenomenon: the attacks upon Christians that occur daily in Israel.

How does Hirsi Ali want to see “Christophobia” addressed?

As for what the West can do to help religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries as leverage.

It might be hard for the U.S. to apply such leverage since there is only one country to which the U.S. actually gives billions of dollars of aid each year: Israel.

Glenn Greenwald writes: CBS News‘s Bob Schieffer is the classic American establishment TV journalist: unfailingly deferential to the politically powerful personalities who parade before him, and religiously devoted to what he considers his own “objectivity,” which ostensibly requires that he never let his personal opinions affect or be revealed by his journalism. Watch how thoroughly and even proudly he dispenses with both of those traits when interviewing Ron Paul last Sunday on Face the Nation regarding Paul’s foreign policy views. In this 7-minute clip, Schieffer repeatedly mocks, scoffs at, and displays his obvious contempt for, two claims of Paul’s which virtually no prominent politician of either party would dare express: (1) American interference and aggression in the Muslim world fuels anti-American sentiment and was thus part of the motivation for the 9/11 attack; and (2) American hostility and aggression toward Iran (in the form of sanctions and covert attacks) are more likely to exacerbate problems and lead to war than lead to peaceful resolution, which only dialogue with the Iranians can bring about:

You actually believe 9/11 was America’s fault? Your plan to deal with the Iranian nuclear program is to be nicer to Iran? This interview is worth highlighting because it is a vivid case underscoring several points about the real meaning of the much-vaunted “journalistic objectivity”:

(1) The overarching rule of “journalistic objectivity” is that a journalist must never resolve any part of a dispute between the Democratic and the Republican Parties, even when one side is blatantly lying. They must instead confine themselves only to mindlessly describing what each side claims and leave it at that. Their refusal to label Mitt Romney’s first campaign ad as dishonest — even though it wildly misquoted Obama — is a perfect example; so, too, was their refusal to call torture “torture” on the ground that Bush officials called it something else. This is also what The Washington Post‘s Congress reporter Paul Kane meant in his widely disparaged attack this week on those who condemn the media’s “cult of balance”; when Kane defended the political media’s trite, reflexive both-parties-are-at-fault coverage of the Super Committee’s failure by saying “news coverage should always strive to present both sides of the story,” what he means is: whenever Democratic and GOP leaders say different things, it’s the job of opinion writers — but not us objective reporters — to say what the truth is; our job is simply to faithfully write down what each side says and go home.

To these types of journalists, “objectivity” compels that lies and truths be treated equally and never resolved — that is, when the dispute is between the two parties (they allow themselves exceptions to this mandate — their overt swooning for George Bush and contempt for Al Gore in 2000 was probably the most blatant example, and they also eagerly seize every opportunity presented by sex scandals to self-righteously rail against a political figure because sex is apolitical and thus entails no danger of being accused of political bias — but, in general, mindless neutrality in disputes among the two parties is the prime commandment of their objectivity religion).

Following a venomously anti-Palestinian blog post by Rachel Abrams that was promoted in a retweet by the Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, Glenn Greenwald comments:

It’s the opposite of newsworthy that a rabid neocon like Abrams spews this sort of anti-Arab hate-mongering; that is basically the defining attribute of neoconservatism. But what is significant is that Jennifer Rubin promoted and endorsed it without any hesitation. Over the past 18 months, we’ve witnessed a series of journalists fired for far less virulent sentiments directed at Israelis and Jews (Rich Sanchez’ complaints about disproportionate Jewish media influence and Helen Thomas’ call for Jews to leave the region), and even for completely innocuous remarks whose only sin was offending neocons (Octavia Nasr’s mild eulogizing of a moderate Hezbollah cleric). Yet here we have a Post blogger who has endorsed this extreme hate-mongering, and does so with total impunity.

Is there any doubt whatsoever that had Rubin promoted a rant spewing these sorts of ugly caricatures about Jewish children and Israelis with accompanying calls for savage violence — rather than directed at Palestinians — that she would have instantly been fired, then castigated and attacked by all Serious precincts? As [Ali] Gharib reports today, that was the question posed by a Post reader via email to the Post‘s Ombudsman, Patrick Pexton. To his credit, Pexton had previously condemned Rubin on his Ombudsman blog, writing: “in agreeing with the sentiment, and in spreading it to her 7,000 Twitter followers who know her as a Washington Post blogger, Rubin did damage to The Post and the credibility that keeps it afloat.” After denouncing Abrams’ rant as “reprehensible,” Pexton added: “That a Post employee would retweet it is a huge disappointment to me.”

That’s all fine as far as it goes, but what about the question posed by the reader: wouldn’t Rubin have been fired for promoting this hate-mongering had it been directed at Jews and Israelis rather than Palestinians? Pexton’s email response, published by the reader who emailed him, was this:

Off the record, I think it’s quite possible. But the ombudsman does not hire or fire people here. I only comment.

Leave aside the bizarre belief of establishment journalists that they can unilaterally decree their statements to be “off the record” and then expect that to be honored in the absence of any agreement by the person to whom they’re making the statement. What is most striking here is Pexton’s highly revealing cowardice — probably well-grounded — in wanting his observation about this double standard to be kept private; shouldn’t an Ombudsman who believes this be eager to raise it in public? As the reader noted in reply to Pexton:

If, in your opinion, such a grave double standard exits, why do you comment off the record? Why not publicly state your opinion? Why self censor? Doesn’t that reinforce insidious limitations on free speech?

Think of the absurdity. You must stay cautiously silent about a perfectly reasonable opinion while Rubin and Abrams can let fly with genocidal remarks. With respect, your silence contributes significantly to the poisoning of public debate.

Please speak up.

What’s particularly remarkable is that Pexton is admitting (albeit wanting it kept secret) what any honest observer knows to be true: that there is a very high likelihood — I’d say absolute certainty — that Rubin would have been fired had she promoted a post like this about Jews and Israelis rather than Arabs and Palestinians.

But this is the insidious, pervasive bias that has long been obvious in a profession that relentlessly touts its own “objectivity.” Even the mildest criticism of Israelis and anything even hinting at criticisms of Jews is strictly prohibited — a prohibition enforced by summary, immediate dismissal and enduring stigma.

Indeed, the American media exhibits gross bias in favor of Israel and deference towards Jews– that hardly needs saying. The question is, why?

The easy answer is to say that this reflects the ruthless power of the Israel lobby. A riskier explanation which even though widely accepted is much less voiced would be to say that this reflects the wide reach of Jewish power in American society. But neither explanation really exposes the way the power dynamic functions.

In most accounts of the nefarious influence of concentrated power, too much attention is given to the role of the individuals or entities which supposedly possess great power and too little to the way others relate to that power.

Americans are by nature enslaved to the possibility of their own advancement and to advance is to rise through the structures of power; not to defy or attempt to transform those structures.

“I never met in America with any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately withheld from him,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840.

For those convinced that a shortage of luck may be their only impediment to a better life, then the greatest fear will be of the self-created obstacle — a poorly chosen alliance, an imprudently expressed opinion, or anything else that might alienate them from the sources of power towards which they gravitate.

Patrick Pexton may be the Washington Post‘s ombudsman today but that’s not a position anyone holds or would want to hold for life. He has an eye on his own future and no one gets ahead in Washington or elsewhere in the US media by creating the impression that they might have anything less than warm feelings for Israel.

This is a reality sustained by the collective ambitions of most journalists.

What the media especially lacks, are sufficient numbers of individuals who do not so diligently nurse their own ambitions. Taboo-breaking, defiance and the kind of fierce independence which are the things that make a free press free, can only be unleashed by those who are willing to say: to hell with success; save the Pulizers for the media slaves.