ParisTampaBlog

I do love this country. There is a certain greatness in America that is still with us (in spite of all that is wrong now and has been wrong in the past), a real, admirable quality that is always turning up if one has the eyes to see it. Courage and generosity, and being able to laugh at oneself and admit one’s mistakes, these are, I think, the words that best describe our country’s greatness. These qualities are easy to discern in the big events of the country’s history, in the survival of the early Atlantic seaboard colonies, the settling and the winning of the West, the making room in our public lives, alongside of the white males, first for women, then for Blacks, and now for all those who come to our shores from nearly every corner of the earth. These are generally recognized instances of greatness in our country’s history, but there are also innumerable individual instances of greatness, demonstrated by the actions of individual Americans and resulting from an inner sense of what is the right thing to do, and not from an outer awareness of convention, or tradition, or from fear of risk taking, or from a need to be well thought of, well remunerated, and the like. Americans have always reached out to people, whoever they are and wherever they be, disregarding whatever the particular circumstances and prejudices there might be surrounding these people and that might have stopped a lesser person from becoming involved, and have instead welcomed that "other" into their lives and hearts and homes.
In the instance before us the American with a “great soul” is Mike Hoover and the "other" to whom he reached out is Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, now 28 years old and a freshman at Yale, but a former roving Ambassador for the Taliban. Chip Brown in today’s NYTimes tells us this fascinating story. In what follows below I will be taking whole passages from Chip’s account.

In May of 2000, when he first met Rahmatullah at the airport in Quetta, Pakistan, Mike Hoover was a "hale, rangy, black-haired 56-year-old, mountaineer, cameraman, filmmaker, and possibly the only member of the American news media whose life was as eventful as Rahmatullah’s. He had been to both poles, all seven continents and, during the making of "The Eiger Sanction," served as Clint Eastwood’s stunt double. He had one Academy Award, three wives, four children and 14 Emmys and had had many brushes with oblivion. In 1994, he was the only survivor of a ski-helicopter crash in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada that killed four people, including his second wife, Beverly Johnson (at one time the best female rock climber in the world), and Frank Wells, president of the Walt Disney Company."

Typical? Well maybe not, but certainly American with a not untypical American story.

"In the 1980′s, Hoover slipped into Afghanistan for CBS News and filmed mujahedeen battles against the Red Army. The Afghans dubbed him Shutur, or "the Camel," because he insisted on lugging his heavy camera equipment up trails in the Hindu Kush. Now, in May 2000, he was one of the few American news cameramen who had been given Taliban permission to visit Afghanistan since Clinton’s attempt to kill bin Laden with cruise missiles in August 1998. Rahmatullah had been assigned to take him around as a guide and translator and show him whatever he wanted to see."

"Rahmatullah had a driver, and Hoover was traveling with another filmmaker, Cindy Carpenter Spies, who was working on a documentary about Afghan women. The party set off around noon for Kandahar in an old station wagon. After they had been going for a while, the driver pulled to the side of the road. He and Rahmatullah got out. They were in the middle of nowhere, and no one was around. "I thought this was it," Spies recalls. "I thought, They’re probably going to kill us right here." Hoover wasn’t sure what the two Taliban were up to until they faced southeast and got down on their knees to pray.

"Over the next three weeks, Hoover and Rahmatullah traveled around Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and formed a deep friendship. One night, a week or so into the trip, Hoover was sitting on the floor of the foreign office guest house in Kandahar, drinking tea as Rahmatullah and some other Taliban peeled potatoes and onions. Rahmatullah asked him a question."

"Do you believe people are related to dogs?"

Dogs are not favored in Afghan society; the question dared him to contradict common sense.

"Yes," Hoover said.

The Taliban all laughed in amazement.

"How can you possibly believe that? We are so different."

"You see only differences. I see similarities."

"Similarities! Like what?"

Hoover wanted his first example to be an intellectual bunker buster, so he thought carefully.

"Bilateral symmetry," he said. The laughter stopped, which pleased him.

"What does that mean?"

"It means dogs have eyes on either side of their nose, just like humans. Dogs have two nostrils, just like humans. They have two lungs. They have toenails. They have a heart in the center of their chest. Dog blood and human blood are indistinguishable."

Recalling the exchange not long ago, Hoover said: "Now you could hear a pin drop — and it was a dirt floor. They were starting to get uneasy. There was a dog right outside. It was scraggly and covered with sores; I think the appropriate word for it would be ‘cur.’ When I finished laying out how they might be genetically related to the cur outside, they went off and started talking among themselves very intently. What they were discussing and what they wanted to understand was if what I was saying was true, would it fit within the teachings of the Koran. After a long time they came to the conclusion that it would."

Chip’s account in the Times makes it clear that Mike Hoover recognized the worth of this young man, and brought him to Yale via Jackson Hole, Wyoming where he, Mike, now lives.

So who is Rahmatullah, the "other" in this story? Two anecdotes in Chet’s account are particularly revealing of the young man’s character, qualities that Mike and Yale probably recognized in turn.

Waiting to hear from Yale, Rahmatullah spent the holidays in Jackson Hole with Hoover. [While there] he spoke to students at several local schools…. After a talk to the young teenagers at the Jackson Hole Middle School, two boys approached Rahmatullah.

"Can we ask you a question? Have you ever been in a war?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell us about it? We want to be Army Rangers."

He thought for a second. "Do you guys play video games?"

"Yeah," they said, looking at him as if he had rocks for brains.

"I thought so," he said. "Let me ask you, have either of you ever killed a chicken?"

They shook their heads. They didn’t know anyone who even had chickens.

"When was the last time you had to kill anything to eat?"

They were confused.

"I killed a goat before I came here," Rahmatullah said. "I hated doing it. Go kill a chicken, and pluck it, and eat it," he said softly. "And then maybe you will know a little bit about war."

And then a bit later the writer has this to say:

Many distinctions could be drawn between his old life and his life at Yale. But he had seized on one.

"You have to be reasonable to live in America," he said. "Everything here is based on reason. Even the essays you write for class. Back home you have to talk about religion and culture, and you can win any argument if you bring up the Islamic argument. You can’t reason against religion. But you cannot change Afghanistan overnight. You can’t bring the Enlightenment overnight."

Well, I thought, what about that, "you have to be reasonable to live in America. Everything here is based on reason."
And then, "you can’t bring the Enlightenment to Afghanistan overnight."

Well, I’d like to believe that, not that you can’t bring reason to Afghanistan, but that everything here is based on reason. My own activities, such as reading books purchased through Amazon’s used book network, downloading newspaper and magazine articles from the Web, through it all constantly on the outlook for new ideas that I can then write about and share with my email correspondents, highly reasonable activity all that? I’d like to think so, and I’d certainly rather be called a reasonable man than a born again. But, "you have to be reasonable to live in America," probably not.

So I wouldn’t agree with Rahmatullah that it’s the place of reason in our lives that is our most striking characteristic. (Nor was it probably that noticeable in France during the Enlightenment, followed as that was by the least reasonable period of their history.) In fact I don’t know many people whom I would characterize in that manner. I do know a lot of people for whom money, not reason, is most important. But I also know many Americans who are fundamentally good, who are extraordinarily generous with their time and money, who are quick to reach out and help others who have much less than they. It’s not so much by the place of reason as it is by the place of generosity in our lives that I would judge the greatness of our country. And right along with that generosity, and an inseparable part of it, is the American’s ability to look to the worth of the man or woman underneath whatever might be the clothes he or she is wearing, the color of that person’s skin, the social or economic class to which the person might belong. I would say that people in general, no less than Americans, may be called great souled or magnanimous when in their dealings with others they disregard the external factors of others’ lives and see them and relate to them for what they are underneath. Only for the scientist, perhaps, are externals all important. Most of us try to go directly to the essence of things beyond the externals, or at least we would like to think we do. For when the externals, one’s social position, one’s bank account, one’s golf game are all important, well then we’re in big trouble. And most important we are much less the man or woman that we could be. Up until now I’d like to think that America’s times of greatness have overshadowed the instances of its littleness. For some of us they have, and for others they haven’t, and today we find ourselves divided because of our differences in this regard. I think it was one an instance of greatness that had Mike Hoover bring Rahmatullah to Jackson Hole, and another one when Yale University accepted Rahmatullah as a freshman at the college.

Now you wouldn’t raise a red flag in a bull ring and not expect a violent reaction on the part of the bull. Yes, the seemingly reasonable and calm, Flemming Rose, the arts editor of the Copenhagen Daily, Jyllands-Posten, with the agreement of the newspaper’s editor, Carsten Juste, did just this sort of thing on September 30th of last year by publishing twelve images of the Prophet. Whether or not he was perfectly within his rights to publish what now are referred to as the Mohammed Cartoons is not the point. Although in his defense he couldn’t possibly have known, in view of the consequences still raging today nearly five months later, the result of what he was doing. The images of the Prophet were a red flag, and just as red flags will arouse the bull, so in this case the cartoon images aroused the anger of the Muslims, first in Denmark, then months later in the Middle East and on throughout the entire Muslim world. The current state of the world is, and probably has always been, like a bull ring in that at any moment the bull may be aroused by someone’s ill-considered action and only calmed down after a good amount of blood has been shed. At the present time, “There is,” in the words of Robert Wright writing in the New York Times, ”if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between the ‘Western world’ and the ‘Muslim world’." Publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed is no way to bridge this gap, and in hindsight the Danish newspaper editors, and their imitators at other publications in Europe and elsewhere, did a reckless and thoroughly foolhardy thing.

Why did they do it? Why did the editors of a small newspaper in a small country, pretty much out of the line of fire during the wars of the past and the wars of the present, why did they enter the ring in this manner? Well the most common explanation one hears is that we in the West, Danes, Europeans, and Americans, need to show that we are free to publish whatever we want, and that in order to preserve this freedom we have to use it, and not allow our freedom to publish weaken in the slightest through lack of use. Roger Köppel, the editor of the German newspaper, Die Welt, said it most bluntly, "It is the core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subjected to criticism, laughter and satire. If we stop using our right to freedom of expression within our legal boundaries then we start to develop an appeasement mentality." And many others have picked up on that, their mantra being, avoid appeasement at all costs. Tony Blankley writing for the rightist internet publication, Townhall, reminds us that Britain’s decision to appease Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland in October of 1938 did not buy peace but only encouraged further Nazi aggression, because Nazi demands were unlimited and non-negotiable. The implication is that Muslim’s demands on us are similarly unlimited and non-negotiable, and that regardless of the wisdom of the original decision to publish the cartoons there is no backing away now from defending our right to do so, if we would hold on to that right and not allow it to slowly wither and die from disuse. Well, to push the appeasement button in this affair of the Mohammed Cartoons is a red herring, diverting attention from more substantial and interesting topics and issues underneath. Even though we are at war with al-Qaida terrorists and their ilk this talk of appeasement wages the wrong battle at the wrong time. The wrong time because of the on-going Israeli Palestinian conflict and the War in Iraq, to say nothing of the situation along the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The position of the West in all three conflicts has not been helped by the Cartoon War. The wrong battle, too. The right battle would have been, and would still be, to seek to bridge that gap, not open it up even further and thereby make any future bridging even less likely to happen. This is not Munich in 1938. In this affair of the Cartoons there is no Sudetenland of immense strategic importance being lost to our enemies.

Appeasement is just one example of the wrong word being used throughout the crisis. Another is “self-censorship.” Both show the power of words, and in both cases the wrong words, to arouse the passions. We won’t be charged with being appeasers, and we won’t restrict our right to publish whatever we want, especially within the borders of our own liberal democracies. But again, there is no appeasement here. Rather our recognition that the publication of the cartoons was insensitive and inappropriate, as many Western governments have wisely done, is best seen as a kind of affirmative action on our parts. There are many people in the world, billions of them in fact, and especially in those countries where Islam is the dominant religion, who are not even close to seeing the rightness of our rights, and the rightness of our defending these rights. Perhaps we have to help them get to this point, or at least respect and understand our position, but it’s going to take a long time. And if there is ever a chance of their being changed in this manner (for the better?) it will be in response to our making an effort in their behalf. In any case we lose nothing by that effort, for unlike Munich in 1938, there is in the case of the Cartoons no strategically valuable Sudetenland hanging in the balance. The other word, self-censorship, is just as misplaced, just as much of a Red Herring. We are told that Jyllands-Posten “dared to challenge the creeping self-censorhip that was undermining precious freedoms.” However, we haven’t yet seen examples of this loss of precious freedoms through self-censorship. Jasper Gerard in the Sunday Times of London, said “Islam is protected by an invisible blasphemy law that is called fear" the implication being that any self-censorship on our part came from our fear of retaliation. On the contrary, self-censorhip is much more a mark of civilized behavior. We do it all the time if we would live peaceably and happily with our families, with our neighbors, with our fellow countrymen, not to mention with those huge numbers of people living in other lands and immersed in other cultures. In general, self-censorship is simply another term for using the proper restraint in all our dealings with others, but especially when the others are not able to understand our point of view, especially in the instance before us. Muslims most of all adhere to the words and the life of the Prophet, or at least what they have understood of those words and that life. Westerners, Europeans, North Americans et al. adhere to the words of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in particular to the First Amendment to the US Constitution that says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." These different loyalties have created and continue to fuel the gap between the Muslim and Western worlds. All that we do should be aimed in good part at bridging that gap. On the other hand those cartoons, although trivial in themselves, have become the favored vehicle for promoting the destructive passions of the least gifted and least capable and intelligent players on both sides of what may yet turn out to be a war of civilizations. The cartoons should never have been printed. They were a mistake, and in that regard not too different from the Iraq War itself. Both the editors of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper and the proponents of the War wanted to promote the values of the West. They have in fact put these values at even greater risk than ever before.