When writing truth is a crime

TIMIDITY and indifference are a lethal combination.

It was bad enough when, one after another, major American and Western European news organizations capitulated to violent Islamic extremists and refused to let their readers or viewers see any of the cartoons depicting Muhammad that have triggered what amounts to a pogrom against Danes and other Westerners across the Muslim world. This craven abrogation of the standards by which news judgments normally are made was matched by the cringing, minor-key response that passed for diplomacy on the part of Washington and most of the European governments.

The Western news media’s stampede for safety has created quite a draft, and left to swing in the wind are the courageous Arab journalists who printed some of the cartoons in connection with stories and editorials denouncing the violence.

To its credit, the New York Times this week reported that 11 journalists in five Mideastern countries now are facing prosecution for fully reporting this story. One of them is Jihad Momani. The government of the U.S.’s close ally, Jordan, thinks he committed a crime when he wrote:

“What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?”

Truth inconveniences tyranny.

In Yemen, three journalists already are in jail and a fourth is a fugitive. A local imam says, “The government must execute them.” Their crime? Writing editorials that urged fellow Muslims to avoid violence and to accept an apology from the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons.

Eleven journalists facing prison, perhaps death, for the crime of publishing sense and where are the outraged editorials in American and European newspapers? Where are the letter-writing campaigns and protests on their behalf from their colleagues in the United States?

This indifferent silence is all of a piece with the way in which the major Western news organizations have treated the ongoing story of the Iraq war’s appalling toll on the journalists trying to inform the world about what’s going on there. That’s not to argue that the killing of reporters or cameramen is any more lamentable than the deaths of Iraqi civilians or the coalition’s servicemen and women. Still, as advocates for -- and beneficiaries of -- a free press, Western news organizations ought to take some responsibility for defending the principle that makes their service to society possible.

Dead journalists are free to do whatever it is that dead people do, but it certainly isn’t journalism.

IT isn’t as if the Western and, particularly, the American press haven’t reacted to the deaths and injuries of some of their colleagues in Iraq. When ABC anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameraman were badly wounded there, for example, there was so much wall-to-wall coverage you’d have thought somebody from Dubai had tried to buy a piece of an American port.

Consider the difference this week when three journalists working for the Dubai-based television news station Al-Arabiya were murdered while reporting from Samarra. Correspondent Atwar Bahjat, 30, cameraman Khaled Mahmoud al-Falahi, 39, and engineer Adnan Khairallah, 36, were shot dead by unidentified gunmen while trying to cover the destruction of the Golden Mosque. Bahjat, formerly a popular correspondent for the Al-Jazeera satellite network, was the seventh female journalist to die in Iraq since the American invasion.

The killings, which brought to seven the number of journalists killed in Iraq since Jan. 1, were strongly condemned by the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists and by Reporters Sans Frontieres, but barely noted in the American news media.

There’s an unpleasant reason for that. According to Reporters Sans Frontieres, 82 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the American-lead invasion began three years ago. Of all the foreign news organizations working there, al-Arabiya has suffered the heaviest losses. Six members of its staff have been murdered.

But the news organization that has suffered the heaviest losses isn’t based in the Gulf, London or New York. Its headquarters is in -- of all places -- Baghdad. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, 10 employees of al-Iraqiya television have been murdered.

Just imagine what would be happening on this country’s editorial pages and television stations if 10 correspondents from the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times or ABC or Fox News had been killed?

Similarly, of the 38 journalists kidnapped in Iraq since the war began, five were killed. Four were Iraqis and one was Italian. Every editorial page editor in America can tell you about Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter currently being held by insurgents somewhere in Iraq. Next time you meet one of these people, ask them to name one of the Iraqis who were murdered in similar circumstances.

IF 20th century journalism had patron saints, one surely was Albert Camus, who was forced to leave his native Algeria for writing in defense of his Muslim countrymen’s rights. In occupied France, he joined the underground Resistance newspaper, Combat, and a collection of his work from those desperate wartime years recently has been published. Among the many memorable things he wrote is this: “What is needed today are men who will speak up clearly and pay up personally.”

Is that not precisely what the dead and jailed journalists of the Arab world -- men and women -- now are doing?

Honoring their sacrifices through expressions of solidarity isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s the smart card to play.

The Muslim Arab world desperately needs change because without it there is no hope. Without at least some semblance of a free press there will be no change. Ignorance and hopelessness go hand in clammy hand. One of the grim lessons of these last few years is that a globalized world can no more contain ignorance and hopelessness than it can quarantine disease.

Arab journalists and their counterparts throughout the Muslim world willing to speak up at all deserve the full measure of their Western colleagues’ support not only because they are defending one of the fundamental principles that make a civil society possible, but also -- and most important -- because they are agents of transformative hope.

The jihadis, who have more to fear from hope than they do from all our weapons, know this, and so they kill independent Muslim journalists. The corrupt and sclerotic regimes in power across the Middle East who fear change more than hell know this, so they throw independent editors and reporters into prison.

Western journalism’s institutional silence in the face of these outrages is neither wise nor prudent. It is cowardly and, ultimately, self-destructive.

In another wartime, Kenneth Patchen described what’s really at stake in this moment when he wrote:

People who have nothing to live for

Always find something to die for

And then they want you to die for it, too.