With years of reporting from outside the US, men and women sophisticated in world affairs speak knowingly On Air: ethnicity, beliefs, culture, politics and the way of the Muslims

IN HAWAII, at the East-West Centre, journalists from South and South-East Asia dialogue with their US counterparts on Islam and terrorism, and, of course, why America and the rest of the world is not on the same page.

Pleasantly surprising is the sensitivity flowing from senior editors and writers working at The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Seattle Times. With years of reporting from outside the US, these men and women, sophisticated in world affairs, speak knowingly on ethnicity, beliefs, culture, politics and the way of the Muslims all over.

Howard French, the New York Times Shanghai Bureau Chief empathizes with the humiliation Muslims faced in America after 9/11. As an African-American, he well remembers how, “I first became aware of the power of hatred as an 11-year-old boy, in the late 1960s in the state of Virginia”, where he alone with his brother and sister were ordered out of the public swimming pool for being “niggers”. He says, “I felt an eternity of pain and of hate and the experience is as fresh today as it has ever been.”

In the liberal Boston suburb, where Howard spent his teenage years, “white parents refused to allow their daughters to date me because of my race.”

Both his children have since experienced incidents of racism, “but my overall sense of things is one of positive evolution towards far less virulent discrimination and hatred.”

Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune gives a moving account of the shattered dreams of Afghan women: “Living with war makes them numb...tragedies are everyday here...tears do not come easy...it is difficult enough to rebuild a broken infrastructure.

“How do you fix people?” She asks.

Kim is a hardened reporter. Still, at the same time, she’s a woman and her voice shows emotion as she describes her encounters with women in Kabul. One can feel for Kim. It is but universal to be deeply touched by the helpless misery of other fellow humans, specially women and children.

Men are different animals, would you not say? Most are oblivious to the intrinsic pain and suffering of women, or at best are peripherally drawn to their issues.

At the Seattle Times, admits editor Jim Simon, “We have no Muslim reporters”, and while his paper has been criticized for portraying Islam as a violent religion because of its aggressive reporting of locals linked with terrorist groups, “We soon realized that the traditional role of investigating news developments and vetting controversial issues wasn’t adequate to covering stories...we found that readers had a huge hunger for basic information about Muslim culture — the kind of material newspapers usually aren’t very good at producing.”

So the Seattle Times has been in the forefront, educating Americans on Islam, “We even distributed these primers at schools and drugstores.”

David Lamb of The Los Angeles Times, delightfully seasoned in Islamic contours and currently based in Washington DC, says that Bush has “surrounded himself with such pro-Israeli, ultra-conservatives Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams — that an even-handed US policy in the Middle East is impossible.

“As mainstream journalists, those of us who understand a bit of Islam have failed to educate our readers and viewers about Islam. We have failed to make the distinction between the “moderate” majority and the “extremist” minority. We have inadequately explained the reasons many Muslims are disillusioned with the United States. And that is our challenge as journalists as the world passes through a perilous moment in its history.”

While these journalists know why America is hated so much, answers from Indian and Pakistani journalists on their historical hatred of each other are studiously left lurking at the media moot in Hawaii. The undertones, mind you, are there!

Back in New York at the UN, Pervez Musharraf steals the show from his Indian adversary, Vajpayee, who tries to make his case wherever he can manage to get invited. His pet delivery lines are Pakistan-trashing — as is to be expected. Our General-in-Chief, dapper and dauntless nonetheless, speaks a language that leaves little room for doubt. Emboldened perhaps by Bush back-patting, Musharraf’s love affair with the western press, although jaded a bit, shows no signs of tastelessness. The NYT, unabashedly carries his pictures every other day, while Mr V’s visage is conspicuous by its absence.

Eating his heart out is one Indian journalist (can’t name him) who, in his off-the-cuff remarks, takes a swing at Musharraf’s “centre-parted hairpiece (dark this time — switches to henna for exclusively Muslim audiences),” and his “verbose peak” saying that, “facts have never stood in the way of his (Musharraf’s) declamations...that Pakistan has nothing at all to do with cross-border terrorism; that he is really a democrat; and that indeed, the system in Pakistan now is more democratic than at any time in its history.”

Musharraf’s ripostes get better: On Vajpayee’s refusal to meet him, he tells his audience in the UN, “I reject anyone who does not want to meet me!”

While Howard at The NYT may have left his demons behind (he tells us how when he was approached by a colleague at Times, soliciting blood donations. “While I was filling out the forms, signalling my assent, he suddenly blurted out: ‘No, we had better not take your blood. Your wife is African.’... the point being that we were probably contaminated with AIDS.”) the Bushies continue to hound Muslims, specially Pakistanis.

“I am not going to vote for Bush again,” says a Pakistani American who was put into “secondary questioning” by the immigration officials when he arrived back from Pakistan. Worse treatment was meted out to yet another Pakistani arriving on a PIA flight at JFK. “I was insulted by a white man in his early 20s who interrogated me in a separate room, ordering me to leave my hand-baggage outside (anything could have happened to my stuff). He taunted me for getting married in the US despite knowing that she is not even a green card holder, and wanted me to produce my wife’s photo (we Pakistanis don’t carry photos of our spouses and kids as Americans like doing). He tried to provoke me by asking all kinds of trivial questions about my family. I tried not to get worked up, knowing that I’ll be sent back on the next plane!”

While the Irish and other white passengers breezed through the US Immigration & Customs, the Pakistanis and blacks from Haiti and Guyana were grilled for hours. “Take off your cap!” barked the same immigration officer, “nobody wears a cap in my office”, terrorizing a black hauled up for secondary questioning. His sole crime apart from the colour of skin? His looks in the eyes of the beholder (the nasty immigration officer) did not match those in his passport!

How stupid is that?

Hundreds of people pass through the friendly portals of Honolulu’s East-West Centre (EWC). A grand edifice dedicated to building bridges between America and Asia, the EWC, brainchild of the US Congress, was born 43 years ago. While it has facilitated a frank dialogue between America and the rest and hopefully arrived at a realistic conclusion, the Bush administration still struggles for answers.

Yeah, go figure out is all one can say.