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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, page 57 Music & Arts An Unembedded Journalist Speaks
INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST Dahr Jamail, author of the new book Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (available from the AET Book Club), spoke to a full room on Oct. 25 at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. For eight months in 2003, Jamail was the only unembedded American reporter covering the U.S. occupation of Iraq. His book is a record of the horror and brutality of that occupation, with a forward written by Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now.” Jamail painted a sad picture of the situation on the ground in Iraq back in 2003, as well as today. Recalling that he had been in Fallujah when the fighting began, he said that the U.S. had created a disinformation campaign concerning the whole affair. “The U.S. was not attacked,” he stated. He proceeded to read a passage from his book about his meeting in Baghdad with Dr. Womidh Nadhme, an Iraqi professor. “When I asked him what he thought about the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was the front line of the ‘War of terrorism and resistance,’ he replied, ‘Here, one would have to distinguish between terrorism and resistance. Terror was unseen here before the invasion. In Fallujah, it is not terrorism, it is resistance.’” When Jamail finished reading, Anas Shallal, the Iraqi American owner of Busboys, told this reporter that Nadhme was his mother’s cousin. During the question-and-answer period, Jamail invited Steve Connors, who is co-director, along with Molly Bingham, of the new film “Meeting Resistance,” to join him on stage. The film focuses on the lives of eight “insurgents” in Baghdad and the reasons and manner in which they resist the U.S. occupation. A woman in the audience told Connors that she had seen his film and was very impressed, but was concerned that the uninformed viewer would walk away from the film feeling that all Iraqis were nothing more than violent religious fanatics. In response, Connors repeated what the U.S. commander at Fallujah told his troops: “We have seen the face of the enemy, he is Satan.” To great applause, Connors asked, “Who is the religious fanatic?” Connors also pointed out that the West was trying to justify the conquering of Iraq, and does so by demonizing a 1,400-year-old religion. Asked if he would go back to Iraq today as an unembedded journalist, Jamail replied: “There are no Western unembedded journalists there now. It would be suicide.” —Jamal Najjab |
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