Worth watching?

Relevance of Zero Dark Thirty       Every fall semester includes a class that is within days of the anniversary of the massacre of 9/11/2001. One of the first questions my class is asked to answer is an emphatic WHY? Most are honest enough to answer with blank expressions. Others either guess or insist that American actions provoked the attack.

We spend the next two weeks uncovering the real reasons. After watching Zero Dark Thirty, I’m hopeful many more will want to do the necessary research. That movie offers a place to begin. Quotes from bin Laden may attract more attention; if so, closer scrutiny may follow.

However, understanding Osama’s words requires a Rosetta stone. The quote that follows was taken from Osama bin Laden - Biography Osama bin Laden was the criminal mastermind behind Al-Qaida ... www.imdb.com/name/nm1136915/bio -.  “I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11th attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle…”

As straightforward as this may appear, it is actually doublespeak, deception used as a tool of war. In Islam, the world is divided into the innocents, the believers of Dar al Islam, comprised of Muslims, and everyone else, non-believers, kuffar or infidels who belong to Dar al Harb, the world of war.  No one in the latter, Dar al Harb, is, by definition (since they are non-believers in Allah and Mohammed as the final prophet) is considered innocent.

That’s why, in an ideal world, jihad for the sake of Allah would successfully convert all of Dar al Harb to Dar al Islam. By grasping that core idea, it is easier to understand the imperial orientation of Islam. Non-Muslims must be confronted; they must be offered three choices. The first is to convert to Islam so that their misdeeds as kuffar will be forgiven instantly.

The second choice is much less appealing (if the first can be considered that). Non-Muslims can accept dhimmi status, i.e., can acknowledge that they are second class, (part of Dar al Harb) and that they must pay a poll tax or jizya to live under the protection of those who are part of Dar al Islam. Not accepting that status and its servile restraints leads to the third choice. Simply put, that’s war.

Regarding the first choice, examine this:

Osama bin Laden tells US to convert to Islam - Telegraph

Osama bin Laden has urged Americans to convert to Islam in the first video message from the al-Qa'eda leader for three years, but issued no clear threat of attack as ...

www.telegraph.co.uk/.../1562536/Osama-bin-Laden...Islam.html

You’ll find:

…Bin Laden addresses the American people directly, saying: "I invite you to embrace Islam"  [my emphasis] in order to achieve their "desire to stop the war" in Iraq and show "warmongering" major corporations that you have lost confidence in your democratic system".

Following the example of Mohammed, Osama reveals that his original claim that he had “…no knowledge of these attacks…” was false [please see the quote at the beginning of this piece]; he employed taqqiyah, deception, regarding 9/11 :

Bin Laden Claims Responsibility for 9/11 - Fox News ...

Bin Laden Claims Responsibility for 9/11. Published ... bin Laden said he wanted to explain why...www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137095,00.html

Targeting Osama was essential; his was an unpardonable crime. However, those who admired and praised him saw [and see] him as a martyr who had ascended to paradise since he was killed while waging jihad against infidels. [please see Surah 9:111 in the Koran] Muslims revered him for that.

One of my students, son of a Pakistani immigrant, spoke to me in distress the morning after bin Laden was killed. His father, a Muslim who was now an American, didn’t know how to feel about bin Ladin’s death. Although Osama had killed thousands, Osama was still a Muslim. And, according to my student, his father didn’t know whether he should be thankful for Osama’s death.

To find an answer, my student’s father called a relative in Pakistan. [Throughout Pakistan, population centers range from 95.3% Muslim to 99.6% Muslim; please see PAKISTAN - CENSUS POPULATION BY RELIGION ... Hindu: Qadiani: Scheduled: Others Unit (Jati) (Ahmadi) Castes : Pakistan: 96.28: 1.59: 1.60: 0.22: 0.25: 0.07: Rural: 96.49: 1.10: 1.80: 0.18: 0.34: 0.08:www.census.gov.pk/Religion.htm - ] I’m not sure what advice the relative in Pakistan provided. I haven’t seen my former student since then.

However, after seeing Zero Dark Thirty, I wonder what the father of my student might think if he sees that movie. Chances are that his reaction would underscore its relevance.

                       

                                                    B. Koplen 1/15/13

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Civil Rights, up close and personal

The rest of the story   Months ago, I gave a copy of my book, No Gold Stars, to one of my Mom’s most competent and caring sitters, Betty. Because she works at least two jobs, I doubted she would find time to read it. For almost six months, I’d ask her about that. “I just haven’t had time,” she’d tell me. “But I will,” she’d insist.

But she never did. That’s why I offered to read it to my mother and her. Although I knew my reading would require fifteen to twenty days to complete, I knew the time would pass quickly because Betty, a black woman from Danville, is the same age my students (in the book) would have been now. I reasoned that memories I would stir in her with my reading  might be profoundly important and probably painful. As my readings continued, that proved to be true for both of us.

No Gold Stars is based on my memoir of my first teaching experience. In Greenville, SC, in the fall of 1968, I integrated that city’s school system. The school was Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.’s alma mater, Sterling Jr.-Sr. High. I was the only white person in the school.

“I met Rev. Jackson,” I told Betty, “when he was here for President Obama’s first campaign. I told him about the book and sent him a rough draft. He signed a testimonial; it’s on the back cover.”

I told Betty that because I wanted to remind her that my book was a true story about the Civil Rights era, near the end of its darkest days. That explained Rev. Jackson’s interest. I’d hoped, that by telling Betty about him, she would be more involved in the reading.

She was. From the start, she identified with my students in their segregated, but for me, environment. She told of living conditions that would have terrified me. As a child, she lived with her family in a tiny rental home owned by a negligent landlord. “Rats would come through holes in the wall near the floor when I was taking a bath,” she told me. “It was scary, but the owner wouldn’t fix it,” she said.

When I asked where the home was, she was reluctant to say. “I’ve never taken anyone there to see it. I have such bad memories.” Her voice trailed off.

I couldn’t tell whether she was crying. As I read about the outdated textbooks I’d refused to use, she recalled the tattered books she’d been given.

At the chapter about taking my students to the “public” library for their first time, she winced. She remembered not being allowed to go to ours.

She talked about having to go to the back of the city buses, about menial jobs her relatives had to take. None others were available to them.

At times, while reading, I would get tearful. My memories, too, were that searing. When it seemed I couldn’t read another line, Betty would quietly get up to pour a glass of water for me. Time and again, her kindness helped me through the hard parts.

Always, when I finished, I would listen to her stories, so important yet hard for her to tell.

“When my husband and I were first married,” she said in her honest and genteel manner, “we lived in a trailer court. Everyone there but us were white. At night, we would hear things hit our trailer. Drink bottles. Beer cans. People would call us niggers, would tell us to leave.”

I grimaced at hearing her story, felt like cheering when I heard that they got away from that trailer park.

Last night, I finished the book. I sensed that Betty didn’t want it to end. I wondered how many more stories she might have told had there been more chapters to read. That’s why I told her that I’m working on its sequel.

“Another book?!” she exclaimed more than asked. She wanted me to read that one too. Its story will be a lot like No Gold Stars. Its setting is St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. My students were wonderful kids, the same ages as those I taught in Greenville.

Many were just like Betty. That good, that kind. I’m sure she’ll ask about my progress. For me, they’ll be no better reason to finish it than that.

                                                                 B. Koplen 1/10/13

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Do you own one?

Guns for sale!   Gene was an old friend, a bright, sardonic, and crazy old friend. Twice, he’d spent time living as a homeless man on the streets of Manhattan. When I questioned him about it, he told me he’d never felt more at peace. Married with young children, he always returned home. His unique loyalty to his family caused me to believe him to be sane in a distinctively different way. I suppose that’s why I wasn’t surprised when he made a profoundly important request.

“Barry, I want you to kill me,” he said, in a voice he could have used to thank someone for selling him a loaf of bread. “I’ve got the gun.”

I shrugged as I might at a friend who’d tried to make a prank call by disguising his voice unsuccessfully. “You’re kidding,” I said without actually saying it and left him. That was 35 years ago.

In all that time, I’ve neither shot nor owned a gun. But I know and respect many people who possess and shoot guns. Not one has committed a crime; very few have bullets enough to go to a firing range. Still, they are deeply concerned about laws that would curtail their legal ownership of guns.

They believe in being able to protect themselves; self-defense is their motivation. Licensed and registered, the people I know are not the ones who are looking for trouble. Indeed, none are members of gangs that seek to rob and rape and plunder.

That said, I did wonder about the gun owners I didn’t know. Indeed, I questioned what I’d find at gun shows and the kind of people who paid to attend them. Since I’d never been to one, I couldn’t answer those who thought gun shows were part of the problem. After all, weren’t people outraged to hear that a gun show was being held not far from the Sandy Hook massacre and not many days after?

This past Sunday, while in Winston-Salem, across the street from Wake Forest’s baseball park (well, the B, B, & T Field), I attended my first gun show. Immediately, I was pleased to see that no one charged for parking. No one directed me to park in a certain area. Outside, there were no vendors hawking their wares, no bands playing country rock or blue grass. Indeed, the only greeters were a dozen or so quiet protestors who had posters that suggested we needed to try loving embraces rather than firearms.

“Do you have a flyer?” I asked a friendly, older man who may have been a leader.

“No,” he answered, “just these,” he said, as he pointed to the group’s signs. “Are you going inside?” he asked, as if he wondered whether I might be one of them.

“Gathering data,” I responded, “for my Controversial Issues class at our Community College. I’ve got to be able to talk about both sides,” I said with a smile.

He seemed to like my answer. “Be careful,” he warned me.

I was. I almost walked into one of the gun owners. Although it was my fault, he apologized. Maybe, I thought, he was a non-dangerous one. A few steps later, I paid for my $8 ticket.

Just beyond that was the concrete patio in the front of what could have served as a hanger for small planes or an air raid shelter. As I crossed it, I saw a group of men talking and smoking. Their topic was the danger of guns, specifically of not owning them.

One was quietly vehement. “Before the Sandy Hook shooting, there was a brutal massacre in Japan. The guy used knives. Did you hear about it?”

[8 Children Dead in Japanese School Stabbing - ABC News 8 Children Dead in Japanese School Stabbing. Hot Topics: ... Although the Japanese crime rate is much lower than in the United States, ...abcnews.go.com/International/Story?id=80964&page=1]

I didn’t, but, regardless, his point was that knives and guns aren’t the problems. Insanity and rage and those with a vested interest in murdering people are. As the man continued his lecture, he mentioned recent incidents where gun owners, just regular people who were carrying their guns, had been able to stop criminals while they were committing crimes.

Then I walked inside. Immediately, I was asked to fill out a form for a door prize. There were as many food vendors as ammo dealers. Guns and rifles for sale were locked and secured by metal wires; there was no target shooting. There was no loud music.

Families were there. No one was rowdy; I didn’t see a single inflammatory t-shirt; no one was on a stump preaching hate. Although there were no targets with President Obama’s picture, there was one with Osama’s.

Men were talking about nomenclature, about rifle specifics that were highly detailed and of little interest to me. Many guns and rifles were museum pieces priced at thousands of dollars. Gold and silver coins were available too. One vendor crafted signs that served as outdoor memorials. I asked for his card, then walked on; I passed a table with camo cloth bullet proof vests.

They too were tied down. What I didn’t see were gangs and mafia thugs and people who were acting out as if they’d skipped their meds. People I saw reminded me of the volunteer firemen and women who lived near my home when I built my house seven miles outside the city limits.

They didn’t remind me of the meek protestors who’d warned me about going inside the gun show. I thought about that when I saw the headline in the Danville paper a day later.

“Son charged in Dad’s Slaying,” it read. Below it was the picture of a 31- year-old man who we had waited on for years. In fact, I’d helped him about two weeks before he was charged with “…first degree murder in the Thursday stabbing death of his father.”

Both he and his 64-year-old father wore very big sizes. One of my salesmen suggested that the father may have gotten his son to stab him. After I thought about that, I realized that, if the father’s condition was terminal, the time may have come for him to provide for his son after he died. It might have been that the stabbing helped achieve that since the son wouldn’t be found to be mentally competent. He would be cared for by our prison system for the rest of his life.

I wished I had seen that story before attending the gun show. I would have asked the protestors and the gun owners to talk about knives and knife control laws. After all, I’d seen some sharp and deadly looking doozies on tables at the gun show.

                                    B.Koplen 1/8/13

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                 http://poetscry-bkop.blogspot.com/

A question your parent would ask...

But is it news?      Frequently, I write about America’s left/right divide. With almost alarming predictability, I can anticipate readers’ reactions. About the same piece, one side condemns me while the other praises my perception. With good reason, as long as both responses are civil and well researched, I appreciate both. You may wonder why.

The answer is that I seek truth. Always have and always will. My aim has never been to manipulate although some insist I’m doing just that because of stories I choose to write about (or the ones that seem to choose me).

Some dispute my sources and the clarity of their intent. Am I careful enough to decipher the line between PR and honest reporting? Do I announce my agenda as it influences what I write? Over time, I’ve tried to become more and more transparent about that.

Of course, that makes me suspicious about reporters like Isabel Kershner of the New York Times [Isabel Kershner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Isabel Kershner is a journalist and author who began reporting from Jerusalem for The New York Times in 2007. Previously, Kershner was Senior Editor, Middle East, The ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Kershner

                                                and

Isabel Kershner :: News Transparency  Articles about the work of Isabel Kershner. New York Times Sees 'Sad Irony' in Terrorists Killing Terrorist Sympathizer camera.org.

www.newstransparency.com/person/925/isabel-kershner -] and her frequent collaborator, Ethan Bronner [NYTimes Ethan Bronner Files One More Sympathy Card for the ...

Departing New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner filed Thursday's off-lead front-page story from the West Bank town of Ramallah, passing on yet another ...

newsbusters.org/blogs/clay-waters/2012/03/09/nytimes-ethan-bronner..] and his replacement, Jodi Rudoren [Ethan Bronner | The Jewish Week

She has yet to write a word from Israel, but already the appointment of Jodi Rudoren to succeed Ethan Bronner as the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, is ...

www.thejewishweek.com/ethan_bronner].

How that trio fails to report the U.N. bias against Israel baffles me as much as their determination to promote a Palestinian agenda. “Tell it all!” I want to demand, the entire story. “Provide a reliable perspective!”

In a nutshell, that’s the crux. Encourage readers to investigate and corroborate stories and their sources rather than doing that for them. Surround truth; it’s known to be slippery and murky and malleable. Getting to it journalistically is essential, yet absolutely challenging when it’s time to divest truth from a narrative that attempts to shape it.

Doing that can be messy business. That’s why I attended Duke University’s Palestinian Solidarity Movement’s Conference as a participant, inside, rather than as a protester outside. Heralded as a gathering that would promote dialogue, the conference generated little of that. Still, inside, I listened, and, as a participant, gathered the material the PSM handed out to their supporters and to me, a non card-carrying reporter of sorts.

What I found, in the notebook of workshops offered on Saturday, was one that taught about how to take over any university newspaper for the purpose of converting it into a source of propaganda. The workshop served a purpose; it taught how to promote a biased view. Protesters outside were neither informed about the workshops nor invited to attend.

( Please see:

Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference Speakers Attack ...
Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference Speakers Attack Israel ... a sophomore at Duke University's Trinity College, wrote a column for The Chronicel, ...
www.adl.org/Israel/psm_duke.asp -

Duke News & Communications | Palestine Solidarity Movement ...
PSM Home Conference Q&A –Conference organizers –Conference details –Duke and the conference –Security –Past PSM conferences : The Palestine Solidarity ...
today.duke.edu/showcase/mmedia/features/psm/concert.html -

Duke News & Communications | Duke Focus On Middle East Conflict
Site Home Resources –Duke's Palestine Solidarity Movement site offers information about the conference and its organizers...
today.duke.edu/.../mmedia/features/mideast/postpsm_0505.html)

Noisemakers on both sides put on a show. Truth was there to be found and garbed; Israel was demonized, on the inside, by unchallenged speakers. Dialogue didn’t stand a chance.

That was more than eight years ago, in October, 2004. Since then, the left/right divide has become a chasm. Reportorial truth is no less elusive. Pointing to it seems to be the best that much of our media can or is willing to do. One story in particular confirms, for me, that each of us must do the grunt work of getting at truth’s core.

Here’s that story from the January 3, 2013 New York Times:

BUSINESS: MEDIA DECODER BLOG

Al Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where Gore Failed

By BRIAN STELTER

Al Gore's low-rated cable channel will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms.

                                      

                                                B. Koplen 1/3/13

                                               

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