NYT Reporter Anthony Shadid Missing in Libya

Shadid at Brown University, April 2010 [photo credit: AP] Shadid at Brown University, April 2010 [photo credit: AP]

NYT Reporter Anthony Shadid Missing in Libya

By : Shiva Balaghi

[UPDATED March 21: The NYT announced that the Libyan government has released all four reporters, who are reportedly on their way home. Reports indicate the Turkish government played a key role in negotiating their freedom.]

[UPDATED March 18: In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC, Saif Qadaffi said that the NYT reporters had been detained and were in Tripoli. The NYT announced that they believed the reporters would be released on Friday. We still await official word of their release.]

“Weeks before the war started, I had promised myself that I would stay in Baghdad through the conflict, whatever the circumstances,” wrote NYT reporter Anthony Shadid in July 2010. One of the few unembedded American journalists fluent in Arabic covering Iraq, Shadid shed light on the humanitarian devastation of the war. “I didn’t want the Pentagon to write this story like a screenplay, with expert scene-setting, and the temptation, irresistible in conflict, to manipulate reality... Readers needed to understand how American weapons were fired but just as importantly, where our bombs landed. This war, from the American perspective, might have had democratic aims, but it was still war, horrific – a panorama of terror and grief.”

Shadid didn’t set out to be a war reporter. An Arab-American from Oklahoma, he trained seriously to be a journalist of the Middle East—studying Arabic at CASA and journalism at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. For the AP, Shadid reported from Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. Commenting on Shadid’s first book, Legacy of the Prophet, the late scholar Edward Said wrote, “In the reductive and bellicose sensationalism that has disfigured the general American awareness of Islam, [Shadid’s] work is a stirring exception.” Shadid interviews political activists and leaders, but he also gets the story by riding on a motorbike through Cairo’s slums with garbage collectors, by sitting around campfires with Taliban, by listening to Arab intellectuals recite poetry to help explain their world. His reporting on the contemporary Arab world matches—and often surpasses—the very best scholarship being written by leading academics at top universities.

At the Boston Globe, Shadid became a global reporter of sorts, since his beat was the Islamic world. In 2002, he interviewed Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah compound. Wearing a bullet proof vest clearly marked “press” and walking in the middle of the street in the light of day with his handler, Anthony was shot in the shoulder. He told me later that as he lay on the ground, watching his own blood pour out of him, his thoughts were only of his daughter whom he longed to see again.

Not long after he began working with the Washington Post, Shadid started covering the US war on Iraq; his base was a small hotel room in the Palestine Hotel. As I wrote my biography of Saddam Hussein, I culled Shadid’s articles on Iraq as one of the best sources available. Together with the writings of Iraqi poet and novelist Sinan Antoon, Shadid’s writings brought the country to life for me. In 2004, Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

I last saw my friend Anthony in April 2010, when he came to Brown University to speak on Iraq and Lebanon. He couldn’t stop smiling and his eyes fluttered with sheer joy. The day before, his lovely wife Nada had given birth to their son Malik. That morning, he got a call letting him know he’d won his second Pulitzer.

When there is news in the Middle East, my natural inclination is to look for an Anthony Shadid byline. Last month from Egypt, he didn’t just write from Tahrir the day Mubarak left, he gave us the view from the working class neighborhood of Imbaba. And he didn’t just cover Libya from Benghazi. On Tuesday, he was reporting from the western edge of Ajdabiya. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer also missing, said last week that the fighting in Libya was the worst he’d seen; Hicks has covered Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya. Tuesday, as the area they were reporting from came under bombardment, Anthony ran for his car. The Libyan driver Mohammed tried to take Shadid, Hicks, and two other NYT journalists to safety.

Their fate remains unclear, their whereabouts uknown.

Anthony would be the first to tell us we should be concerned for the Libyans being killed by Qadaffi’s forces; for the Egyptians struggling to create a new constitution; for the Iranian, Iraqi, and Bahraini protestors risking their lives for more freedom. As Anthony’s friends and colleagues, we follow and support the struggles of the brave people across the Middle East. But we also pray that he will soon be celebrating Malik’s first birthday with his wife, Nada. 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412