Writing wrongs: An Arab journalist in post-9/11Europe – #25YearsAJournalist
In the third part of the #25YearsAJournalist series, Khaled Diab recounts the challenge of establishing himself as a journalist in Europe in the immediate wake of the11 September 2001 (9/11) terrorism attacks in the United States.
Until we were up in the air, my conviction that we would successfully make it out of Egypt was suspended in midair. Once the plane was airborne, I was able to relax and look forward to the new chapter in our life that was about to start in Europe.
Beyond departing Egypt, we did not have a clear idea of what we would do in Belgium or even how long we would stay there. Looking back now, I realise I must have possessed quite some reserves of audacity and self-confidence: not only had I given up a good job at one of the world’s most prestigious news agencies, I also had faith that I could re-establish myself in an environment with which I was unfamiliar, where very few with my background had gone before and with no connections or clear game plan.
We spent the first few weeks during the summer of 2001 finding our feet. By the end of September, Katleen and I were married and had rented a flat in central Brussels, wedged between the historic quarter and an immigrant-heavy neighbourhood, with a larger Moroccan population, as well as remnants of pockets of previous waves of Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese. We also lived near in an area popular with Flemish Belgians in predominantly Francophone Brussels.
Although I have discovered that achievements look smaller and less significant in hindsight, establishing myself as a journalist in Europe was no minor feat, I realise now as I look back on that chapter of my life. I knew very little about Belgium and the European Union, had poor French and, at first, spoke no Dutch (though I took a crash intensive course during my first summer in Belgium).
To make up for these obvious gaps, I tried to wing it till I swing it. What I initially lacked in knowledge, I worked to make up for with my experience and skill. Luckily, I had built up a decent and varied journalistic portfolio in Egypt and the fact that I had worked for Reuters worked well in my favour.
There were also some key similarities between some parts of the media landscape in Brussels and that which I’d left behind in Cairo, such as the ‘expat’ publications and the international press corps. The relative dearth of skilled English-language journalists meant that these publications were not entirely impenetrable fortresses to the new kid in town. And, so, I went knocking on their doors, both physically and virtually.
One of my first ports of call was, logically and perhaps not so logically, Reuters. I received a friendly welcome but was told that they had no openings at present. I suspect the fact that I had just weeks earlier walked out of their bureau in Cairo may have also influenced their polite rebuttal of my advance.
I also knocked on the door of The Bulletin, Belgium’s most established English-language publication, where I met then editor Brigid Grauman, who was sufficiently impressed by my portfolio and pitches that I went on to become a regular freelance contributor.
As was becoming something of a pattern in my career at the time, my first piece for The Bulletin, and the first piece I had published in a Belgian media outlet was about Ramadan in Brussels. Even though I no longer fasted Ramadan and had abandoned every vestige of faith, my first fasting month in Belgium made me a little homesick. I missed the unique spirit of a Cairo Ramadan, with its inversion of day and night, the special Ramadan treats and goodies, the abandoned, deserted streets in the normally logjammed city during iftar, the hustle and bustle of old Cairo during the late night, the gatherings of family and friends.
Seismic shift
Just as Katleen and I were settling into life in Belgium, disaster struck. On 11 September 2001, a group of fanatics belonging to the al-Qaeda terrorist group turned four civilian aircraft into guided missiles that hit the World Trade Centre, struck the Pentagon, and one crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
That day, at first, appeared to be run of the mill but important for our future: we signed the contract for the flat that was to become our home for the next few years.
The footage of the attacks may have grown familiar with the years – though not necessarily for today’s teenagers – but at the time the images radiating around the globe from America were astounding and bewildering. We watched the looped footage of the planes crashing into the twin towers, the dust plumes rising from the WTC, the people leaping from the skyscrapers with a sense of shock and incomprehension.
The 9/11 attacks, as they became known in America, were to cast a long, indirect shadow over my newly (re-)established life in Europe and my subsequent career in the media. Although I was familiar with racism, having grown up in the London of the 1980s, back then, it was more about skin colour and being Arab, including the idea that I owned an oil well or came to school on a camel, and far less about religion, at least amongst fellow teenagers. However, that stereotype was gradually shifting as the Iranian revolution became more ingrained in public consciousness, as well as with the emergence of the mujahideen fighting Soviet Afghanistan and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Confusingly, I was also often called a ‘Paki’ by racists, even though my familiarity with Pakistan was not that much greater than theirs.
The association of Arabs with terrorism and fanaticism in the western mind was nothing new, of course, as painstakingly detailed in Jack Shaheen’s Reel bad Arabs. I had even written a column about the dangerous stereotypes surrounding Arabs, which was published in the spring of 2000, almost a year and a half before the al-Qaeda atrocity. But when I was younger the stereotype was more secular and less bloody. It was of the kuffiyeh-clad PLO hijacker which, after 9/11, was replaced by the image of the bearded jihadi terrorist.
In the United States and Europe, the fear stirred up by the al-Qaeda atrocities reawakened centuries-old distrust against Islam and Muslims and threatened decades of progress for tolerance and multiculturalism. Despite the expressions of outrage and sympathy, bigots, racists and opportunists dusted off and repackaged for the 21st century ancient prejudices about the religion and its followers to give their prejudices a sheen of legitimacy and respect.
This was made abundantly clear to me when, in the autumn of 2003, I went to visit Katleen in the United States, where she was doing an internship at a think tank and advocacy group based in Washington DC. Getting there required me to jump through extra bureaucratic hoops because of my birthplace (Tripoli, Libya) and my passport (Egyptian). This required me to submit an application at the US embassy in Brussels, which was sent to Washington for clearance. I also had to go through a boilerplate interview in which I was asked such probing question as whether I had ever worked for the Libyan government or armed force. “Not unless they employ three-year-olds,” was my smiling, sarcastic answer to the consular staff member asking the questions.
Even though I had received prior security clearance before my trip, this did not make entering the United States straighforward or simple. Upon arrival at Dulles airport, I was sent to a large, ill-lit hall somewhere deep in the bowels of the airport. There, I had to fill out a long and intrusive questionnaire which, among other things, asked me to list every address where I had lived and every phone number I’d had over the past decade. A rude officer then proceeded to go through my answers with me and finger-printed me in a new computer systems developed after 9/11.
Straddling worlds
As the two worlds of my upbringing threatened to spin further apart after this latest collision, I felt it was part of my mission as a journalist to do my bit to build greater understanding, counter misapprehensions and miscomprehensions, challenge untruths and, above all, present a more accurate picture of the reality I observed, socially, culturally and politically. This often involved exploring and mapping out the terra incognita that lay beyond mainstream stereotypes and prejudices, both in the “West” and the “East”.
This involved endeavouring to put faces on and give voices to groups who were often not seen or heard, or were mis-seen and misheard. This included the vilified and demonised “fifth columnists” and “enemies within”, western “Muslims” and so-called third culture individuals.
Although better integrated than their parents or grandparents, the second and third generation grappled with continued rejection by many segments of society and a profound identity crisis. This was certainly the case for Belgium’s Moroccan minority, who felt Moor or less Belgian. The fallout from the 9/11 attacks was, in one fell blow, threatening this decades-long integration process and setting back some of the relative advances that had been made. Young Belgians with a Muslim heritage were grappling with being caught in the crossfire as they stood in the no-man’s land between two civilisations supposedly at war – some found artistic expression for this sense of alienation.
In some ways, I suffered less from this identity crisis than many I encountered because I had not grown up in underprivileged circumstances in “ghettoes” that were feared and shunned by mainstream society. Moreover, my previous encounter with living in Europe was one in which the quotidien racism I encountered in London and the racist attacks I occasionally experienced were far outweighed by my wide circle of friends, my popularity and my academic success in school, which convinced me that I was no less capable or worthy than my white counterparts. In some ways, I also arrived in Belgium fully formed. I was already a journalist and, though still early in my career, I had built up enough confidence in my abilities not to be dissuaded by mainstream cultural stereotypes.
While these young people found themselves in this situation through accidents of birth, there were others who consciously and voluntarily chose to embrace Islam. I was intrigued by these converts who chose to embrace a faith I had abandoned and who opted to do so in a society that was increasingly hostile to it. I met several converts to understand what was behind their leap of faith, see what makes them tick, and how they were perceived and treated by society and other Muslims.
I had also not experienced the Belgian education system, which rarely encouraged these underprivileged children of migrants to aspire to anything beyond a technical education – though some were in the process at the time of smashing through glass ceilings.
These I investigated, too. One fascinating example was Belgium’s first and only Islamic undertaker at the time – who was anything but macabre. Prior to Jamal Ben Taher’s arrival on the funerary scene, Muslims in Belgium were buried by regular Christian undertakers and repatriation for those who wanted to be buried in their native or ancestral lands was difficult, especially given Islamic demands for rapid interment.
In addition, I endeavoured to profile the growing assertiveness of a new generation of activists which were causing a stir and which mainstream society was having trouble accepting.
This included the Arab European League, a militant civil rights organisation which (self-)consciously drew inspiration from Malcolm X and pan-Arabism, the latter due to the fact that they were, perhaps paradoxically, led not by a member of Belgium’s born and bred Arab/Muslim minority but by a relatively recent immigrant from Lebanon, Dyab Abu Jahjah. Although numbering only a thousand members by its own reckoning, the AEL was the subject of enormous controversy way beyond its size, to the extent that Abu Jahjah received death threats.
It is no surprise that such an openly militant civil rights group formed in polarised Antwerp, the stronghold of the far-right Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang). One of the AEL’s slogans (“Our people, too”) was even a response to Vlaams Blok’s exclusionary mantra, “Our people first”.
A sign of how far minorities have come in the intervening years, despite the normalisation of much of the far right’s platform, is that when I first moved to Belgium, it was hard to find any who had penetrated the mainstream. Now minorities are represented quite widely in politics, the media , music and culture, as I reflected in a recent essay.
Realpolitik and resisting typecasting
While the politics of much of my journalism at the time was implicit or secondary, focusing primarily on the socioeconomic and cultural, I didn’t shy away from explicit politics. However, finding outlets for my political writing was a tougher call, given the dearth of publications with a progressive viewpoint and the hardening and pretty hostile political and media atmosphere at the time.
My earliest opportunities to report on politics in Europe were with The European Voice, an Economist Group publication, and Expatica, a solely online publication (something that was very novel at the time) targeted at Anglophone foreigners living in Belgium. Although I was never a fan of The Economist‘s neoliberal ideological slant, I had previously respected the quality of its writing and reporting, even if I didn’t agree with all its political and economic viewpoints.
However, after 9/11, The Economist joined the clarion call of supporters of the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror and loudly beat the drums of battle and stirred the boiling cauldron of (imminent) conflict. A similar malaise afflicted most of the US mainstream media, most of which lent almost unqualified support to Dunya’s march towards disastrous war in the Middle East.
Fortunately, The European Voice did not take editorial guidance from its parent company and its editor, Dennis Abbot, gave me the space to report critically and most of the team of journalists working there were pretty progressive in their outlook.
Although I would later write for such US publications as The Washington Post and The New York Times, back then, I felt it would almost be a betrayal to justice to do so. The pro-war stances and the bigotry allowed onto the pages of the mainstream media made me unwilling to write for such outlets, except in the unlikely event that I would receive the space to counter their narrative of the time.
Moreover, there was limited and narrowing space for critical stances. If I had really wanted to, I could have set myself up a cushy gig pandering to bigotry and prejudice, as some opportunists at the time did, and tell anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant audiences exactly what they wanted to hear, such as the pro-war apologist for US hegemony Fareed Zakaria or anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conservative Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
But I was not ready to sell my soul for the sake of popularity with the powerful. In fact, the warped politics of the time made me ever more determined to stand my ground and maintain the independence of my voice.
My first forays into reporting on Belgian and European Union politics marked a new departure for me. Though it took a lot of work for me to research these stories, given my previous lack of familiarity with the subject matter, I found the experience useful both professionally and personally. It not only helped educate me about my new surroundings but also helped me break through the looming possibility that I could become typecast as a journalist and limited only to reporting on and writing about the Middle East and minority issues in Europe.
I covered a broad range of themes, including the byzantine complexities of EU and Belgian politics, Euro-Med affairs, the environment, aviation, healthcare, trade, foreign relations, paedophile and serial killer Marc Dutroux’s “trial of the century”, not to mention several introductions to Belgium and its political landscape.
I still continued to write about minority issues, from controversial plans to ban the hijab to what I dubbed the mash of civilisations to counter the growing prevalence of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis’s “clash of civilisations” theories.
Freedom lances
I also wrote quite prolifically about the Middle East, in a futile bid to act as a counterbalance against the gathering storms lashing the region, sensing the alarm felt by millions around the world, including in Belgium, where I joined several anti-Iraq war protests and marches. I reported extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the lead up to and fallout of the US invasion of Iraq, opposition to Mubarak’s rule in Egypt, Libya’s international ostracisation, Turkey’s place in Europe, and much more.
At the time, I was satisfied with my status as a freelancer. I was receiving mostly a steady stream of work and the rates I was making were good enough to live off, though it was a vulnerable and volatile existence. However, it did grant me the freedom to pick and choose what I wrote about and relieved me of the need to tow an editorial line with which I did not agree.
However, in the summer of 2002, The European Voice offered me a temporary position on the staff after the departure of one of their reporters, with a view to making it permanent after a trial period. Although I had some misgivings about abandoning some of my independence, I had grown familiar enough with the team to know that I could join them with a clean conscience. It would also potentially mean a steady paycheque instead of the need to constantly pitch and hustle to get by.
The cover period went smoothly. I worked well with the team and there was mutual appreciation between my colleagues and I. In addition, I had proven my ability, drawing on my former news agency experience, to handle the workload and work to tight deadlines. We all fully expected that I would be offered the permanent post but when the time came around I learnt that the job had been offered to a female journalist.
Dennis explained the rationale behind the decision: the team of journalists at the Voice were all men and so it was time to have a woman join the team. While I was all for gender diversity, this decision did mean that the editorial team was all white again. Here was a perfect example of how one form of empowerment could come at the expense of another.
At the time, I was quite sorely disappointed. This was not because somebody else had been hired but because I had been misled, through numerous hints, into thinking that the cover period was kind of like a probationary period for the actual job. And I had more than proven myself capable of handling it. It felt a bit like I had been duped into helping the newspaper out of a bind and that I was being unceremoniously ditched now that the crisis was over.
I was eventually able to put the experience into perspective. Had I taken the job, I may have been stuck reporting on dull EU affairs to a niche audience forever.
Ghostly transformations
Image: ©Khaled Diab
In the wake of this decision, I pursued two simultaneous paths: trying to expand my freelance activities and applying for appropriate journalism jobs. I applied for a few positions back in the Middle East, but only with outlets I would feel comfortable working with, which was very few. I also applied for a few positions in war-torn Iraq, but only with independent outlets and not with anything associated with the United States government or which had a pro-war editorial position.
Back then, the job of foreign correspondent was still mostly a game for white people and the few minorities making inroads were often born and raised in the West and possessed a western passport. But there were a growing number of exceptions. At the time, I only had an Egyptian passport, which hurt my chances of getting a job anywhere but in Egypt because of the complexity any prospective employer would face in acquiring a work permit for me.
Given the paucity of media positions in outlets that I would feel comfortable working for and my failure to widen my freelance net sufficiently, I also began applying for jobs in related sectors.
One thing I uncovered in the “Brussels bubble” job market of the time was its unspoken bias. I never heard back from numerous employers with job openings for which I felt I was eminently qualified and experienced. I occasionally joked about experimenting with applying for jobs under the pseudonym of Karl Diaz to see if it made a difference to my success rate – but I never did attempt this.
After a while more of eking out an existence as a freelancer, I ended up, with mixed feelings, plonking for greater financial security by making the sideways leap into communications, while continuing to freelance in journalism as a side gig.
I joined a Brussels-based communications company called ESN. I learnt later from one of the colleagues who assessed my test that I was the only candidate that managed to complete the task and to do so with flare. I feel grateful for my boss of the time, Cecilia Baker, for taking a gamble on someone who was not a typical candidate for a Brussels comms job and who did not yet have a great depth of knowledge of the EU’s machinery.
There was also a convivial spirit around the comms department, where I was the youngest writer and editor for most of my time at ESN, with lots of banter, humour and cooperation. Quite a few of my colleagues were, like me, part-time or former journalists and authors. One of my colleagues, Christian Nielsen, even became a frequent contributor to the website I would later launch.
The comms work I did had a fair amount in common with journalism. Some of it was straight up reporting or article writing, albeit for European Commission news services or publications, rather than for a news agency or newspaper. I did not have ethical qualms about this work because, though it used the style of journalism, it was clear that it represented the views of the European Commission. In addition, the work I did was anonymous and did not carry my byline and I was, overall, a supporter of the European integration project. In addition to writing, a big and increasing part of my job was editing, as well as conceptualising publications and providing comms advice to our EU and academic clients, some of whom were quite clueless on the subject.
During my years at ESN, I learnt to turn my hand to writing about subjects which I would never normally have touched and which I, at least initially, didn’t possess much prior knowledge about. One of my gigs became that of a science writer. With time, I learnt how to transform complex scientific or dull technical material into interesting and readable content for a more general audience. I even provided training to scientists and researchers in how to communicate effectively and engagingly about their fields.
Closer to my experience and knowledge, I also communicated about development issues and the EU’s policies with its neighbouring regions, especially the southern and eastern Mediterranean, and in Africa.
My job at ESN often lacked the excitement of actual journalism and involved significant anonymity. I was quite literally a ghost, as in a ghost writer. But I did get to travel to countries and places I would probably never have chosen as a travel destination or been sent to in my former career as a journalist, such as CERN when it was inaugurating its Large Hadron Collider and the European Space Agency. I also got to travel to some interesting countries I’d never been to and weren’t high, at the time, on my list of ‘must visit’, such as Ukraine, Georgia and Slovenia.
In addition, I learnt a lot about the architecture and machinery of the EU and got plenty of practice in writing about a wide array of topics I had previously not covered. The editing skills I picked up there also proved useful to my own writing and indispensable to my future (self-)publishing endeavours.
Carving out new space
Although I was sometimes frustrated by the limited time I had for my own writing and journalism, one advantage of having a comms job was that I had the headspace and luxury to be more selective and targeted in my journalism and writing.
I not only wrote fiction (most of which remains unpublished), I continued to contribute to the publications I already freelanced with, but more selectively. I also began to expand my net further afield by reaching out to editors in various countries. And slowly but surely other publications began to bite. These included The Globe and Mail in Canada and Al Ahram Weekly in Egypt.
I even managed to publish an article in Al Ahram about the culture of denial surrounding homosexuality in Egypt on the fifth anniversary of the Queen Boat affair, which had haunted me ever since because I had been unable, despite my repeated efforts, to write about it shortly before I left Egypt. This suggested the tide was turning on the issue of sexuality. This was even more spectacularly demonstrated a few years ago with the release of In the Spider’s Den (2016) by Mohamed Abdel-Nabi, a novel which fictionalised the Queen Boat debacle and was a contender for the Arabic Booker award.
The novel is not only well-written but it also examines the personal aspects of being gay in contemporary Egypt and the challenges of living in the closet, with rich and colourful insights into Cairo’s gay scene. The book does not shy away from going into explicit details about the sex lives of the protagonist and others in Cairo’s gay scene. Around the same time, I dedicated a long chapter to sexuality in my second book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect (2017). Although homosexuals in Egypt are still periodically persecuted, the issue has come out of the closet and a growing number of Egyptians are now openly sympathetic, not just discreetly tolerant.
During my time in comms at ESN, I also wrote for smaller alternative outlets, such as the Palestine Chronicle and Common Ground News Service, which syndicated its output to newspapers and magazines around the world, where I wrote articles that attempted to take a fresh perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Given that this expansion was a very gradual process and the space for my kind of critical, independent brand of journalism, with viewpoints that did not comfortably fall into the polarised camps of the time, I decided to write what I wanted and self-publish what I could not place in a media outlet.
It was at this time that I hit on the idea of taking advantage of the relative democratisation of publishing by launching my own website which would provide me (and other interested like-minded writers) with a progressive forum to air our ideas and where I could bring together all my disparate writing under a single digital roof.
I started off very small scale to keep the costs down. My internet service provider had begun to offer basic free website hosting for subscribers. In addition, although I had little knowledge of coding, I designed the basic website myself, eschewing the chronological blog format in favour of a structured site, more akin to a newspaper, with thematic sections. I launched Diabolic Digest in 2004. Although it never became a hit, it did give me the space to write about subjects close to my heart that would, at the time, have been very difficult or impossible to place elsewhere, in the way that I wanted to write about them. This freedom to express myself and to experiment broadened my horizons and helped embolden me to stick to my guns even when it seemed my journalistic prospects were narrowing. It also enabled me to deepen my portfolio and to republish content I’d run elsewhere.
On the fifth anniversary of Diabolic Digest, I resolved to relaunch it as a WordPress website and rebrand it to make it look more professional and with greater functionality, including commenting. Although this cost me money for hosting and the domain, I kept the costs down by doing as much as possible myself. The Chronikler has had greater success than its predecessor but remains a small-scale affair.
Breaking new ground
After a while, I grew wary of experimenting in this limited way and resolved to up my game and go on a self-assigned investigative mission. Despite the fact that I had been writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years, I had never visited Palestine or Israel. This, I felt, was a gaping hole in my experience that I was keen to fill. Although many of my Egyptian and Arab peers objected out of principle to making such a visit, while others feared the consequences of attempting such a journey, the idea brewed in my mind for several years.
The first time I researched it in earnest, I discovered that it would be difficult if not impossible to make the trip on my Egyptian passport. Despite Israel’s official line of wanting Arabs to visit as part of its campaign against the Arab boycott, the reality was very different. When I called the Israeli embassy in Brussels to inquire about how I would go about visiting Israel, the perplexed staff member who spoke to me informed me that I would need to book and pay for flights and hotels and submit a full itinerary of what I planned to do during my visit. This would then be sent to the authorities in Israel for security clearance, and it would be up to them to accept or reject my application – and she suspected that it would be rejected. With so many bureaucratic hurdles in my way I decided that it wasn’t wise to attempt this journey yet and waited until I had acquired Belgian citizenship.
Once I became a Belgian, I did not require a visa in advance to visit, so, throwing caution to the wind, I booked myself a flight and landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv in the spring of 2007, much to the bafflement and consternation of the late-night staff on duty, a couple of whom were waiting just outside the door of the plane where they greeted me like some kind of anti-star. As a tool of persuasion, I was armed with letters of invitation from Israelis I had befriended online and reserves of patience and calm that don’t always come naturally to me. Eventually, after hours of waiting, interviews, interrogations and confusion, I was permitted to enter the Holy Land.
‘Without a roadmap’ is the name I gave this trip into the known unknown, a small step for a human but a giant leap for an Egyptian and Arab. The name referred, at one level, to all the so-called roadmaps to peace launched in the early 2000s that were ultimately roadmaps to nowhere, dead letters and platitudes that did next to nothing to advance peace and only perpetuated the status quo. The name also referred to the fact that I was arriving without a real plan or a roadmap, beyond the desire to learn more, see and highlight the human side of the conflict, and to make a modest contribution to building mutual understanding and empathy.
I will reflect on this trip and the five years I later spent living in Jerusalem in the next instalment of this series of essays which will be dedicated to my return to the Middle East.
Discovering interactive journalism
While I was travelling around Israel and Palestine, I kept a blog in which I related my experiences and encounters, and reflected on the situation on the ground and how it compared with perceptions. Although I had not arranged to write about my journey through the Holy Land for any media outlet, I ended up doing so by pure coincidence.
Prior to my departure, I had reached out to Alex Stein and Seth Freedman, both of whom wrote regular columns for The Guardian‘s recently launched Comment is Free online opinion section, to see if they wanted to meet up in Jerusalem. Seth ended up writing about my encounter with him, Alex and their friends in a column which triggered significant debate and attracted a lot of interest from readers wanting to learn about my perspective on the encounter.
Although I had been pitching ideas to The Guardian for a while, I had not yet managed to evoke enough interest for them to commission a piece from me, though I had been quoted in the newspaper’s pages before. This was partly due to the sheer volume of pitches a paper of The Guardian‘s calibre receives and partly due to the tendency of editors to prefer freelancers they know.
However, the outpouring of interest elicited by Seth’s article finally convinced the newspaper to commission a piece from me, about the encounter and my general impressions from the trip, which I wrote upon my return to Belgium.
This kind of interactive journalism, in which readers could react immediately and often forcefully to what you write, was relatively new to me. The Guardian had only launched Comment is Free (CiF) a year earlier and I had created a profile to comment on articles as a reader, but it was a novel experience for me to experience it as a writer. I had never written for a publication before with such an active community of commenters and, as for social media, I had only recently signed up for Facebook, though I had had experience with chat forums and even MySpace in the past.
CiF had many of the same advantages and disadvantages people would later associate with social media. As a journalist, it was eye-opening to see readers come to life. No longer the passive recipients of a writer’s word, it redefined the relationship between reader and journalist. Writing went from being a one-way lecture to become more like a two-way or multidirectional conversation, more akin to a seminar followed by a Q&A session or to a town hall, especially if you were willing to engage, as a writer, below the line. Fascination, interest and alarm meant that I regularly checked and interacted with the comment sections under my articles.
I learnt a lot from reading the comments and interacting with some of them. The more thoughtful and interesting readers helped me refine my views on certain issues and introduced me to new nuances and angles. I even made some lasting connections with a handful of readers.
However, there was also an ugly underbelly. The debate under the line could often turn combative, polarised, disruptive and even offensive. This was especially the case with certain combustible themes, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wider Middle East, minorities, integration, discrimination, religion, especially Islam, and gender, all themes that I wrote about.
Many trolls, especially of the far right variety, resided in the comments section. They inhabited that realm not out of any particular interest in the newspaper or its content but as part of their self-styled crusade to bludgeon their chosen pet cause. These sometimes engaged in ad hominem attacks or disingenuously accused you of something you didn’t say or criticised you for leaving out something you had mentioned. And fantastical conspiracy theories abounded. I even wrote some articles debunking these myths, such as the notion that Muslims are out to construct Eurabia, a kind of European umma or caliphate, or the far-fetched notion that terrorist operations in Europe and America are actually government black flag operations.
When I started off in journalism, I entertained the notion that racism, bigotry and hatred were founded on ignorance and that, as a journalist, I could combat this with corrective facts and by providing compelling alternative stories and perspectives. While this approach works with those who are misinformed but are genuinely seeking out the truth, there are people who have fallen so far down the rabbit hole or for whom certain views have become such an integral part of their identity and belief system that my efforts felt akin to throwing pebbles at a fortress wall. The effect of these efforts on such individuals was that they would pull up the drawbridge and ready themselves for war rather than come down off their high horse and talk reason.
Then, as now, the question of whether online discourse reflected offline reality was a hot topic. I was often alarmed by the level of vitriol, bigotry and hatred expressed by users of the forum – and the moderators often struggled to keep the debate civil while allowing users with divergent views the freedom to express themselves. Reading some of the comments could occasionally lead me to despair about the state of the world.
My own impression is that the online world reflects, magnifies and warps the real world. The bigotry and hatred online also exist in society, as reflected by the onward and forward march of intolerance, authoritarianism and identity politics. However, the relative anonymity and distance afforded by these forums can cause some people to abandon the social restraints that they would normally use to moderate their views and to behave in extremely antisocial ways.
It was and remains hard to determine how representative online extremist views are of society at large. This is partly because people with extreme views are more likely than those with moderate views to express them online, while people who agree with you are less likely to endorse you than those who disagree with you are likely to attack you, and partly because of the organised and coordinated nature of some these efforts at disruption.
Personally, I was rather fortunate. Anecdotally, the amount of vitriol and trolling under my articles appeared, on the whole, to be less than that under comparable articles on the same themes and the debate was often more constructive. Although I wrote about plenty of controversial issues, I did not do so to wilfully stir up controversy. By never losing sight of the human dimension, by exploring matters from fresh perspectives, by using the same yardstick for everyone, by building bridges instead of blowing them up, by mapping out the slices of common ground in heavily mined territory, by refusing to descend to stereotyping and by avoiding lazy assumptions, I won the appreciation and respect of many, including some who passionately disagreed with me.
Vanguardians of the universal
From that chance beginning, I ended up writing a couple of hundred articles for The Guardian. Though I’d started off writing about Israel and Palestine and the wider Middle East, I did not wish to be pigeonholed as a kind of native informant, albeit one who challenges and criticises mainstream interpretations instead of confirming and reinforcing them. If white “Westerners” could become experts on the “Orient”, I saw no reason why I couldn’t write expertly, as I had already been doing for years, on the “Occident”, especially since, given my diverse background, I felt as much “western” as I did “eastern”.
Contrary to what was common at the time, I soon expanded my repertoire for The Guardian to include columns about the EU (including the very early warning signs of what would become Brexit mania), Belgium, the UK, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic issues, history, the environment, faithlessness, social and human relations, political psychology, humour and even general interest subjects, such as music, including the Summer of Love, film, sport, travel, language, dealing with illness, death and grief, as well as Christmas and other festivities, not to mention strange superstitions about animals. My first non-Middle Eastern piece for The Guardian was about billionaires and economic inequality, an issue I have since written about extensively as inequalities continue to widen.
This phase of my career also marked my transformation from being predominantly a news and features reporter who occasionally penned OpEds to become predominantly an opinion writer and analyst. I had come a long way since my early days as a Reuters correspondent. No longer did I have to rein in my colourful language and I was free to express my opinions and not just report the opinions of others. However, my approach to column writing retained many aspects of my work as a reporter: my opinion pieces usually included rigorous reporting, storytelling and were grounded in facts.
At the peak of my period writing for The Guardian, I was contributing as many as two or three articles a week, which, when combined with a four-day-a-week comms job, could prove very challenging a times. This reflected a great deal of mutual trust and confidence. Brian Whitaker, The Guardian’s then Middle East editor, became my interlocutor and main contact point. After his initial reluctance to take up my earliest pitches, Brian became my greatest supporter on the Comment is Free editorial team and was happy to give me the freedom to explore my other interests. Many on the team were also supportive, especially the late Georgina Henry, the founder of CiF, who died aged only 53 in 2014.
However, things started shifting following Brian Whitaker’s retirement from the newspaper. Once he was gone, the commissions began to dry up and an increasing proportion of my pitches were turned out, until I reached a point when I decided it wasn’t worth pitching anymore. But I am grateful for my time contributing to The Guardian. Not only did I manage to write about a plethora of interesting topics, I also enjoyed the engagement of readers. My time there also raised my public profile and enabled me to branch out into other media.
Wanderlust
Initially, when we arrived in Belgium, we had expected it to be a temporary move until we figured out where we wanted to go next. By the time our son, Iskander, was born it was getting perilously close to a decade. For the couple of years prior to his birth, we had been contemplating moving to the Middle East or somewhere else in the world where we could do more fieldwork and explore other societies, though Katleen’s job did involve a lot of travel to short-term assignments abroad.
Paradoxically, some might think, our wanderlust was intensified with the birth of our son. We concluded that, if we wanted to move, it would be easier for him while he was still very young and before we were too set in our ways to leave our nest. The opportunity to move to Jerusalem presented itself in early 2011, at the moment when the Arab world was erupting in a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions. This move to the Middle East and my experience as a Jerusalem-based and then Tunis-based journalist and writer will be the subject of the next essay in this series.
