Journalist Charles Sennott

DATE October 22, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Charles Sennott on his reports from Afghanistan and
his new book "The Body & the Blood"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, journalist Charles Sennott, has been on the front lines with some of
the leaders of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan opposition group that the
United States is supporting in the fight against the Taliban. Sennott
reported from northern Afghanistan from late September through mid-October.
He's the London bureau chief for The Boston Globe and was the Globe's Middle
East bureau chief from 1997 until earlier this year. He's also the author of
the new book, "The Body & the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn
of the Century." It examines why the Christian population is disappearing
from the Middle East, the place where the faith began.

I spoke with Charles Sennott this morning. He was at the NPR bureau in
London.

I want to start off by talking about your travels through northern Afghanistan
with the Northern Alliance. Let's start with a report that you wrote a couple
of weeks ago. You were with Commander Mullah Omar, one of the local leaders
of the Northern Alliance, and one of his men brought out a Taliban soldier
that they had captured. Would you describe the scene?

Mr. CHARLES SENNOTT (Author, "The Body & the Blood"): Well, when we met
with Mullah Omar, who is not to be confused with the one-eyed Mullah Omar, who
is the spiritual leader of the Taliban, he actually came out first with green
tea and these little caramel-flavored candies that all of the local commanders
seemed to want to feed to Western correspondents like myself, who are trying
to get to know the Northern Alliance. And we had an interview in which this
Mullah Omar talked about the Northern Alliance, talked about the hopes of the
commanders there to really capitalize on the pending US air strikes.

And it all seemed like kind of a solid interview with a man who was very
serious about his military fortune and what he had hoped lies ahead, and
almost out of the blue, he kind of snapped his fingers and asked, literally,
for the prisoner to be summoned. And we didn't really know what was going on.
And then the prisoner was brought up from a hole, which was dug in the earth,
this kind of brown tundra that's right outside of his military command and
home. And it was one of these incredibly barbaric images of Afghanistan that
makes you think, as a correspondent, `Do we really know what we're getting
into here?'

The man was given ladder, which was lowered down to him, and he emerged out of
the earth. And this was a really small hole, three feet by three feet, which
bottled out a little bit at the bottom. I don't know exactly how much. It's
approximately 12 feet deep. And his face was thin and haggard, and he was
very clearly in pain; he was very clearly afraid. He was spitting up blood.
And for an American journalist, who is trying to understand this enemy, the
Taliban, it's a fairly jarring image to be introduced to the face of the enemy
as this pitiful soul coming up from a hole in the earth.

GROSS: What was it like for you to witness this? Did you have to act
nonplussed, like this was a perfectly average way for people to behave with
their prisoners?

Mr. SENNOTT: No, we actually challenged Mullah Omar a little bit on this.
Myself and my translator were both kind of taken aback by the condition of the
prisoner, and I was with some other colleagues, and we really pressed him and
said, you know, `How can you treat this man this way?' And he insisted he
gives him bread and water and that he'll be fine. And it was just this sense
of we didn't understand where we were, and I think that's true.

I think that Americans are going to have to get to know the Northern Alliance
and realize that the Northern Alliance is maybe northern, but not so clearly
an alliance. And it's a very complicated mix of warlords, commanders, some of
whom are very decent, some of whom are, you know, among the perpetrators of
some very serious war crimes and some very serious human rights abuses. And I
think that, for now, the United States is being very careful as it approaches
the Northern Alliance to weigh all those factors.

So I think my reaction was probably a kind of front-line reaction that
America's going to have with the Northern Alliance, and that's asking, `Who
are these guys?'

GROSS: Well, let's ask again, who are these guys? Mullah Omar--and, again,
this isn't Mullah Omar of the Taliban. This is a local anti-Taliban leader
with the same name. You describe him as a Muslim cleric as well as a local
warlord. He was once an Islamic scholar. You say that he has a strict
interpretation of the Quran that is only marginally more moderate than the
Taliban. Is this kind of typical that a lot of the leaders of the Northern
Alliance are not quite as extreme, but still fairly extreme in their
interpretation of Islam?

Mr. SENNOTT: They are very extreme in their interpretation of Islam, but
also moderate in important areas, I would say; one of them, of course, being
in the way in which they interpret Islamic scripture and the social guidelines
for women, for example. I don't think in the Northern Alliance-held areas,
you're going to see women radically shedding the burqa. I don't know that
that's going to happen because many of the commanders and many of the mullahs
who run these local towns believe that women should wear the burqa.

The difference is they want to give people more choice, basically--give women
more choice. But the notion of these strict social codes being imposed is
very much still there. Another important difference is most of the Northern
Alliance mullahs who I was able to interview believe that girls should be able
to be educated. Of course, in the Taliban areas, girls do not go to school
past a certain age. And here, they're saying they should continue in their
education.

So those are important differences, but when you get down to their
understanding of the Quran and their shaping of society around Sharia, or
Islamic law, they're very similar in more ways than they are different.

GROSS: Now you also met Commander Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance.
What's his role in the war?

Mr. SENNOTT: I was able to speak with General Dostum over a satellite phone,
which to me was like speaking with Kurtz(ph) on a satellite phone. It's this
very strange scene in which we were in a garden of some of Dostum's officers,
who are now actually displaced people from the areas of Mazar-e Sharif, which
were overtaken by the Taliban. They're very eager to get in the fight there
and retake Mazar-e Sharif. And Dostum was on the phone kind of bragging about
how close they're coming to accomplishing that.

We were in this situation of having to listen to him on my satellite phone, on
a speaker phone, while all of his officers were kind of, you know, glued to
this, listening to the translations and, really, just hinging on every word
that he was speaking as if it was the truth. I didn't, frankly, believe it.
I still think that Dostum is exaggerating how much headway they've made in the
Taliban areas. We are in a position, as reporters, not to be able to confirm
these reports, but I also was in a position where I kept trying to ask Dostum
about his very complicated past. And I wanted to know specifically about the
allegations of some very serious brutality on the part of his soldiers under
his command.

When he was kind of running the show, when these forces had control of Kabul
and when he had control of Mazar-e Sharif, he was a famous, kind of legendary
warlord who had his own bullet-proof Cadillac; he had his own airline. He
favors Scotch. He likes gambling. He's this very complicated character, who,
as I say, also perpetrated great brutality on the people who differed with
him, especially any opposing militias. And he's famous for tying, you know,
different militia members' limbs to different tanks and sending the tanks in
different directions and things like this.

So I was very anxious to get in those questions, and he kept saying to me, `It
is not time to ask such questions. We are at war. Just take down what I'm
saying and tell the American people.' And I kept kind of politely trying to
interrupt him, and he kept washing over these questions. And, again, it was
another one of these images where, as an American reporter in Afghanistan, you
feel that you really understand the ways in which the Northern Alliance wants
to capitalize on the US air strikes and the US goals in creating a
post-Taliban Afghanistan, but you also begin to see that these are characters
who are going to have to be watched very closely.

One of the things that I'm worried about, as a reporter, and seeing in the
future is this stirring of the ethnic coals in Afghanistan. The Taliban are
ethnic Pashtun. The Northern Alliance are largely ethic Tajiks and Uzbeks.
General Dostum is a famous leader of the Uzbeks. Now if they return to
Mazar-e Sharif, if General Dostum and his forces return to Mazar-e Sharif,
they are going to want to exact revenge on the Pashtuns who are still there.
And I think that what we have to do is, really, as a country, be careful with
this mix and not allow those ethnic rivalries and hatreds to become rekindled
and to fan the flame again, and that's going to take some sophistication and
it's going to take keeping a close eye on people like General Dostum.

GROSS: Well, you write in your article about Dostum that his excesses are a
part of the reason why the Taliban were, at first, welcomed when they took
Kabul in 1996.

Mr. SENNOTT: Exactly. I mean, the Taliban appeared, at that point at least,
like a kind of enlightened alternative to the brutality of the warlords who
had taken Kabul and who were holding on to power quite ruthlessly. I think
we've learned subsequently--and I think the Afghan people, more importantly,
have learned--that the Taliban were anything but enlightened and actually
dragged the country back deep into kind of a medieval philosophy of Islam and
a kind of medieval economy, frankly, that seems almost preindustrial when
you're there.

It's just astounding to go through this country, at least the parts we were
able to go through, and see the way people are living, to see this poverty, to
see the complete destruction of their infrastructure and, again, a sense that
you're living in about the 14th century.

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott, The Boston Globe's London bureau chief
and former Middle East bureau chief. From late September through mid-October,
he traveled with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. We'll talk more after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Charles Sennott of The Boston Globe. He's The Globe's London bureau
chief, the former Middle East bureau chief and the author of the new book,
"The Body & the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New
Millennium."

Did you get to interview many women in Afghanistan?

Mr. SENNOTT: I was able to interview, really, only one woman face to face.
And after about a month of traveling through northern Afghanistan and being in
the company of all men and mostly military men and staying in the barracks
with the Northern Alliance and being out on the front line, literally, in the
trenches with different commanders and tank battalions and crossing the river
with these workhorses that were led by these traders who know the trails and
lead you on the horses, you realize you haven't seen a woman for a long time.
And the world is not a good place without women. And it's a very bleak
landscape in which women are, of course, completely covered in the burqa.
Very rarely do you see a woman at the market.

But I met one woman, and that was a meeting that was arranged because I had
heard that there was a woman who was trying her best to run a local
organization called the Afghanistan Women's Association in the town of
Khoja Bahauddin, which has become what I call `Mediastan.' This is where
all of the TV camera crews are camped out, and there are satellite dishes.
And CBS News is buying up an entire house for their staff. And the BBC has
this kind of well-groomed colonial atmosphere in their house. And it's an
absolute city of modern Western journalists living in this kind of
preindustrial marketplace, where they've radically altered the currency, where
they've completely shattered the local social codes, and it's created lots of
problems.

And in this strange, modern mix in Afghanistan, there is a woman, Madam
Nazeer(ph), who has emerged as the woman who the media can speak to. And she
runs the Afghanistan Women's Association. She is a part of a kind of Kabul
elite, who left Kabul when it fell to the Taliban, lived in Pakistan. She's
married to a very educated man, a nice man, an engineer. And this couple work
with Medecins Sans Frontieres doing nutrition projects, and they also have
classes which Madam Nazeer runs for women to understand human rights as they
pertain to women and as they are encoded in the Quran and in Islamic law.

What I found out was this woman, who was so eloquent and just wonderful to
speak with, has been pretty much silenced by some of the local commanders of
the Northern Alliance. The specific commander who has been tough on her work
is a man named Kaziq Kabir(ph), another commander who loved to give tea and
hand out candies to Western journalists like myself. And I had learned that
Kaziq Kabir had actually killed his first wife with an AK-47 for daring to ask
him where he was going when he was returning to battle 20 years ago. And this
was kind of the legend in town. And so when I met with Kaziq Kabir, I asked
him about this. And he told me, `No, no, no, no. These are enemies. They
have the story completely wrong. Yes, I killed my wife with an AK-47, but she
wasn't asking me where I was going. She was pulling my rifle because I was
trying to clean it, and then I accidentally pulled on the trigger and she was
killed.'

So this local commander has this story, and the town has an understanding of
who the local commander is. And somewhere in there must be the truth, but the
sense of this commander kind of blanketing his sense of Islam around this town
of Khoja Bahauddin is very evident.

GROSS: You were on the front lines in Afghanistan for a while, and, you know,
I've just been sitting in my office and sitting home watching some news
footage. And you see soldiers from the Northern Alliance on horseback looking
like it could have been centuries ago. And at the same time, you know that
there's a lot of ultramodern US weaponry being used in this battle. So it
seems like there's several centuries at a time that are represented in the
front lines and in the war in general?

Mr. SENNOTT: That's a very good way to put it. When you go out there on
horseback--and I am not the greatest horseback rider. You know, I'm kind of
holding on to this saddle made of burlap and stuffed with straw and this
frayed rope that you're holding on to as you forge the Kaucha River(ph). It's
very much a Hemingway fantasy, and you're very much in a World War I setting
of artillery fire. And you also realize, as a reporter, you aren't even
anywhere close to the story. Yes, you're on a front line; yes, you are
hearing lots of artillery fire thudding into the hills around you. You're in
a trench. You hear tanks, you know, kind of--you can hear the tanks as they
rocket off into the distance with the latest round of sustained shelling that
you will certainly write about. But what you're seeing has nothing to do with
the US offensive on Afghanistan. It has to do with this 20-some-odd-year
continuum of fighting that's gone on within Afghanistan.

So I think that the fronts that we've covered and the reports that we
broadcast or wrote for our newspapers actually existed in some time warp. And
as I say, it's like being stuck inside of World War I while you cover the
first war of the 21st century. The front you are covering has very little to
do with America's war against the Taliban or against Osama bin Laden and the
al-Qaeda organization. Those fronts are going to be in places like banks and
understanding money laundering and how that works and how these agencies are
funded. Those are going to be in things like understanding how you track
anthrax spores. And I think those are going to be the really shadowy front
lines of this war that will be very complex, that will be very difficult to
follow, that will require skill sets that reporters are only just now
beginning to develop.

And those of us who end up on the front lines covering artillery fire have
some old sense of war, some old-fashioned notions of the front line and what
this conflict is really all about.

GROSS: You've written pretty critically about the Northern Alliance, but when
you were traveling with them and when you were on the front lines in northern
Afghanistan, you were dependent on the Northern Alliance for your safety. Did
they have any idea of what you were writing and how critical you were?

Mr. SENNOTT: I don't know yet. I think the answer, I guess, lies in
Afghanistan. There are so many shifting alliances. Some of the commanders
I'm meeting with were arch rivals of the commander I would meet later that
afternoon. And in this mix of rivalries and of old vendettas, I don't know
that my coverage will necessarily jump out at them as particularly critical.
I think I was actually somewhat behind on that criticism. I think some of my
first few days of reporting in there, I was really buying into the excitement
of the Northern Alliance, feeling like it's going to push ahead, that it's
going to really seize the moment with the US air strikes and accomplish the,
quote, "liberation" of Mazar-e Sharif or the liberation of Kabul.

But I think, really, I had an education about the Northern Alliance that's
probably not dissimilar to the one that America is going to have over the
coming weeks and months, in which we're going to learn more about the General
Dostums, in which we're going to learn more about these local commanders, even
like Mullah Omar with his prisoner. And we're all going to see that this is a
very complex place; that the Northern Alliance may be northern, but it's not
necessarily an alliance. It's certainly not the armed wing of Amnesty
International. These guys have serious human rights abuses in their past.

And I think all of that is going to be part of our realization that
Afghanistan is an infinitely complex place with a long history of becoming a
graveyard for empires and that we are going to have to proceed very carefully
and very cautiously.

GROSS: Charles Sennott is The Boston Globe's London bureau chief and former
Middle East bureau chief. His new book is called "The Body & the Blood:
The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium." He'll be back in
the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, Charles Sennott talks about the Middle East. He's The
Boston Globe's former Middle East bureau chief and is the author of the new
book "The Body & the Blood" about the dwindling Christian population in the
Middle East. We'll hear about the predicament of Christian Palestinians as
the Intifadah becomes increasingly Islamist.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with journalist Charles Sennott. He's The Boston Globe's London bureau
chief and served as its Middle East bureau chief from 1997 until earlier this
year. His new book, "The Body and the Blood," examines why the Christian
population is dwindling in the Middle East, the place where the faith began.
Christians now comprise only 2 percent of the population in Israel, the West
Bank and Gaza, whereas 100 years ago, the Christian population in that same
region was 20 percent. I asked Sennott how he thinks the Middle East conflict
is going to affect or be affected by the war against terrorism.

Mr. SENNOTT: I think in Israel, you'll see a sense of camaraderie almost or a
kind of a sympathetic embrace with the United States. There's this sense that
misery loves company almost, the sense of, you know, `We've gone through this.
We know now you're going through it. We want to stand by you. And we want
you to realize what we've been through for so long, so welcome aboard.' I
think for the Palestinians, it's really a sense of feeling cornered, that the
forces within the very conservative government of Ariel Sharon are going to
try to cast Yasser Arafat and all of the Palestinian leadership as part of a
continuum of terrorism, to resurrect the images of Arafat as a terrorist as he
used to appear in the 1970s on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and try to
bring him back to being that person and thereby limit his ability to negotiate
the future of a Palestinian state. And I think Arafat's aware of that, and I
think he realizes that there is an extreme burden on him right now to come up
with arrests of the Cabinet minister who was assassinated in Jerusalem.

GROSS: The arrests of the terrorists who killed the Cabinet minister.

Mr. SENNOTT: Specifically to come after these people who killed this
minister, who are within the PFLP, who are a very militant wing of the PFLP.
And Arafat needs to control them and Arafat needs to produce some arrests and
Arafat needs to show the world that he is, indeed, also part of the war on
terrorism. And I think that will be a big challenge ahead for Arafat because
it will mean he'll have to turn against some of his own people. I think
we're going to see Arafat in extreme pressure on the Palestinian streets. And
I think Arafat is clearly aware of that, and I think he's worried about it.

So all of these different vying agendas will all come into play, but I still
think for Osama bin Laden, the real inspiration for his movement is not
Palestine. It's not the dream of a Palestinian state. It's not human rights
for Palestinians. He's shown remarkable disregard for the Palestinians. I
think for him, it really is the presence of US troops in the Gulf and
specifically in Saudi Arabia. I mean, that...

GROSS: So you think he's just using the Palestinian cause to make his cause
more popular, to make him more popular.

Mr. SENNOTT: I really do. I think that is also the sense of the Palestinian
street. Yes, you can see some posters of Osama bin Laden in certain very
militant pockets of Gaza, but the truth is Palestinians are very
sophisticated. They understand that the Arab world, in general, and Osama bin
Laden, in particular, have not done much for the Palestinian cause. There's a
lot of lip service, but there's not a lot of delivery. There's not a lot of
support. There's not a lot of making this issue in the forefront, you know,
kind of on the global agenda. So I think he has used it. And I think he's
using it even more desperately now as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heats
up. But I still think what Osama bin Laden cares about is US troop presence
in the Gulf and specifically in Saudi Arabia and what he would define as the
Holy land of Mecca and Medina and the notion that these US troops have somehow
defiled that Holy Land.

GROSS: Do you have a reading on what the Bush administration thinks is in
America's best interest now regarding Israel and the Palestinians?

Mr. SENNOTT: The Bush administration is going to have to really very clearly
put its weight behind bringing both the Israelis and the Palestinians to the
negotiating table. The way I think they're going to have to do that is to be
tougher on Arafat about really pushing forward on going after terrorists.
They've done that consistently all along. They're going to keep that pressure
up and they're going to let him know how important that is, but they're also
going to have to do something that they've been more hesitant to do and that
really needs to be done, which is to tell Israel that it needs to live up to
the agreements that were signed after Oslo. And there's eight years of
agreement that have gone violated by both sides, by both Palestinians and by
Israelis, but the expansion of settlements, the notion of the policy of
assassination which Israel has used and all of these real thorny issues that
the United States has not been clear enough in speaking against in relation
with its ally, Israel, it's going to have to do that now. When it does that
is a different question. I think it's not going to do it in the immediate
term because it doesn't want to appear to be somehow trying to placate the
Arab world as a result of what bin Laden did in New York and in Washington.
But I do think down the line we're going to have to expect more from our ally,
Israel, in the Middle East.

GROSS: In your new book, "The Body and the Blood," you write about the
disappearance of Christians from the Middle East and you retraced the journey
of Jesus and look for the Christian population there now. In writing about
Christians in the Middle East, you also write about the contemporary conflict
in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. And you write about
the first intifadah and the new intifadah that's a year old. What are
some of the ways in which you see this new intifadah as being different from
the first one?

Mr. SENNOTT: The new intifadah is really not even an intifadah because if you
understand the term, it really means kind of a shrugging off, a collective
shaking off of oppression. I think this is very different. I think this is a
very specific guerrilla street fight among certain aspects, some of whom have
very different agendas, in trying to confront Israel along the borders of what
is a weakly defined Palestinian state at this point and which they want to
define very clearly as their Palestinian state; some up to the 1967 borders
and some, frankly, who see it as beyond the 1967 borders.

And I think the notion of an intifadah as a popular uprising against Israel is
not what's happening here. This is an armed conflict against Israel. It's
completely changed the way in which the intifadah unfolds on the street. At
the beginning of this intifadah, we were seeing the same images we all know of
burning tires, rock throwing, Israeli troops marching forward, Israeli troops
firing tear gas, then rubber bullets, then live ammunition, young children,
13-, 15-year-old being killed and very much a sense of, `Well, here we go
again. Here's another intifadah.' But very quickly, it became Palestinian
gunmen firing from different points set back from these traditional intifadah
conflicts. And then suddenly, we were hearing tank fire or, you know,
helicopter missiles being fired in from the Israelis and now the equation
began to unravel. It wasn't an intifadah. It was really becoming something
just short of war.

I think what we're seeing now, even today in the West Bank, with the new
Israeli incursion into Bethlehem, is really becoming even more and more like a
conventional war in which we're seeing the tanks really begin to enter these
areas and we're seeing the fighting on the street with the Fatah gunmen out
there kind of crouched down on corners and trying to really present some
resistance to the tanks. So I think it's been a process of recognizing over a
period of weeks, months and now even more than a year that this is not an
intifadah, that this is a real conflict that is looming and that threatens to
become a regional conflict if it's not contained and if it's not brought under
control fairly quickly.

GROSS: Now I think it's also fair to say that you see the new intifadah or the
new fighting as being more Islamist inspired than the first intifadah was, the
agenda of the groups at the forefront of this fighting are much more Islamist.

Mr. SENNOTT: That's true, and I think the language on the street is much
more Islamist. In trying to really pursue the path of Jesus' life in the year
2000, what I was trying to look at was the way in which the themes that were
relevant 2000 years ago are relevant today. Two thousand years ago, they were
still talking about globalization. They were talking about occupation. They
were talking about religious extremism, and they were talking about the quest
to control Jerusalem. And now we see all of this at play again across the
Holy Land on these very same sites, you know, that this whole intifadah was
started, of course, where the Temple Mount once lay and where today there is
the Dome of the Rock.

So I think the sense of the origins of this and its connections to the Bible
really jumped out at me. What makes this reality interesting to me is that
it's increasingly being seen along these religious lines and that those issues
that are more economic or they're more secular like occupation, like
globalization, they're being pushed down to the surface while these issues
that are more religious are being more clearly brought to the surface and used
to shape this conflict.

One of the clearest examples of this is today the Palestinians call this the
Al-Aqsa intifadah. And Al-Aqsa refers to the Dome of the Rock, to the mosque
that lays there within the compound that's known as the Noble Sanctuary. So I
think when you hear Al-Aqsa intifadah, that immediately defines it as a battle
for this holy space. And what interests me in pursuing this with the
Christians was to notice that this completely cuts out the Christian
Palestinians and it completely removes their very important role in
Palestinian society and in the Palestinian cause, and it marginalizes it. And
I think secular Muslims are keenly aware of this and Christian Palestinians
are also keenly aware of the dangers of having this conflict be defined as a
religious one.

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott. He's The Boston Globe's London bureau
chief and its former Middle East bureau chief. His new book is called "The
Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New
Millennium." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott, The Boston Globe's London bureau chief
and former Middle East bureau chief. His new book is called "The Body and the
Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium."

Well, you have a particularly interesting chapter on Hanan Ashrawi in your
new book, and Hanan Ashrawi is one of the leading Palestinian negotiators and
she has been one of the leading media spokespeople for the Palestinian cause.
She's Christian. She's a Christian Palestinian. And, you know, reading your
chapter on her, I kept wondering, `What's it like for her as a Christian to be
part of this movement that has grown increasingly Islamist, knowing that this
extreme Islamic movement has very little room for women?' I mean, much of the
Islamist extreme wants women in the house, you know, wearing a burqa on
those rare occasions when they're outside of the house. So what was her
reaction to that?

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, Hanan has always been a very eloquent and passionate
spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, and I think Americans really know the
Palestinian cause through Hanan Ashrawi or possibly through Edward Said,
which interestingly, both of whom are Christian. So in a way, America and the
West have been presented the Palestinian cause as very much a Palestinian
Christian interpretation of that cause, as a fight for independence, as a
fight against occupation, and they haven't understood that on the street with
Hamas, with Islamic Jihad, with many of the more traditional aspects of
Palestinian Islamic culture, it's a very different battle.

And I think what you see when you talk with Hanan Ashrawi now is this
disconnect, this sense that what she was longing for when she became prominent
in 1987 on the show "Nightline" and began to really emerge as a spokesperson
for the Palestinian cause, was a very secular, a very Western concept of human
rights, of civil rights, of wanting to create an independent state, a kind of
post-colonial atmosphere in which they wanted their rights, too.

And what she's caught up in now is a completely different vortex. And she was
very honest with me about how it depresses her, that this has become very much
a battle defined along religious lines. She would be the first to say, `These
issues aren't about religion. They're about land. They're about
international law. They're about human rights.' But she can see this
conflict defining itself increasingly along religious lines. And for people
who are secular, whether they're Muslim or Christian and especially for
Palestinian Christians who are this very diminishing minority, this is very
troubling because it has marginalized them. And I think it's marginalized a
part of the Palestinian society that has made an extraordinary contribution to
its gains.

GROSS: Although Hanan Ashrawi talked with you about these concerns, my
impression was that she's actually pretty reluctant to discuss them in public.

Mr. SENNOTT: Hanan Ashrawi is an excellent spokesperson for the cause, so
Hanan Ashrawi has been very careful in the few minutes she gets of air time to
stick to the main issues. I think if Hanan Ashrawi were to have a forum in
which she could go deeper into these issues and to point out the ways in which
Israel has also made this much more of a religious conflict, the ways in which
Israel has increasingly defined its Zionism as religious and the way in which
Israel faces a real conflict with its own fundamentalists, within its own
country pushing for an agenda to define the Jewish state a certain way, and if
she could then counterpoise that to the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism
within her society and the ways in which that's recast the debate, then she
would present it to you fairly. But in any forum where she feels it's just
going to be looked at as a Christian complaining about the Muslims, she's very
skeptical. She's very wary of the attempts to divide and rule, and I
understand that wariness. And I think it's fair enough given the history of
the West's attempts to do precisely that.

GROSS: If the Islamist groups become the leaders of a new Palestinian state,
what kind of room will there be for Palestinian Christians within that state?

Mr. SENNOTT: This is one of the real troubling questions for Palestinian
Christians now. They are seeing their numbers leave in another historic
exodus. This immigration pattern began a long time ago. It's complex. It's
multilayered. It has to do with education. It has to do with economy. But
they've been leaving the Holy Land for a very long time, and their emigration
is accelerating right now amid this new conflict in a way that hasn't been
seen really since 1948. They're very worried, frankly, that they won't even
exist to play a role. There are people like Bernard Sabella at Bethlehem
University, a demographer, who's predicting that in two generations, the
Christian presence in the land where Christianity began will no longer be a
demographic reality. In other words, it'll be less than a fraction of a
percent. And therefore, they won't be able to include it in the demographic
studies of the land. So this sense of perilousness just in terms of numbers
is pre-eminent.

GROSS: But where does Arafat fit in to the Islamist emphasis on the
Palestinian uprising of today? Is he seen as sharing that agenda or being too
secular?

Mr. SENNOTT: He's seen as effectively exploiting that on the one hand, but
also for those within Palestinian society, they know he is really a secular
leader who is greatly challenged by Hamas and by Islamic Jihad, who represent
this force of Islam coming deeply in a fundamentalist way into Palestinian
society. So I think Arafat exists on many different levels. He exists in the
way he presents himself to the Western world. He exists in the way in which
he presents himself within Palestinian community and society. And he exists
in the way he presents himself to the Arab world. He's kind of played all
three of these identities at different times, both using kind of the notion of
an Islamic battle for the Holy Land, for, you know, the Dome of the Rock and
all Muslims must come together to defend that. And on the other hand, he'll
shift and tell Western analysts, `We must be very careful of these Islamic
fundamentalists in our mix.' So once again Arafat emerges as this very astute
man on the international stage who's managed to always redefine himself and to
always redefine his movement.

His relationship specifically to the Christians is an interesting one because
he's surrounded by Christian advisers and has been very careful in coddling,
frankly, the Christian community knowing that the images of Bethlehem, for
example, under attack by the Israelis is a very resonate image in the West.
And that's a very sophisticated little front of that war going on there in
which the Israelis are very sensitive to it and Arafat is very aware of the
ways in which it can be exploited and dramatically illustrate just what's
going on in this conflict.

GROSS: My guest is Charles Sennott. He's The Boston Globe's London bureau
chief and its former Middle East bureau chief. His new book is called "The
Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New
Millennium." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Charles Sennott. He writes for
The Boston Globe. He's The Globe's London bureau chief. He just got back
from northern Afghanistan. He's the former Middle East correspondent and the
author of the new book, "The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians
at the Turn of a New Millennium."

In today's papers, it's reported that yesterday, Israeli military killed a
Christian Palestinian youth in Bethlehem, and that's one of the towns that
Israel has invaded. Do you think the killing of a Christian Palestinian youth
is reported any differently than the killing of a Muslim Palestinian youth?

Mr. SENNOTT: Yes. I think that when you're dealing with the Christian
presence in the Holy Land and you're dealing with a place as resonant to
Christianity as Bethlehem and the whole idea of nativity, I think Americans
and I think the Western world stopped for a minute, and they think, `Well,
wait a minute. You mean there are Palestinian Christians?' I don't think the
world at large is even really aware of the fact that Palestinian Christians
exist and that there is this slim minority of Christians who would define
themselves as Palestinian who live with their Muslim brothers. And I think in
a short-circuit way of thinking, most Americans say, `Palestinian equals
Muslim. Muslim equals Palestinian. Arab equals Muslim, equals Palestinian,'
and they just do this math all the time. So I think, yes, it does get covered
differently because it resonates differently.

To understand the diminishing presence of the Christian population within the
Palestinian society and within the state of Israel, where Palestinians live as
Israeli citizens, then you can being to tease out so many different issues and
you can look at the Christians as a kind of litmus test or canaries in a coal
mine who can really gauge the human rights abuses, the ways in which their
democracies are succeeding or failing, not only for the Israelis but also for
the new and emerging Palestinian leadership.

So I do think it gets covered differently, and I think specifically when this
Christian youth was killed, the reporters seemed to stress this notion that a
Christian youth was killed in a cross fire because it would have to be a
Christian youth killed in a cross fire--Right?--because a Christian couldn't be
involved in the war against the Jewish state from a Muslim Palestinian side.
So they kind of stress that to allow people to make sense of it all, but the
truth is from knowing this, from being on the streets of the West Bank and
being on the streets of Bethlehem and seeing that fighting firsthand, there
are many Muslim kids who are killed in the cross fire who have nothing to do
with these two sides, but maybe we're not so careful to point that out as we
are when it is a Christian Palestinian.

GROSS: You write that when you left the Middle East, you were relieved in a
way because you didn't want your children growing up surrounded by so much
hate. And so now you're London bureau chief. You're from the United States,
and here we are. There are many, many Islamists who hate the United States,
who hate England, too, hate everything that the West stands for. Do you feel
now like you can't really remove your children from that environment of hate?

Mr. SENNOTT: I think we all feel that. I mean, I think one of the new
realities after September 11th is this feeling that we all have to look over
our shoulders. When we were living in Jerusalem, it was very hard, for
example, to get family members to come see us because they had these notions
of buses blowing up and they had notions of bombs exploding near the Old City.
And, of course, they were, but they weren't the only reality of Jerusalem.
They were one reality and one that is written about extensively. But we
always tried to convince people, `Come see us,' and people would kind of shake
their heads and say, `No, thanks. We'll see you next summer.'

And when we left Jerusalem as the new intifadah began to really intensify and
as the bombings began to happen more and more frequently and they began to
intersect more and more with the paths that we crossed in our lives, going to
school or going to the shopping mall, we felt so relieved to get out of there,
to feel like we had this weight lifted from our shoulders, that we finally
didn't have to kind of watch very carefully while we sipped coffee in the
morning some man coming through town who looks like he might be from Gaza. We
felt finally like we could relax, and that was September 1st when we got to
London.

And as of September 11th, I think the whole world feels like Jerusalem, the
whole world suddenly feels like a place where you have to sip your coffee very
carefully and watch who's walking around you. And I think that's one of the
real tragedies of what happened, is that it's going to push us to move to the
right of ourselves or something or to move to a side of ourselves that's going
to define the world increasingly along, `Well, this is Islam. This is
Christianity. This is the West; that's the East.' And I think that's going
to be a real mistake if we allow that to happen. I think that September 11th
shook America and shook the world. And it happened in a void in which America
doesn't understand the Middle East and it doesn't understand some pretty
legitimate yearnings within the Middle East.

And I think that if we cannot react with fear but maybe try to react with a
greater understanding, to try to really understand the issues that shape the
hatred in the modern Middle East, I think then we're going to be able to see
just how marginalized bin Laden is, just how small an enemy he really is
because he isn't about all those great yearnings in the Middle East. He is
about a very narrow fringe that has accomplished an extraordinary act of
terrorism but one that is completely disproportionate with who the man is and
what the goals of his organization represent.

GROSS: Well, Charles Sennott, I want to thank you very much for talking with
us. Thank you.

Mr. SENNOTT: Thank you.

GROSS: Charles Sennott is the author of the new book "The Body and the Blood:
The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium." He's The Boston
Globe's London bureau chief and former Middle East bureau chief.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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