Rabiye Kadeer, a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, was imprisoned for more than 5 years in China on charges of providing state secrets to foreigners. Following her release she went into exile, where she worksto further human rights for the Uyghurs who live largely in the Xinjiang region (formerly known as East Turkistan) of the PRC. She is also one of the most prominent advocates for women's rights in China. Using her own resources, Rabiye Kadeer founded and then directed a large trading company in Northwestern China that provided training and employment for Uyghurs. She also founded the "Thousand Mothers' Movement" as a vehicle for the empowerment of Uyghur women in Xinjiang. Prior to her arrest in1999, while en route to a meeting with a visiting U.S. congressman, Rabiye Kadeer was a member of the top advisory body to China's parliament. She is the winner of the 2004 Rafto Prize, and the current director of both the Uyghur American Association and the Uyghur HumanRights Project.
I heard her speak at the University last night. My linguistic fascination with the Uyghur language and its relationship to Kurdish and Arabic aside, I found the talk very moving. She was poignant, funny, and passionate. I nearly cried as she talked about her children, now imprisoned by the Chinese, and her suspicion that they are being held in solitary confinement as she was for two years. And I was amazed by her strength in resuming her political efforts at such an international level after such trauma for trying to act in the past.
The whole experience made me want to learn Uyghur and move to East Turkistan and DO something about the human rights abuses there.
Last week on the bus, after I'd been speaking to a Korean student about why I am learning Arabic and that I hope to contribute to greater world peace and stability, and she asked me, Why didn't you learn Korean? And I had to say, Well, I had to choose a language. I can't learn them all.
It's so frustrating to be one little person in the face of all that is sour and wrong in the world. So frustrating to think that I can't fix everything, and that even when I try to fix some portion of it, by interpreting Arabic in the Middle East, chances are that I won't ever see the result of what I've done, for better or worse.
Today the Jordan Times published a commentary that eviscerated NPR's bias towards Israel in reporting on the Palestinian Territories. I have to say, I'm disappointed, but not surprised. I trust NPR more than, say, Fox or CBS, but nonetheless I am all too aware that they, too, have a degree of bias.
More than a year ago, while I was in Jordan, I received an email from my father about a piece NPR did on the opinion of Jordanians vis-a-vis America and the war in Iraq. My father wanted to know if it sounded accurate to me. When I read the transcript, I was apalled. The NPR reporter, whose name I don't recall (unfortunately, I no longer have the transcript), had interviewed Iraqi long-range truckers stuck in Amman due to closed borders, and Palestinian taxi drivers, and from these extracted an extremely negative view of Americans. I have seen many such reports from many news and polling sources, but can't think of any that I've seen which reflected the opinions of the Jordanians I knew.
Over and over I heard, yes, the American government went out of their way to stir things up in Iraq where they had no business. Such comments were almost always qualified, however, with the sentiment, but Americans have been very good to us: e.g. granting visas to study in the US, building health clinics, offering free surgeries through Medicin sans Frontiers and Operation Smile, etc., putting computers in the schools, training teachers, providing wheelchairs and hearing aids and other tools for the handicapped, and on and on.
I don't know if you noticed the very fine distinction in that paragraph, but I never failed to hear it when listening to Jordanian opinions on America. That distinction is between "the American government" and "Americans." This is one of the things I love most about Jordanians, that not even most Europeans I know seem to note. Jordanians very easily, from a young age, differentiate between governments and their people. They recognize very quickly that the decisions and statements made by governments, even those elected by their people in a free democratic system, do not always represent all or even a majority of their constituents. Perhaps this is because Jordan is a police state, a dictatorship, however well-intentioned its kings may be. I, however, like to think that it's because so many Americans come to Jordan, or give their money or time to organizations that aid Jordanians.
Though studies show that the United States' government gives less in charitable aid to less fortunate nations, I have also read studies showing that Americans, per capita, give a higher percentage of their personal funds to charitable and humanitarian organizations than the people of any other nation. Of course, Americans have, per capita, more to give than most other nations, but having the money doesn't make one any more likely to give it away.
The role of the writer is not to defend his country, his role is to defend what is right.
I had a fascinating encounter today, while folding laundry, with a visiting Israeli math professor who is living temporarily in my building. When, in casual conversation, I mentioned living in Jordan for a couple years, he was immediately fascinated, and told me he had been in Haifa, Israel, during the summer's war, and wanted to hear my opinion on the whole thing.
I was reluctant. Having lived in the Middle East, in a predominantly Palestinian country, I know that these things are emotional issues. He must have heard this in my voice, because he hastened to say that he was center-left, in favor of peaceful coexistence but, as became increasingly apparent through our conversation, truly baffled at where Israel had gone wrong and what they should have done differently.
I had to concede, as angry as the conflict made me, sooner or later Israel had to respond to the direct threat of thousands of rockets in the hands of a group, Hezbollah, which had publicly announced its intention to wipe Israel off the map. What, then, he kept insisting, should Israel have done differently? They have their own internal struggles over the Palestinian Territories, and the corresponding international rhetoric and politics. Israel is a small country with limited resources, and now they and the Palestinians are suffering because Hezbollah has diverted their attention and resources. What should they do? What should they have done?
For one thing, I said, perhaps Israel should, from time to time, speak up and contradict their allies in the West. Perhaps they should speak up and say, for example, Don't go to Iraq, you'll just make things worse, or, Leave Iran alone, they're more bluster than threat. I subscribe, in large part, to the theory that what happened in Lebanon was a proxy war between Iran and the United States, more political than ideological.
But what I kept coming back to was education. I admit, as a teacher, I'm biased. But I truly believe that the root of the problem in the Middle East is in education. Totalitarian governments like the Baathists and the Saudi Wahabis want a generally ignorant population. They're easier to control, easier to marginalize. But democracies demand educated citizens, to a fairly high level.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things about teaching in Jordan was that my students didn't understand the basic concepts of critical thinking that American students take for granted. It is so ingrained in the American and European systems that teachers do it automatically, urge their students to be skeptical, to look for corroborating evidence, to identify a writer or speaker's point of view, his prejudices. The majority of Jordanian students I met, and even many of the older teachers, weren't familiar with the basic concepts of critical thinking. I can't tell you how many times I heard, 'But I read it on the Internet! It must be true!' From adults as well as children.
King Abdullah's Minister of Education works very closely with the American and European embassies, and with Western educators, to integrate critical thinking into the national curricula in all subjects, and to teach Jordanian educators about such basics as Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives, teaching to aural, visual and kinesthetic learners, personality theories like Meyers-Briggs and their application in the classroom, and essay writing. I helped lead a workshop in my governorate on critical thinking, and helped my colleagues apply these skills in the classroom. The public goal of these reforms is to hone Jordan's human resources--it's ONLY natural resources!--to take advantage of opportunities for leadership in Information Technologies in the Middle East. Privately, I have on impeccable authority that King Abdullah has said he doesn't wish to be king forever, he would rather see Jordan function as a true democracy.
If Israel, the United States, Britain, or anyone wants to see real progress in the Middle East, they must support education, they must support the teaching of critical thinking, a cornerstone of democratic literacy. If a nation like Israel doesn't have the resources for this, they could at least speak up and call on those who do--the US, UK, EU, UN, Japan, anyone!--to put their money where their fear is.
The drawback to this method is time. It is likely to take 30 years to show real progress, because the older generation doesn't know how to support their children in this new kind of education. Parents asked me all the time, especially the mothers about their daughters, 'I want her to succeed in school, I want to help her, but how can I do that? I'm not even literate in Arabic, I don't understand these things she's studying.' It will be the next generation of students who truly benefit from the reforms of this generation.
But the advantage is longevity. A democracy achieved gradually, from the bottom up, from the first grade up, is more likely to be successful over the long term than one imposed from without. Don't take my word for it. Take Ghandi's:
"The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."