Meals with militants reveal human face

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Dining With Terrorists
By Phil Rees
MacMillan, 395 pp, 18.99 pounds


While he has yet to lunch with Osama bin Laden, British journalist Phil Rees has sipped and supped with a lot of people whose names figure on the watch or wanted lists of security services around the world.

Dining With Terrorists is a record of Rees' work covering insurgents, jihadists, guerrillas, militants and mujahideen from Ireland to Afghanistan, but it is much more than a simple chronicle of a reporter's brushes with bad guys. Rees uses his extensive firsthand experience of dealing with armed militants to examine the use, misuse and various interpretations of the term "terrorist."

BBC correspondent Rees has covered conflicts hot and cold all over the globe for the past 20 years. While Dining With Terrorists has its share of war stories and detailed frontline observations, Rees' real focus is examining the root causes of militant movements and trying to accurately portray the opposing sides in the world's many asymmetric conflicts.

The notion that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter comes through clearly as Rees records the motivations and justifications given by Egyptian and Algerian Islamists fighting repressive regimes, Basque nationalists seeking their own state and Afghan mujahideen battling first the Soviet Union and later the Taliban and the United States.

Along the way, Rees shares rum with Colombian Marxist guerrillas, tea and cakes with Hamas jihadists and fruit brandy with Kosovar and Serb nationalists in Kosovo.

Rees illustrates how the heavy-handed "war on terror" and the Manichean pronouncements of the White House have been used by oppressive regimes to crush legitimate dissent, driving the marginalized and repressed to take up arms. Most importantly, Rees reminds us that those who take up the gun are not the faceless, raving maniacs that mainstream media and government propagandists often portray them as, but human beings with thoughts, feelings, memories and desires. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly, Rees has met the enemy, and he is us.





Copyright 2005 The Yomiuri Shimbun

She was a soldier

Dear Michael Coren,

Having read your latest column about the death of Canadian Forces Trooper Karin Blais as the result of a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, let me be as polite as I can in saying this: Fuck you, you sexist moron. Try your "women can't serve in combat" horseshit on some of the women in the early Israeli army or the Russian Army in World War II or any of these women. You'll be glad of Canada's universal health care system in the aftermath. Trooper Blais was a soldier like many, many others who volunteered, was trained to do a job and died serving her country with honor. Like Capt. Nichola Goddard, and 115 other soldiers, she accepted the risks involved in doing her job and for you to say she was "dressed up as a soldier" is an insult to every woman serving in Canada's military. Women have been serving in combat roles in the Canadian military with distiction for nearly 20 years. She was a soldier and died like one, her gender had nothing to with it.

Update: Nice to see the Torch weigh in on this one as well. It is nice to see some on the other side of the blogosphere break ranks to slap down such an offensive troglodye.(H/T to Dr. Dawg for the milnet link) If only they would do it more often. Why does the Sun give Coren a platform? Why on earth is such an ill-informed and offensive douchebag on television?

And, yes, I sort of figured this would set the Skipper off, but sometimes you need to call in the big guns to make a point.

Among the many idiotic things in Coren's column is his fear that should things descend to close combat, Trooper Blais' armored vehicle, machine gun and sidearm would be no match for the long knives and heavy clubs of the Taliban. Uh....right.
He also seems very, very worried that such a pretty young thing would be raped as a matter of course. Given the well-documented tendency of the Afghan mujahedeen to take the idea of foxhole buddies to a whole new level, I strongly suspect that raping of prisoners would not be confined to female prisoners. (For further first-hand observation of the hot mujahideen-on-mujahideen action phenomenon, see BBC journalist Phil Rees excellent book Dining with Terrorists")

More updating: Once again proving that there is no situation in which certain right-wing douchebags won't feel they need to score points.