No Friends Left Behind

[posted by Callimachus]

She belongs in America.

American Reporter Steven Vincent and his translator Nour Al Khal were putting their lives on the line each day in Iraq to uncover the truth about sectarian violence. In August 2005 they were kidnapped by the very people they had been reporting on. Vincent was shot dead, becoming the first U.S. journalist murdered in Iraq.

This week, NOW's Maria Hinojosa travels to the Middle East to talk to Nour, an extraordinary woman who, despite being shot three times, survived. Like two million of her compatriots, Nour has fled Iraq and still fears for her life as a refugee in a neighboring country.

Now Vincent's widow, Lisa Ramaci, is doing everything she can to bring Nour to safety in the U.S. "We share Steven. She was his friend. He was my husband. But we both loved him in different ways," Ramaci tells NOW.

But Ramaci is facing an uphill battle, as the U.S. denies the entry of thousands of Iraqis like Nour who helped Americans in Iraq. In fact, only 466 Iraqi refugees have been permitted into the U.S. since the war began in 2003. What's next for Nour and millions of other refugees who are overwhelming cities across the Middle East?

On Steven Vincent's killing here and a follow-up from Reader here and some sorry examples of the anti-war reaction to it here.

If we must come home now, let's not come home alone. If you think this theme is becoming tiresome here, you'd better find another blog to read.

Anti-war blogger Richard Warnick also is fighting the good fight on this one. This ought to be something that transcends everything but a solid sense of right and wrong, obligations, and whether America really intends to continue to be what it says on that statue in the harbor.

Honoring A Fallen Journalist

[Posted by reader_iam]

UPDATED AT BOTTOM.

Judith at Kesher Talk notes that murdered journalist/blogger Steven Vincent is being honored posthumously by the The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which is conferring upon him the 2006 Kurt Schork award.

Both Schork and Vincent gained their reputations reporting from countries relieved of oppressive dictators but in transition to destinies still unknown. Like Schork, Vincent only found his true calling as a foreign correspondent in his 40s, and like Schork, he was killed in action. Like Schork, Vincent refused to strain his reporting through the sieve of ideology; he went where the action was and reported what he saw.

Vincent has been nominated posthumously for many awards, and it upset Lisa that he was never awarded any of them. But being honored in the name of a journalist whom he so much resembled is the best recognition of all.

Nick Gillespie wrote a piece in Reason back in August of 2005, just after Vincent's murder, which moved me deeply at the time and which jumped to mind while I was reading Judith's post a little bit ago. It's well worth reading now, not just in memory of Schork on the occasion of the presentation of a well-deserved, hard-earned honor, but as an opportunity to stop and ponder the ideals and values for which he lived--and died.

Journalism is a profession covered in self-congratulatory myths the way a barnyard is covered in stinking horseshit. It's easy to slip into routinized obituaries, especially about good people who die—are murdered—in the ugliest of circumstances by the ugliest of people. The impulse is to acknowledge the victims' sacrifices and their talents, invoke the righteousness of their lives and your anger, bow your head, wipe away the tear forming in your eye, and then get on with your day. That's a noble gesture—and a necessary one. It allows us to process grief, and if we didn't do that, we'd all be puddles of tears all the time.

But when I think about the murder of Steven Vincent—when I think about those last grim hours he spent in captivity, waiting for the inevitable bullet to his body or the blade to his throat—it's hard to wipe away the tear. His death gives us reason to linger at the gravesite and puzzle over many things. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to know Steven, however briefly and however barely—and, more important, to have published some of his material. He was that rarest of a breed in a profession that supposedly reveres shoe-leather reporting and a dogged pursuit of the truth, no matter where it leads. Unlike most of us, he used reporting to challenge his own beliefs rather than set them in concrete. ... [Emphasis added.]

((Thanks, Judith, for e-mailing us about the award. I'm a little out of touch this week and not making my typical rounds of blogs--or news sites, for that matter--and it would have bothered me to miss this one.)

Update: Here's what Callimachus wrote back in August of 2005 (which was before I started blogging). In an odd coincidence (because of one of Cal's earlier posts today), he mentioned Spirit of America in that post, because it happened to be the organization for which Vincent's family requested donations, in lieu of lowers.

Lost for Words

Anti-war left reactions to the murder of Steven Vincent.

Günter Grass wrote it best: "I couldn't eat enough to puke enough."

RIP, Steven Vincent

Killed in Iraq for telling the truth.

He was one of us -- a writer. And he was one of us -- the people who watched the towers burn on Sept. 11 and decided to change a world where that could happen into a world were it couldn't.

His Reuters obituary describes him as "an art critic inspired to write about war after watching from the roof of his New York apartment as the World Trade Center towers fell."

He did it his way. He took his skills to Iraq, and he set up base in Basra. He wrote online, at his excellent blog, In the Red Zone, he wrote a much-praised book by that name, and he freelanced his prose for big media.

It was the latter that got him killed.

His death came four days after publication in the New York Times of an opinion piece he wrote critical of the rise of Shi'ite Islamist fundamentalism in the southern city of Basra, Iraq's second city and the subject of his next book.

Those closer to the story than Reuters make the connection more explicit. The Times of London tells it like this:

There is speculation that Mr Vincent, who received death threats, was murdered in an attempt to silence him. Four days before his death he had written an opinion piece in The New York Times in which he said that the police force in the British-controlled city had been infiltrated by Shia Muslim extremist militias, who were responsible for carrying out hundreds of murders of prominent Sunni Muslims.

He criticised the British, whose 8,000 troops in the area are responsible for security in Basra, for turning a blind eye to abuses of power by Shia extremists. The whole city was "increasingly coming under the control of Shia religious groups, from the relatively mainstream ... to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr".

In his final blog, he wrote: "The British stand above the growing turmoil, refusing to challenge the Islamists’ claim on the hearts and minds of police officers."

How cruel, then, that, as the Times reports, Vincent "and his female translator were kidnapped as they left a currency exchange shop, within sight of a British military checkpoint." The translator, Nouriya Itais, was Vincent's fiancee. She was shot four times but survived. It also is possible that Vincent's killing was motivated in part by his romantic involvement with a local woman.

Reuters again:

New York Times reporter Edward Wong, who described Vincent as "a short, wiry man with a penchant for cigars," said Vincent had told him in mid-June that he was prompted to go to Iraq by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Iraq war.

"He said he fully supported the Iraq war, believing it was part of a much larger campaign being waged by the United States against 'Islamo-fascism,' " Wong wrote in a Times report about his death.

"But Mr. Vincent said he was also disappointed by the failure of the United States and Great Britain to enforce their visions of democracy here in Iraq, instead allowing religious politicians to seize power across the south," Wong added.

This is a serious problem, seriously under-reported by our media. Those of us who read Iraqi bloggers got clued into it a while back. But this is the British zone, outside the reach of American policies. And it seems the British have made a potentially disastrous wrong turn in dealing with Basra.

Be sure to read Vincent's last full post, dated July 26, on his blog. Let his legacy be, in part, your awareness of what's happening in Basra.

My blog-friend Tigerhawk has a good wrap of links on Vincent's killing. The National Review has a moving tribute. According to Smash, Vincent's family would like donations in lieu of flowers to go to Spirit of America, a first-rate organization doing good work in our names in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've been supporting them for years.