The naive hubris of Steven Vincent

More and more people are understanding the sheet foolishness of Steven Vincent’s conduct in Iraq. Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftwing journalist (and regular VFR reader) who went to Afghanistan and Pakistan on assignment in 2001 and was arrested by the Taliban as a spy, writes:

Steven Vincent can’t catch a break. Liberal pacifist Helena Cobban also says he was clueless (though for different reasons). I’m inclined to agree with her. Leave aside for a moment what a visiting American should be able to get away with while visiting a fundamentalist-controlled Muslim country. In practical terms, you don’t do what he did and expect anything less than a severe beating.

The advice I got for going to Pakistan was, “You don’t talk to women, you don’t look at women, you look at the ground when they walk by.

’People’ means men. At one point, one of my editors wanted me to get some quotes from Pakistani women about their jewelry being donated to the mosques to fund the war effort. I flipped on him. “You want me to TALK TO ANOTHER MAN’S WIFE? Are you trying to get me killed? Look, here’s how it works, OK? Women don’t have an opinion on the disposition of property. Women ARE property.” So he published that, in exactly those words, and the hate mail started rolling in.

And here are excepts from a blog about Vincent that Mr. Hechtman sent me:

In one of his blog entries, Vincent writes of one man’s angry reaction when [his interpreter] Tuaiz, given the pseudonym Layla, took off her abaya, a long Islamic robe, and sat in a coffee shop in long-sleeved blouse and jeans.

“He’s staring at us with the blank, malevolently stupid glare I’ve encountered so often,” Vincent wrote. ‘You have a problem,’ I snap … By now, I’m thinking, ‘What would happen if I punched this guy?’ Layla defused the tension by putting her abaya back on.”

Once again, Vincent’s quixotic gallantry appears desperately out of touch with the realities of Shi’ite-controlled Iraq. Picking a fight in a public place over an unmarried Muslim woman’s attire appears next to suicidal for an American journalist trying to keep a low profile.

… None of which for a moment excuses the killing of this man, which was barbaric by any measure. If local people indeed felt offended by the way he conducted his relations with his female colleague, there were hundreds of nonviolent ways in which they could have pointed out to him how offensive they found his behavior, and requested that he cease and desist.

But we should not be too hard on poor Mr. Vincent for his lack of a realistic grasp of Muslim realities. Wasn’t he simply following the uplifting, all-American message of President Bush, who keeps telling us that the Iraqis want and deserve the same things that we do?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 10, 2005 01:35 AM | Send