Jane Novak, Hedgehog
oh my, I cant stop laughing. Faris is calling me a neocon hedgehog.
Its the fourth article in a week attempting to trash me in response to my latest article. The others are a little further down.
Hedgehogs in Yemen
By Observer Staff
Sep 24, 2005 – Vol.VIII Issue 38
In a now famous essay written about Russian novelists, the literary critic Isaiah Berlin divided the world into foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes, he said, knew many small things. Hedgehogs knew one big thing. A certain kind of reporter—the kind resembling a hedgehog—has been writing about Yemen lately. This reporter arrives at the airport with his One Big Thing trained and ready to ride. He leaves a few days later, unaware that reality has contradicted his Big Thing at every turn.The American Jane Novak is a curious cousin of this Hedgehog. She doesn’t bother with the airport. She delivers her opinions from New Jersey on the east coast of the United States. Another reporter, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trifomov, visited Yemen with his Big Idea four years ago. His book, FAITH AT WAR: A JOURNEY ON THE FRONTLINES OF ISLAM, FROM BAGHDAD TO TIMBUKTU has just been published in the United States.
The one thing these two writers have in common is their belief that Yemen is essentially Iraq – Iraq, that is, as conservative American commentators saw it before the war. As everyone now knows now, their views were unhampered by first hand observation and other useful tools in assessing political conditions. Nevertheless this view, that Yemen is Iraq, is the one they’ve fallen in love with.
Still, their articles deserve a hearing. Both writers find something of a police state in Yemen. Both writers find that religious freedom and press freedom and individual liberty are not cherished here as they are in the US. What is the evidence for such charges? In Trifomov’s case, there is a friend’s report of being followed in a museum by a policeman. In Novak’s case, the evidence is the arrests of journalists Khaled Al-Hammadi and Jamal Amer. Never mind that both journalists were freed several hours after being taken into custody. Never mind that far graver problems than the unfortunate plights of the two journalists exist in Yemen and that these plights bear no comparison to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Novak focuses on her one Big Idea in her most recent article, and tries to track it down.
Novak’s article found outlets in both local Yemeni and international publications. Some may have been unaware of the writer’s underprivileged position to comment on Yemeni internal affairs, others not.
At the end of her piece she makes a plea: if the US cares about human rights, she says, it should consider getting tough with Yemen.
It is the kind of talk that has sent shivers down the spines of many an impoverished nation in recent years.
No it sends shivers down the spines of the corrupt government officials apparently. Thus this week I am a Zionist, militaristic Abu Ghraib encouraging, anti-Arab, neocon hedgehog. All because I think the Yemeni people should have their full rights and an empowered democracy. This is the third article trashing me in English in the YO, in one I was labeled an extremist and the other called me a Yemeni man from al-Arabait, possibly funded by the CIA or the Yemeni Socialists.
Update: Dan has a photo of a real hedgeowitz, a neocon hedgehog. Thanks Dan!
