ustxtxb_obs_2002_02_15_50_00026-00000_000.pdf

Classical Where Classical Music Goes to Party Join Golden Arm Trio’s Graham Reynolds and Brown Whornet’s Peter Stopschinksi, hosts of KMFA’s Classical Crossover, as they explore underground classical music, past and present, from Austin and around the country. Classical Crossover 11:05pm Thursdays and 2am Saturdays. Sh The Voice of the Arts for Central Texas. around the flag and supporting the leader, no matter what he does. That is catastrophic for me. As it should be for most Americans. And the Defense Department now can do whatever it pleases.We’re an unchallenged power in the world. What’s most frightening is either the indifference or the anesthetization of the American consciousness, which seems to say, ‘Too bad if they don’t like it. Look what they did to us. We’re right to do whatever we want.” TO: What did you think of Fouad Ajami’s New York Times Magazine article in November about Al-Jazeera’s being extremely biased, and a danger to the United States? ES: It was preposterous. Ajamiwho I should tell you is an ideological opponent of minewas extremely shoddy and I thought hysterical in his presentation. His conclusion that Al-Jazeera is anti-America was simply wrong. I watch. Al-Jazeera. There is a very large range of opinion, some of it proAmerican, some of it anti-American. The announcers present the news as it occurs in the Arab world, obviously differently from the way the Israelis and the Americans present the news, but why shouldn’t that have a status of its own? Why should just one version be the accepted version? And certainly it’s a much freer, more diverse range of discussion than in any American media. For instance, you’ve got much wider coverage than normally available here of what was taking place in Afghanistan before the American invasion or bombing began.A1-Jazeera had three or four people inside Afghanistan, one of whom was a casualty of the American bombing of their main office in Kabul. And [on news programs dealing with Palestine] they regularly put on Israeli spokesmen, many of them very fluent in Arabic. They’ll not only have Hanan Ashrawi [a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and the Arab League’s Arab Media General Commissioner] and the head of some institution in Gaza and some spokesman for Arafat, but they’ll bring someone from the [Israeli] foreign ministry, somebody from the Army, to talk about what the Israelis think they’re doing, and they’re given quite a bit of time. TO: Reading your writings immediately after September 11 and all the times you said that you as a NewYorker were shocked and grieving like everyone else, I sensed that you felt the need “to get with the program,” and show that even though you’re an Arab and strong critic of U.S. policy, you’re a bona fide American. ES: No! [Shock and grief] is what I felt! I felt it because it was so much in continuity with my own early life. I was a boy when [Israeli terrorists] blew up the King David Hotel, 300 or 400 yards from the house I lived in in Jerusalem. I was 10 at the time, and because our house in those days was in an area that wasn’t fully settled, you could see right down the slope to where the King David was. There was a huge explosion; I remember hearing a tremendous sound. By 1948, my entire extended family had left Palestine, all of them refugees. Later on, in the 1950s, [I experienced] explosions and plots and fires in Cairo, where my family was at the time. Then the Lebanese civil war, 15 years ago. So iSeptember 11 is] quite on the same continuum of horrible, eruptive events. 26 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 2/15/02