Posts Tagged ‘damagnificent seven’

Covering the cop shop

Posted: September 14, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Over the past few years, my students’ attitude toward the police have changed dramatically. Even though a few of the students still profess some trust in cops, the vast majority have a distinctly hostile attitude, primarily based on recent reports about brutality rather than first-hand experiences.

“It doesn’t take much to see the absolute racial injustice with the police, so, if I were to cover a story with the cops, calling out that racial injustice might seem biased because I would be highlighting the negative, but it really is just shining some light on the cruelty and brutality that has been caused by the police,” one Black woman wrote on the class discussion board. 

A white woman responded: “I hear a lot about the ‘bad apples’ metaphor or people stating that there are good cops. My question is, if there are these good apples, what’s eventually going to happen to them when they are hanging around the bad apples? You turn into the people you surround yourself with. Again, the whole system is corrupt. There are no good cops in a racist system.”

Interestingly, a Black woman from an affluent neighborhood was one of a few students who defended the police. “My attitude towards cops is respectful. In general….I think highly of police because they have made it their purpose in life to protect others and to uphold the law. I know that at the end of the day if I am in trouble, I am calling 911 to help me.” 

Not only is it troubling that many of my students don’t respect the police, but somehow the budding journalists think they can get past their biases if they had to report about crime. Nearly all of the students think they should be fair and balanced in their reporting except when it comes to the police.

One woman justified her bias. “I would be reporting on police-adjacent topics through the lens of historically documented racism, corruption, and hyper-toxic masculinity,” she wrote. 

Historically, cops and journalists haven’t mixed well together. Cops don’t trust reporters to get the story right; journalists think the police try to cover stuff up. 

Now, however, a new chasm has occurred—one that I have been unable to bridge despite my best efforts. In the past, I’d bring in a police officer to talk to the class. But few students no longer want to listen.

9/11/1981

Posted: September 7, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

My 9/11 story started 20 years before the attack on the World Trade Center.

On Sept. 11, 1981, President Anwar Sadat expelled me from Egypt because I reported about his troubles with Islamic fundamentalists.

After he signed a peace treaty with Israel, Sadat faced various threats from his fellow Arabs, but the most serious one came from the mosques in Egypt.

Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as the “blind sheik,” issued a fatwa against Sadat, who imprisoned about 1,500 of the sheik’s followers from a group known as Al-Jama’s al-Islamiyya, or “The Islamic Group.”

As a reporter for ABC News in Cairo, I interviewed some of Abdel-Rahman’s followers, who began widespread demonstrations after the arrests in September 1981. At a news conference shortly after that, Sadat told me, “If this were not a democracy, I would have you shot!”

The next day, I was ushered to the airport, where I boarded an Egyptian Air flight to Rome. I was the only passenger.

Less than a month later, Sadat died in an assassination carried out by Islamic fundamentalists.

The Egyptians arrested a lot of bad guys but eventually left them go free. Among the Islamists jailed after the Sadat assassination was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a confidante and colleague of the blind sheik. Together, he and Abdel-Rahman, who spent three years in Egyptian jails, spread the beliefs to the prisoners of what would become al-Qaeda.

Although many of al-Qaeda’s followers came from the war with the Soviets in Afghanistan, many more came from the prisoners held for the assassination plot against Sadat.

Al-Zawahiri received a three-year sentence for dealing in weapons and left prison in 1984. As a top leader in a key Islamist terrorist organization in Egypt, al-Zawahiri eventually joined forces with bin Laden and served as the second-in-command of al-Qaeda. He rose to head the organization when bin Laden was killed in 2011.

After Abdel-Rahman was found not guilty in the trials that accompanied the investigations into the attack on Sadat, the sheik made his way to Afghanistan, where he became a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden. In 1990, Abdel-Rahman set up shop at a mosque in New Jersey. There, he helped plan the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center for which he was convicted and spent the rest of his life in a U.S. prison.

I saw the 1993 attack as a significant escalation of radical Islam, and I tried to convince my bosses at ABC News to create an investigative team to look at the bombing. “Only four people died,” the executive producer of 20/20 told me. That disconnect between my analysis and that of ABC started me thinking that it was time to leave journalism, which I did a few months later.

As it turned out, the organizer of the 1993 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was so frustrated by the mission’s failure that he became obsessed with trying again. That’s one of the reasons he chose the World Trade Center on 9/11.

I often wondered if it would have done any good if ABC had backed my desire to investigate the 1993 bombing.

So, as Paul Harvey used to say, “Now you know the rest of the story.” At least my little piece of the story.  

More friends gone too soon!

Posted: August 30, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

I never really understood why my father turned first to the obituary page in his later years.

Now I get it.

I have seen many friends die in the past few months, including four remarkable women who played significant roles in my youth. It’s worth noting that none died from COVID-19. Although I don’t have any proof, it’s conceivable that they couldn’t get the proper treatments because so much of the medical community focused on the pandemic and not other illnesses.

Lynn Langway served as my teacher at Northwestern University and helped me get a job at Newsweek. She worked Newsweek for more than a decade, rising to the level of senior editor. Later, she became executive editor of Ladies’ Home Journal. Although we kept in touch over the years, we parted company over the 2016 election. I’m sorry that politics stood between us upon her death. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnlangway/

Ann Bartsch, the wife of the best man at my wedding, was among the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University—an honor I also held from a far less competitive university. Ann attended law school at the University of Chicago, where he met Doug Blomgren, my roommate in Chicago. 

Ann worked mainly with low-income and elderly clients in Oregon, her home and where Doug also practiced law. She served as the chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Legal Services for the Poor. See her obituary here.

I wrote about two others who died recently in my 2011 book, Flyover Country, which chronicled the lives of my high school class, which graduated in 1969 from Lincoln High School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Barbara Sidlo Hughes was my first girlfriend. We dated in our sophomore year, but she tired of my endless weekends on the road with my rock ‘n’ roll band. 

Upon graduation from Drake University, Barbara became a flight attendant for TWA, where she met her husband, Don. Eventually, the couple and their children moved to California, where she cared for her daughter, whose health issues kept her in a wheelchair much of the time. When her daughter was able to attend college, Barbara started teaching elementary school, where she helped students—many the sons and daughters of immigrants–for more than 20 years. See her obituary here.

Mary Hrdy Kaczmarek was my second girlfriend. We dated in our senior year and later at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. We broke up after two years—a parting that angered Mary for many years. Alas, that divide never narrowed, and I blame myself that we never reconciled. 

She met her husband Norman, a physician, in Danville, Pennsylvania, which ironically is about a 30-minute drive from where I now live. 

Mary first worked as a medical social worker, then helped establish and manage her husband’s medical practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. See her obituary here.

All of these talented women are gone far too soon! 

A proud slice of Americana

Posted: August 10, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Vietnam veteran Bill Poulton stood on the bandstand erected on his farm in Muncy, Pennsylvania, and asked the several hundred spectators to stand.  

With almost military precision, the assembled crowd rose, placed their hands over their hearts, looked upward to the American flag nearby, and said the pledge of allegiance. 

I hadn’t seen such a display of unity and patriotism in many years. It was a striking reminder that my wife and I had chosen well when we decided to leave the woke environment of Philadelphia and move to Muncy, a town of 2,500 people in central Pennsylvania. 

After the pledge, the crowd settled back into their lawn chairs to listen to The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra perform a collection of old American tunes from around the turn of the 20th century.  

Nearby, Boy Scouts sold hot dogs to raise money for their troop, and the Muncy High School band and choir offered burgers at another stand. The Muncy Historical Society provided free popcorn. 

“It was a slice of Americana,” one of the organizers told us. Norman Rockwell couldn’t have put it any better, and the scene just a few blocks away from our home was reminiscent of a Rockwell drawing.  

Rick Benjamin, the orchestra leader, provided background about each of the songs, including tunes from Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, and some lesser-known composers. Our neighbor, talented soprano Bernadette Boerckel, sang some of the selections, such as “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” by Gus Edwards. She led the crowd in a rendition of The Pan Alley Song Medley, which included “The Sidewalks of New York,” “Sweet Rosie O’Grady,” “A Bicycle Built for Two,” and “The Band Played On.” Muncy Ragtime Band 

As twilight merged into nighttime, the orchestra erupted into an encore by John Philip Sousa, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”  

On a cloudy, summer evening, this verse seemed particularly appropriate: 

“Let eagle shriek from lofty peak 
The never-ending watchword of our land; 
Let summer breeze waft through the trees 
The echo of the chorus grand. 
Sing out for liberty and light, 
Sing out for freedom and the right. 
Sing out for Union and its might, 
O patriotic sons.” 

And I didn’t see anyone wearing a bleeping mask! 

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