To The Best Of Our Knowledge; The New Silk Road

We're seeing the reopening of the Silk Road, and it's really returning India and China to their past roles as our big trading partners. The fact that there's 2 billion plus people in India, China and India together, they are basically prepared to clean our clocks. So our China and India poised to become the world's next superpowers, and what does their re -emergence on the global stage mean for the West? I'm Jim Fleming. Today we'll look at the countries along the old Silk Road, the historic crossroads between East and West. We'll also talk with travelers, bloggers, and artists who are finding their own ways to reach across the cultural divide. Like the great Celestio Yamav, whose Silk Road project uses music to break down cultural barriers. What makes things work in our ensemble is the combination of two values, its virtuosity and generosity. The most important value in music is that you're working for something that's bigger than yourself.

The Silk Road was once the great meeting place between the East and the West. It was a network of ancient trading routes that wound through China and India across the mountains of Central Asia and the plains of Iran and over to the Mediterranean. All kinds of treasures were carried across Asia, jade and gems, incense and spices, linens and, of course, silk. This part of the world has always fascinated British travel writer Colin Thoubran. He made his first journey along the Silk Road nearly 20 years ago. Recently he felt compelled to go back, so he spent eight months trekking some 7 ,000 miles, traveling by truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, and he's written a book about his journey called Shadow of the Silk Road. I've always been drawn to the countries that we've traditionally in the West been brought up to fear. This part of the Silk Road, the far

north west, is a controversial Chinese area and then of course there was Central Asia, the old Soviet Union and Islam itself. And I went really hoping to follow something that connect all those elements that had always interested me and it was the Silk Road that connected them. The Silk Road is really the connection between East and West. Is that historically what draws us to that, do you think? Yeah, it was astonishing, much the greatest and most influential land trade route in history. It started well before the time of Christ and ended, perhaps 500 years ago, spanning the whole breadth of Asia from China to the Mediterranean. There is a flowing back and forth from East to West. Sometimes it goes one way and sometimes it goes the other. The Mongols came East to West. The Romans tried, I guess, to go west to East. Yes, it's almost always a flow east to west. The one we're familiar with in Western

history, that the barbarism comes out at the East out of Asia with its hands or Mongols and people sort of feared this great hinterland. And the people who went west didn't usually get very far. There was a Roman legion you talk about that had defeated everyone in its path and had, of course, taken on the Gauls and taken all over Europe and then disappeared as they... Well, this is a very strange story. The worst disaster to before the arms of ancient Rome happened in the Syrian desert when they were attacking the then was called the Parthian Empire, was the Persian Empire. And 10 ,000 legionaries got captured and marched off into oblivion and settled, it seems, on the borders of West and China by the Persians. And people didn't take much notice of this until another eccentric Oxford professor, some 60 years ago, bowing through Chinese annals, discovered accounts of these strange mercenaries who were fighting for Hunish chief and their habits of military formation and even military building of

stockades were those of the ancient Romans. And at the same time, the Chinese annals come up with a little settlement is recorded called which basically was synonymous with the Roman Empire. And so people got very excited about this a while ago and the local Chinese were investigated by journalists who described them as tall and fair -haired and that all this stuff about them being the descendants of ancient Romans. I, of course, had to go and investigate this. And it was actually fascinating this area because you did meet people with certainly wavy sort of ginger hair and these other unnerving pale eyes, pale green and sometimes even blue eyes looking at you from quite comparatively European faces, high -bridge noses and so on. And I began to sort of believe in this but the more I thought about it, the more flawed the whole thing seemed to be because in fact, you know, Beijing geneticists have come out and found that many people here are about 25 % of European ancestry but there was so much movement in this part of the world that you could take such tests

all along the Silk Road in this eastern half of it and you'd come up with about the same result. So I'm afraid the idea of Romans having penetrated into West and China is probably a fable. It's a lovely fable but I think it's any of that. How important was religion along the Silk Road? Did you find that the contensions that are so strong in the West are as strong there? You find many different sorts of Islam now. I mean, Islam, you realize, is just as varied as Christianity is. For instance, in the Far East of the Silk Road, you find these people call Hui who look indistinguishable from the Chinese at least to me. They intermarried with the Chinese. They came along the Silk Road in the seventh century and later and were absorbed but their descendants still practice Islam but it's of a very much more Chinese color than anything we're familiar with. But then as you go West, you increasingly find an Islam which is more conventional. You find the great Shia shrines of Iran. It's very complicated. The

more I traveled the Silk Road, the more complicated and interesting the people were. The borders were all strange and scrambled and some of them seemed irrelevant ethnically. You talk about the Great Wall in that context. It was, you say, built not to keep the rest of the world out but to try to keep the Chinese in an attempt at which it failed. Yes, it's a rather unusual interpretation of the function of the Great Wall but it does seem to have been like an enormous sort of definition, the Chinese love definitions, which was saying, it seems to me, within this wall is civilization. Here in the celestial kingdom, as they call China, is everything that matters. Outside is barbarism. You wonder whether that's still effective today. I mean, is there still, do you think, a sense that civilization is on the Chinese side of the Great Wall? I think there's a sense that among Chinese, a great superiority complex,

which is a cultural one, in spite of all that happened to them in the 19th century, the humiliations, for instance, under British imperialism, they still feel, I think, that their culture is special, unique. They love to say that our culture is the oldest, continuous civilization in the world. This leads me to another thing that struck me about your journey. We think of East to West as being Beijing to, I don't know, Rome, Paris, London. In fact, I got the sense that the West you're talking about is, to us not West at all, it's Iran and Iraq and maybe Turkey as far a West as you go. Yes, this is West and Asia. When it's talking about this, the greatest continent on Earth, Asia, and it spans Japan to Turkey, and the Silk Road traditionally ended on the Mediterranean. At this great town, in early times, in biblical times, it was called Antioch. Now, it's a smallish Turkish town called Antarctica, and you go a few miles

beyond it, and there's these ruins hanging above the Mediterranean. This is the end of the Silk Road. There's a silted harbour with nothing in it, of course, from which St. Paul went on his first missionary journey, and that's where the silk took off for the Roman Empire and later across the Mediterranean. But there's nothing there. It's a little eerie, and that was the end of my journey among these ruined columns. That's Colin Thoubran, who's been called the Dean of British travel writers. His book is Shadow of the Silk Road. Yoyomai is one of the world's most famous classical musicians. He's

also a man on a mission, determined to cross musical and cultural boundaries. That's why he started the Silk Road project a decade ago. He wanted to bring together musicians from different backgrounds, Turks and Armenians, Chinese and Americans, Iranians and Italians, not just to make great music, but to show how musicians can be cultural ambassadors. Yoyomai calls the Silk Road the Internet of Antiquity. He told St. Paulson that music can play a special role in a world torn apart by political and religious turmoil. Music travels easily because it travels light. You know, there's not much mass involved, and so people also borrow things very easily from one another. There's no culture in this world that doesn't have music. Music is something that a lot of people have going around in their heads all the time. So essentially it does certain things that we don't necessarily

know yet what the actual purpose is. It sounds like what you're saying is that music can touch people, maybe can break through those boundaries in ways that a lot of other things can't do, maybe in ways that just talking, for instance about politics, so maybe that would raise barriers that music can break through. Maybe that's a very good example. For example, I can name one word that's a very difficult word for people. It's genocide. That once you use that word, it means a lot of things if you're a government. It forces certain action. What music can do, for example, we could play Turkish music. We could play Armenian music. We could play Austrian music. We could have musicians. In fact, we'd like to say that we can present the whole world on one stage. In a way where the people that are playing are not to say I'm playing my music, but they're actually working really well with other people, which is immediately visible because there's nothing more deadening than to see people who don't get

along on stage. So you have to trust one another on stage. And how do we do that? We work at it. And one thing that's striking about your Silk Road recordings is that you've blended just an incredible variety of musical instruments. I mean, we don't usually think of the Chinese people or the Arab Ud as being part of the same musical experience as what we'd find in a classic Western orchestra. Was it hard to incorporate these different musical sounds within the same performance? I think it becomes hard if you don't have a guide to figure out what the commonality is. And of course, knowing that the Ud and the Lute and the Peepum all are from the same plucked instrument family that traveled and therefore was reinvented in each place. But I think beyond instruments, I just like to say

that what makes things work in our ensemble is the combination of two values that cannot be separated. It's virtuosity and generosity. There's so many people that if you're virtuoso, you know you're saying something. You have an ability to say something to say it really well. But generosity means that you actually are willing to share it. And I think one of the big things I've learned in music, the most important value in music is that you're working for something that's bigger than yourself. Did you ever have an aha experience the first time you heard an instrument that you really weren't familiar with? Absolutely. I've had a lot of aha experiences. One of them would be the Deduque, the Armenian

sort of, it's a short flute and it's just it's the most haunting. But I've had this over and over again hearing the Shakuhachi for the first time, the Japanese wooden bamboo flute that Buddhist use in meditation as well as in defense. Go figure that one out. And the Persian Neh, which is the cousin of the Shakuhachi, which is also a bamboo flute, it's used for meditation in Islam. All of these instruments have outside of, you know, a sound that you can say, okay, well, this is a G. Well, there's so much other stuff and air around it that it actually suggests everything that's in between. So it suggests the invisible. What you cannot see, what you look for and you think is there and you're actually trying to code. Has the experience of

playing with these other instruments as well as the musicians who are familiar with those musical traditions? Has that actually changed your own music? It's changed me and therefore my music in the sense that first of all, I don't think I ever really did think in categories, but even less so, I don't think in categories because I'm always thinking more and more when I hear something, I say, well, who's doing it and why? So it's made me more human and it's made me feel like you could drop me anywhere in the world and I will find a way to be there and to be able to function musically. That's such a philosophical perspective. It's something much more than that. Well, making great music is a byproduct, I think of a state of being or a state of thinking.

Looking back over your career, you seem to have an insatiable curiosity for exploring different musical genres, different traditions and I'm wondering where that comes from for you personally. I mean, is it something about your background? Because this is rather unusual for a classical musician, especially someone of your renown? Well, my parents have moved around a lot and I've moved around a lot, so that's one thing. It's born in Paris, parents are Chinese, so they have different memories of different places and I think I was aware early on that you leave one place, you know, there's a place space in your mind for that place that can be replicated by another space because if you miss kindergarten and you miss the songs you sing in kindergarten in one place,

you know, you can't recapture that. You just know it from another place and so that's one aspect. The second aspect is, you know, my profession as a sort of classical musician is to play composers over, you know, four, five hundred years span over many, many different territories and so the idea of representing people's thoughts in the sound world means that you have to figure out who they are and who they were, what they're trying to tell us, you know, it's a form of musical DNA composition is. You know, what makes Mozart different from Heiden? Oh, it's all from the same classical period. It doesn't matter. No, that's not true. They're very specific things just like you know what your one friend is different from another friend just because they're your friends doesn't mean that, you know, you know, specifically why you like one person and why specifically you like the other friend. Isn't there also a tradition, particularly when you're playing western classical music, to

try to get the right note? I mean, isn't that sort of what the expectation is? And I'm wondering if that's different once you start delving into some of the eastern traditions? Well, I gave up sort of saying I have to have to play the perfect concert and get the right note when I was 19. I spent a year practicing for concert and it was kind of perfect and I was totally bored. During the concert, I felt like, you know, I was not invested in it so that I could actually even get up from stage and leave and nothing would, that it would be fine. So what does it mean to be really invested in something? What does it mean to say I care so much about this that, you know, if you have a cold, you're sick, you're temporarily fine, you know, you can activate your immunity system to just get you through something. That's because you care enough. That's really the crux of what we're trying to get to is to figure out how we can get more people whether you're 10

years old or 18 or 94 years old to feel we're part of the world and that we really care about it. We live in a world of tremendous cultural and religious tensions. Do you think music has the power to heal? I know music has the power to heal but in different ways than perhaps what you're describing. I have played for people who were in hospitals or who've had Parkinson's and who actually would even momentarily get a charge out of listening so that they would be able to do something that they otherwise would not have been able to do. So music is a form of energy. I think there have always

been religious tensions. I mean, look at even within any religion, look at the wars that we've had. It is pathetic how much horrible things have happened in the name of anything and religion is one of them. But when you're saying something else is the other, actually if you look deeply enough what you think is the other may actually have contributed to you and you have without knowing also contributed to the other. So in fact part of the other is you. And so I think that's the part that I find so fascinating because it's not the ebb and flow of culture and it moved in one direction. It was always both ways and I think to have the skills and the tools to do that for an enlightened population would actually enhance the imaginative and creative and productive possibilities of any one place. That's a piece called Volcussion performed by the Silk Road ensemble and the Chicago

Symphony Orchestra. Yo -Yo Ma talked to Steve Paulson. Coming up we'll look at two great civilizations along the old Silk Road. Our China and India poised to become the world's next superpowers. I'm Jim Fleming. This hour the new Silk Road is part of the special series East meets West brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International. There was a

time long ago when Europe was a cultural backwater and China and India were among the world's great civilizations. Then Europe and America took center stage and those Asian giants receded into the background. Now China and India are once again charging ahead in the global economy and Western multinationals are watching closely. The fact that there's two billion plus people in China and India together, they share a Western outlook towards education i .e. they know that education is a stepping stone to tomorrow. They are basically prepared to clean our clocks. While Americans sort of raise their children to be like golden retrievers, they sit on command and they do as they're told and they're friendly and lovely. The Chinese are raising little rot wilders and the Indians are probably raising gray hounds. Mary Insalsman is a top trend spotter. She is the director of strategic content for America's largest advertising firm, J. Walter Thompson, and co -author of the book Next Now Trends for the Future. You know life is not a J. Crew catalog and I think that we think of the work week as a

40 -hour work week. Our friends in Europe think it is a 34 -hour work week and in India a 60 -hour work week is just fine but better still if you outsource yourself so there are four of you working 60 hours a week. I can envision your kids' tutors. I mean why would we pay $25 an hour for the tutor to come on their bicycle from the local university when you can go online with a webcam and find an Indian PhD. You'll do it for $2 an hour. Robin Meredith has had a front row seat watching the re -emergence of China in India. She lives in Hong Kong where she's a foreign correspondent for Forbes magazine. She's just written a book called The Elephant and the Dragon, The Rise of India and China and what it means for all of us. Meredith recently sat down with Steve Paulson to talk about this historic transformation. If we go back a number of centuries the Silk Road was the meeting point between East and West, the trading route where Asians, Arabs and Europeans interacted with each other. Do you see what's happening in China and India as a new kind of Silk Road for the 21st century? In a lot of ways we're seeing the reopening of the Silk Road combined with

the reopening of the spice route. I mean we are seeing two giant countries that for a long time have taken a pass on global trade and they are now embracing both globalization and capitalism at the same time and it's really returning India and China to their past roles as our big trading partners. It's worth pointing out that back in the 14th century China was a technological leader. I mean compass but of course in more recent. Even wallpaper. Of course for centuries the West has been the locus of new technology but I'm wondering if you think that will change. Will we see the cutting edge of technology shifting back to China as well as to India? I don't think we will in China. What China is really good at right now is copying Western inventions and making goods cheaper than Americans and Europeans and Japanese can't. No can they make things cheaper just because their labor force works for lower prices. Actually labor is cheaper in other countries

than it is in China. However China has connected most powerfully to the West. Now most consumer products not to mention big ones like cars are being put together in almost a pinball like fashion. Many pieces of products that we buy every day are actually made in different countries and all assembled in China. China has built roads and ports and highways and airports that can allow it to connect very efficiently to the supply chains of US and European and Japanese companies that then export the finished products from China. What about India? Are we seeing something similar happening there? Absolutely although it tends to be more service industry work that's moving to India and of course if you're in America and you call an 800 number you quite often reach someone in India. What's interesting though is it's not just call centers that are moving to

India. If you're in America and you didn't do your own taxes but had them prepared for you by a big accounting firm most likely your tax preparer was doing that when sitting in India. A lot of animation for Hollywood movies is now done in India. All kinds of jobs are moving there. Very high -end jobs as well. High -end research and development jobs, investment banking jobs are being moved there and I see it on my trips there all the time. You'll be driving along some bumpy Indian road to a suburb of say Delhi or Bombay. You get to an area where there are brand -new office buildings, skyscrapers, a whole forest of them. When you go inside those skyscrapers you look at the roster of companies represented and you'll find oh Microsoft is on the 8th floor and Intel is on the 9th floor and Nike is on the 7th floor etc. It's quite a dramatic change. And you're saying these are white collar jobs too. I mean these are important

jobs in terms of how companies like Nike and Microsoft are positioning themselves. Absolutely. These are middle -class jobs that were located in America before. Let me give you a couple of examples. IBM, GE, Microsoft, each of them have hired tens of thousands of Indians in the last few years. Accenture alone went from 800 employees in India five years ago to 35 ,000 employees in India today and that's more than the 31 ,000 employees that Accenture has in the United States. So the job shifts are enormous. I just also want to go back very far back in time for a moment if we could. In 1600, India and China combined accounted for more than half the globe's economic output. I was astonished when I came across that figure in your book and then you say that according to some economists those two countries remained the two largest economies in the world until the late 19th century. Exactly. And then they both were shut off from the world and didn't want to trade. India,

because of its reaction to colonialism, wanted to be very, very self -sufficient, so it pulled back from the global economy. China, of course, had communism, it virtually shut its borders and stopped trading with the world and stopped having anything to trade, of course. So now we're seeing a return many people see of India and China to their historical equilibrium in the global economy. There really is a return. It's funny isn't it? We're still seeing the silk road and spice route countries that we traded with hundreds of years ago returning to prominence today. And some economists say that China's economy will grow larger than the United States' economy by 2030 and that India by 2030 will have the third largest economy. And over the last couple of decades we've heard a lot about China as a rising power, not just an economic power, but a political power as well. And many people see this as the

great future rival to the United States. But where does India fit into that picture? Well, India, since it hasn't historically been an enemy of the United States, is often ignored in this discussion, but it shouldn't be. The fact that India and China are getting richer is enabling both of them to modernize their militaries. And both of them now have concerns about protecting their exports and also protecting their imports of oil and other natural resources. The interesting thing to me is that both America and China are rather predictably trying to draw India closer to their realm as a traditional role of the independent individualistic country. It doesn't want to be viewed as an ally of America or in the pocket of China. It is, you know, rightfully viewing itself as an emerging superpower in its own right. But I think we're moving from an era of unrivaled American dominance in geopolitics to

decades from now, a world in which we'll have a tripolar world. We'll have three superpowers. Forbes magazine correspondent Robin Meredith talked with Steve Paulson about her book, The Elephant and the Dragon. What do you think? Are China and India poised to become America's great rivals? You can send us email through our website at ttbook .org slash eastmeatwest. Coming up, we'll drop in on another country along the old Silk Road, Iraq. If you want to get a sense of how messed up things were at the beginning of the Iraq War, listen to the man who was once the chief US military spokesman to the entire era world. I'd read Iraq for dummies on the plane right over. I didn't know the language language I'd learned would get me through, you know, hi, how are you? Can I try some of the hummus? But not much further. And this was our face to the region during the

invasion of Iraq. I mean, it's absolutely mind -blowing. I'm Jim Fleming. This hour, the new Silk Road, part of the special series Eastmeats West, brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. The Silk Road was the historic crossroads between East and West. During its heyday, news traveled only as fast as people did, whether they were on foot or on camels. So what's the new Silk Road? The place where East and West now meet. What might be the blogosphere? Consider this story. An American professor

who struck up an email friendship with a woman in Iraq. In November of 2006, my friend, a professor at a university in Iraq, wrote to me by email. On the first day of Eid, I visited the graveyard where my father's grave is. I visited also my lifelong dearest late friend, the chair of a department, who was assassinated in the most atrocious way in August of 2004. Seeing her corpse in the forensic department, I realized they smashed half of her head by 33 bullets. After they tortured her by bullets in her hands as she was trying to call her father through her mobile when she was driving her car on her way to the university. I miss both so much, but I thought that the dead might be at rest now. The death we are craving and anguishing for. God bless you. Susan Friedman is a university of Wisconsin English professor who specializes in feminist interpretations of literature. One day in June of 2005, she got a letter from a graduate student in Iraq asking for

scholarly advice. Friedman started to correspond with a student and even said her books, though at times she had to rip them in half to comply with the U .S. Postal Service rule that no package to Iraq can weigh more than 12 ounces. Her email corresponded on soon put Friedman in touch with a student's professor and it offered a unique look into the dangerous world of Iraqi universities where hundreds of professors have been assassinated. Susan Friedman told Anne Strangehamps that her friend, the Iraqi professor, is plagued by constant stress. Daily life is very tough. She's lucky if she has two to four hours of electricity a day. She is not living in Baghdad. I'd prefer not to say where she's living. She's living in a city where there's a lot of violence. And so they don't have basic services at all. And I'll read from one of her emails that certainly gives me a sense of her daily life. She writes, I'm trying to survive amid all the crises. It's very cold and there's no fuel or cooking gas, benzene or electricity.

More than that, my health condition is worsening with a strange mass that is enlarging on my right ovary. I do not know what to do amid these circumstances. Just today, as I was in the gynecologist's clinic, a fierce attack against the police shocked us all, that made people lock their shops and move in panic and cars on wrong sides. Even the doctor herself was so much horrified as the American military helicopter started to bomb the market that was fraught with people in a rush hour. She concludes, please keep in touch. Thanks for you giving me a real sense of life. Lots of love. What is it like for you sitting in your quiet academic office and getting emails like this? And how often do you get emails? A great question. I typically get emails every day. And if I answer them right away, they're answered immediately. And it makes it hard for me to work. I'm emotionally very wrenched by these emails. And sometimes I can't answer them right away. I know that in some sense, my country's invasion

of her country is what opened a can of worms. And so, I feel the ethical situation as an American. So, we write to each other across a huge chasm. Is she in much danger? She's in terrible danger. For reasons I don't fully understand, professionals in Iraq have been targeted by other Iraqis for assassination. Academics especially? Academics and doctors and teachers. Teachers K through 12 and also university and college professors have been targeted. And hundreds have already been assassinated. Has she been threatened? Most recently, she has been threatened specifically with assassinations. I'll read from an email that I received in January. Thanks a lot for all your efforts. The explosion scared us here today. Today, the university received a formal threat to all

university professors, officials, etc. to be killed. And the university was in panic. I do hope that they will ask us to sit at home. Assassinations are going on. Today, I read four black obituary placards at the outer university walls carrying the names of the professors who were assassinated in one week. That's the first direct threat to her university, but more recently, she has personally received an assassination threat. And she wrote on April 16th of this year. I've just been informed by the head of the department where I'm working that me, him and another colleague are threatened to be killed by what's called the... I'm just not going to read the name of the group. A letter was dropped into his room. The letter contains the threat and a bullet. They say, if we do not improve our dealing with our students, this is one of the tens of bullets to be killed with. And then most recently, a little later, she writes, my dear Susan, I am in panic as two university scholars have just been assassinated. They got their threats a week

ago. They have the same text, the same source, the same signature. The news is there on Alchazear channel after one hour of their assassination. I have no other choice than staying at home. My brother brought the letter of threat to me at home with a seal on it. It contains verses from the Quran that threaten the infidel with severe punishment. So I was in a panic. If I hear from her for a couple of days, I think, well, maybe she's been killed. So she didn't go to her campus for two weeks. The university president threatened to fire the professors who didn't come to campus. Even though they were under death threats. Right. He said, we have to stand up. We have to have courage. And her family is begging her, please, please don't go. So she finally went back to campus. And she wrote me in an email that she was surrounded by her students and colleagues and friends hugging her, kissing her, telling her, please don't come to campus. You have to leave the country. Given this level of danger, is it

possible at all for her to leave Iraq? Well, it's very difficult to get into either Europe or the United States because of a new law. And that is the law that you have to have what's known as a G passport in order to get a visa to either the Europe or the United States. And most Iraqis have been issued an S passport. And the only way you can get a G passport is to go personally to Baghdad and get it there. Baghdad is very dangerous. And for someone of this professor's background, she is quite convinced that she would simply be killed, raped, and her body abandoned. If she were to go to Baghdad to try to get the proper kind of passport. So what she did was she spent a year's salary to give to a man who said he could get the passport for her. And she had no idea whether it was a fraud or a sham, but she didn't herself dare to go to Baghdad. And I got this letter from her in

the middle of March. My dearest Susan, how can I go to Baghdad? Our neighbor, a young taxi driver, a father of four kids was captured in Baghdad by the militias. Their family were in a panic looking for him. They were informed after a long and difficult negotiation with men in the dark that he was killed and his corpse was in Najaf. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to claim his body. They were led to a mass grave in Najaf where they could dig his body up and they brought it back to our home. He was disfigured as he was drilled from toe to top. He was tortured to death. The family, I saw his mother in front of their house, a few meters from ours, tearing her hair and beating her body, tearing her clothes, his sister and wife were doing the same. And their men trying to cover their naked bodies as the beer was brought down from the car. It was a scene I've never seen in my life. I cried for days. I was insomniac with excruciating pains and I

could not bear up with it. I remembered him when he was going to the university. He was very studious, courteous, and handsome. I can't imagine you can do anything after you receive one of these. It's very hard to sit down and prepare my classes and talk with students and go to meetings and worry about the things that we worry about and Wisconsin. Do you have to be careful at all in what you write to her in any way or do you have the sense that there are things that she cannot or would not write to you about? It's interesting. I have a sense that she doesn't censor her emails. She's very afraid to step outside her door, but she's not afraid to write these incredible descriptions to me about what's going on. So she must not fear that somebody's reading her email and that she'll get in trouble for what she says. Susan Friedman is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin.

She talked to Al Jazeera. It's November the 15th day one of a new era in television news. I'm Julie Goesh. And I'm Sami Zedan. This is Al Jazeera. When the Arab TV network Al Jazeera recently launched its English language service, lots of Americans were alarmed at the prospect of anti -American propaganda pouring into their homes. And when Josh Rushing's family heard that Josh had signed on to become an Al Jazeera correspondent, they were appalled. After all, Rushing had spent 14 years as a U .S. Marine. What's more, during the U .S. invasion of Iraq, Rushing was the spokesman for U .S. Central Command to the entire Arab world. He was the guy representing the American military to tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims. So how could Josh Rushing

turn around and join this foreign network? That's the subject of Rushing's new book, Mission Al Jazeera. When I first came across Al Jazeera, I probably knew the same thing that most Americans knew, that it has something to do with Al Qaeda, that they show beheadings, that it was anti -American, and I had to admit all my opinions were based on having never seen the network, having not watched a single minute of it. So when I encountered it firsthand, you know, and I'm not some lefty from Berkeley, I loaned Star Texas. My mom's on the city council, dad's a fireman, family believes in civic service. I've been a Marine my entire adult life. When I encountered Al Jazeera firsthand in their studios, I couldn't help but realize what I thought I knew about it was wrong. The way America was dealing with it was dangerous for America's own strategic interest. Now, did you really find that out right away because you were a Marine. You were a spokesman for the Marines. You were there to explain to the world the American purpose in being there, not

exactly the kind of position where understanding Al Jazeera would have been the first priority. Central Command Forward, where I was, was in Doha, Qatar. Well, that also happens to be where Al Jazeera's headquartered. So while I would go on other networks, everything from Fox News to Genoa in China, Al Jazeera was the only network in the world. I could literally go over inside their studios, rather than doing a satellite hit just in front of a camera aboard the base. So it was the only network that I really did get a firsthand view at how the network operated from the inside. And, you know, just even on the drive over to Al Jazeera, I was kind of scratching my head thinking, this is supposed to be some kind of terrorist organization and yet it's funded by the government of Qatar, which also supports the base that I'm stationed on, something as an adding up here. And how did you end up being the Marine who was responsible for Al Jazeera? Yeah, you would think like it would be some huge strategic decision that they made

long before, they dropped the first bomb in Shaqina, that someone at the Pentagon would have said, who's our Al Jazeera guy? Who's going to be the face of American Al Jazeera? That's what you would think happened. What actually happened was I wanted to learn Arabic. No one on this base I was at spoke Arabic until the Al Jazeera engineers came to set up their office at the media center. So I would simply go by in the morning and ask them to teach me a phrase in Arabic, and they would, and I would go back at lunch when they would have the best catering around. And this way, trying to just pick up a little conversational Arabic. Well, there came a point where there were only a handful of spokespeople and there were hundreds of reporters and producers, and we were worried about requests falling through the cracks. So we decided each network would have a point person. And I got ABC, the European Broadcasting Union, Genoa, and then my boss said, hey, Russian, you got a pretty good relationship with those Arab guys. Why don't you take Al Jazeera? And by taking Al Jazeera, because it was so large compared

to the rest of the Arab media, it also meant and the rest of the Arab media as well. So I guess that helps to explain how a relatively junior marine communications officer could end up representing the United States to the Arab world. Yeah, absolutely. I was the junior spokesperson there with no expertise in the region. I'd read a rock for dummies on the plane ride over. I didn't know the language language I'd learned. I'd learned from Al Jazeera, and it would get me through, you know, hi, how are you, and can I try some of the hummus, but not much further. And this was our face to the region during the invasion of Iraq. I mean, it's absolutely mind -blowing. Why does Al Jazeera have such a bad rep in the world outside? I mean, your personal experience, have it seemed to be fairly positive, fairly early on? No authority likes Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera's unspoken motto is to give a voice to the underdog to speak true to power. No one in power necessarily appreciates that. So it's not anomaly that the U .S. government doesn't

like Al Jazeera. Neither do most Middle Eastern governments. Neither does Al Qaeda. Anyone with authority is probably going to get a hard time from Al Jazeera. So they don't appreciate that. Well, the government here in the U .S. has put out a lot of misinformation about Al Jazeera that just flat is not true. The most stunning example is Secretary Rome's bill said a number of times in the press that Al Jazeera shows beheadings. Al Jazeera has never shown a beheading. Al Jazeera will never show a beheading. But he said it so many times in the press that it's become an urban myth in America that they do. How long were you at Centrum? I was at Centrum Command from January through July of 2003. What does that mean to the command then when you leave the Marine Corps to to join Al Jazeera English? It is the great irony that I receive far more respect from the military now that I'm without Jazeera than I ever did as a junior officer. I'm asked

to frequently come out and speak to the military not just the military but to senior officers and senior leadership about what Al Jazeera is, what it isn't, why it should be so important to them. I go out probably twice a month and do that. When you go in what's the one thing you try to get across? What they think they know about Al Jazeera probably isn't true. I give them a hypothetical situation that's happened countless times in Iraq. There's a mosque in a village in Al -Ambar province and the Marines are patrol and they go past the mosque and the Marines take fire from someone from within the mosque and according to rules of engagement they can return fire and they do return fire and they generally do it with a massive destructive force you know shooting up the mosque and the things on fire this kind of thing. Well a reporter will show up on scene an Arab reporter a stranger maybe an Al Jazeera reporter if they weren't kicked out of the country they'll approach the Marines and want to get a statement

about what's happened here. The Marines squad will say no comment there's no way they're going to talk to a reporter, particularly an Arab reporter and they will leave the area and go back to their base. Their secure base that no one can get inside or reach them. From within the mosque or the community near the mosque or down the street will come somebody to that reporter who says I saw it. They tacked the mosque. It was just innocence in there praying they're attacking Islam. They will do this while they are crying. So the reporter has this great emotionally powerful interview. He has footage of the mosque that is now on fire. Now there's also evidence cross street of some bullet holes in the wall. Now that reporter will try to go to that local base often a palace or something or a call that squad to get a statement. No one there will help them. If he is Al Jazeera no one will give him a statement and as a matter of fact it will probably treat him with this kind of condescending attitude. Now it's left to that reporter to make deadline with this story. Is he going to include the part about the holes in the wall opposite

the mosque? He won't if he's so frustrated with the military but the story will go out nonetheless with the mosque on fire with the interview with the guy crying saying that they're attacking the mosque and this will air 35 to 55 million Arabs across the region and might incite some to go and defend Islam. It could be a really simple thing instead of saying no comment if you're the guy on the ground say here are the holes in the wall behind us. According to our rules of engagement we have to defend ourselves. We think it's insulting that they're using the mosque in this way and that they have these weapons we found in the mosque and for more information here's a public affairs officer you could call and bag that that'll help you out and you can get the right story out there and I think it could be a real difference in the end of that story so I often share that hypothetical story with generals and I've actually had it click with a few. That's Josh Rushing he's now a correspondent for Al Jazeera International

his book is called Mission Al Jazeera. I'm Jim Fleming this hour the new silk road is part of the special series East meets West the series was produced by to the best of our knowledge at the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. For more information on to the best of our knowledge or this series please go to our website at ttbook .org slash East meets West.