- I studied Arabic four hours
a day, five days a week, with my Palestinian professor,
Omar Ottman, in Jerusalem. We met in my house on Mount Scopus, overlooking the Old City, every morning. He would arrive with
his books and something from his garden: olives,
peaches, apricots, or a bag of pistachios he
would patiently unshell as we worked, and then push towards me. Yom fil mishmish, we would say, as we ate his apricots, literally meaning, tomorrow will be good times
and we will eat apricots. But given the long
tragedy that has befallen the Palestinians, this
phrase has converted into a wistful, tomorrow will never come. Omar, a polyglot who spoke
German, Hebrew, and English fluently, and would work
as a teacher in the court of King Hussein in Jordan, was determined, I would not only learn
Arabic, but the politaise and formalities of Palestinian society. He drilled into me what to say when someone offered
me food: Yislamu Edek, may God bless your hands. Or when a woman entered
the room, Nowar El Beit, you light up the house. Or when someone brought me a small cup of sugary arabic coffee,
Away Dime, a phrase that meant, may we always
drink coffee together in occasion like this. Omar had a fondness for
the Lebanese child singer Remi Bandali, a fondness I did not share. But on his insistence,
I memorized the lyrics to several of her songs. He told long, involved shaggy dog jokes in Arabic, and made me
commit them to memory, although sometimes the
humor was lost on me. It was armed with this
cultural and linguistic fluency that I first reported from Gaza,
carefully removing my shoes before entering the
cramped, concrete hovels in Palestinian refugee camps. Hovels that, on the inside,
were always immaculately clean. When a plate of rice or
coffee was brought to me, I responded with a
politaise Omar taught me. The fact that I had
taken the time to learn to be polite melted even the
most suspicious of hearts. It immediately opened
the door to friendships that would last years. In March of 1991, I was in Basra, Israq, during the Shiite uprising as a reporter for The New York Times. I had entered Kuwait with the Marine Corps and then left them behind to cover the fighting in Basra. I was taken prisoner by
the Iraqi Republican Guard, who in the chaos, whole
army had defected to join the rebels, had ripped their
republican guard patches off their uniforms so
as not to be identified with the regime of Saddam Hussein. I was studiously polite because of Omar, with my interrogators. I swiftly struck up
conversations with my guards. My facility in Arabic rendered me human, and when I ran out of things to say, I told a long, shaggy dog jokes, taught to me by Omar. Perhaps it was my accented Arabic, but my guards found these
jokes unfailingly amusing. I spent a week as a prisoner. I slept and ate with Iraqi soldiers, developed friendships with some, including the major
who commanded the unit. And there were several moments, when trapped in heavy
fighting with the rebels they shielded and protected me. One afternoon in the driving rain, I was seated in a Pajero Jeep, hot wired and stolen by my Iraqi captors during the frantic
flight from Kuwait city. We had stopped to fill our canteens from muddy puddles. All of the water purification plants had been bombed. The muck and rain water had already turned my own guts inside out. As I made my way to the brackish pools, I noticed a woman and two small children scooping up their hands to drink. I knew what the fowl water
would do to the these innocents, and in the cold downpour,
recited, W. H. Auden's epitaph, On a Tyrant, as a kind of quiet, unintelligible blessing,
perfection of a kind, was what he was after. And the poetry he invented
was easy to understand. He knew human folly like
the back of his hand and was greatly interested
in armies and fleets. When he laughed, respectable
senators burst with laughter. And when he cried, the little children died in streets. I would hear the Iraqi
soldiers whisper at night about what would happen to me. Once I was turned over
to the secret police, Mukhabarat, something they and I knew was inevitable and dreaded. That day came. I was flown on a helicopter to Baghdad and handed to the
Mukhabarat, whose dead eyes and cold demeanor reminded
me of the East German Stasi. There was no bantering now. I was manhandled and pushed forcefully into a room and left there
without food or water for 24 hours. (foreign language singing) I awoke the next day to the
plaintive call to prayer, the Adhan, as the first pale
light crept over the city. God is greater, there is no God but Allah. Mohammed is the messenger of God. I went to the window and
saw the heavily armed guards in the courtyard below. I did not know if I would live or die. At dawn, the women and often children climbed to the flat roofs
in Baghdad to bake bread in rounded clay ovens; I was famished. I called out in Arabic to these women, I'm an American journalist. I am a captive; I have not eaten. A mother handed fresh
bread to her young son, who scampered across the roofs to feed me. A few hours later I was turned over to the International
Committee for the Red Cross, and driven to Jordan and freedom. Where are they now? These men and women who
showed me such compassion. Who ignored the role my own country had played in their oppression. To see me as one of them. How can I repay this
solidarity and empathy? How can I live to be like them? I owe Omar. I owe all these people,
some of whom I did not know, the miracle of human kindness and my life. I am Chris Hedges for
the Emir-Stein Center. (calm music) - [Announcer] This video was produced in collaboration with Alliance of Virtue. If you wanna see more content like this, make sure to like, share, subscribe, and hit the bell notification so you don't miss any new videos.
