Ann Kerr and American values

My dear friend Ann Kerr, with whom Bill and I spent the past weekend in California, had a heart-rending op-ed in yesterday Christian Science Monitor that’s appropriately titled The murder of American values in Lebanon.
Her piece is a tiny out-take from the big project she’s working on, in which she has gone back to interview four Arab women who were her room-mates when she did a year’s undergraduate study at the American University of Beirut (AUB) back in the mid-1950s. These women are Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian. They are Christian and Muslim. They have all, it seems, led fascinating lives much marked by all the political turmoil through which their families have passed.
Ann is currently writing these interviews up into a book. (She has already published two: this one, and this one.)
Another thing that has marked Ann’s life deeply is that her husband, the distinguished scholar of Middle Eastern politics Malcolm Kerr, was murdered in 1983 in his office in Beirut, where he was the newly installed President of AUB. His assailants were reportedly Lebanese Shiite militants affiliated with a pre-Hizbullah network, who struck him (presumably) because he was a prominent symbol in Lebanon of the US, which gave Israel a green light for the military assault and subsequent, debilitating occupation of one third of Lebanon that the IDF had launched just the previous year.
Those networks were acting in a quite anti-humane and illegal way when they targeted killed and kidnapped civilians in Lebanon in those days. Yes, they were acting out of their own intense pain, after an Israeli military operation that killed an estimated 17,000-19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people in lebanon, the vast majority of them civilians. But still, that was no excuse.
I never knew Malcolm Kerr, though he was a good friend and colleague of my spouse’s– and he was always someone who had tried to understand the Arab viewpoint and worked for balance and fairness in US Middle East policy. Over the years, though, I came to know Ann and to love and admire her a lot. She and her four kids were, quite understandably, devastated by Malcolm’s killing. But they notably did not let that grief and anger become transformed into any kind of broader anger against “all Arabs” or “all Muslims” or “all Shiites”. Just the opposite. In the years since 1983, Ann has been a constant advocate for better understanding between US citizens and all the peoples of the Middle East. For some years, she led a program that took smart US students on visits to a number of Arab countries. She wrote and published those two earlier books. The first is a poignant evocation of Malcolm Kerr’s life– he grew up at AUB in the 1940s, since his parents both also taught there– and of their life together, the family they founded, and the grief the family suffered after his killing… The second book is built around many of the beautiful watercolor landscapes Ann has painted in various countries of the Middle East over the years…
Anyway, nowadays whenever we’re together Ann and I often talk for hours. We differ on some issues (pacifism, the value of the US-style trial system, etc.) But we agree on much, much more than we disagree on! Three or four years ago she persuaded me to join the “Leadership Council” of a DC-based organization called Churches for Middle East Peace, which does some excellent if low-key advocacy work on Middle East peace issues
Anyway, it was great to see her CSM op-ed. Its argument, incidentally, picks up well on the theme in this specially commissioned column that I wrote actually on September 11, 2001. That one appeared in the 9/13/2006 edition of the paper. It was titled Don’t let our values be a casualty, too, and it started like this:

    We may not know for many days yet how high the human casualties of Tuesday’s attacks will mount. But we should take care that some of our country’s basic values don’t fall casualty to the attacks, too…

But goodness, back then these were the main values that I listed as being in possible jeopardy: “Things like our capacity to reason calmly, our sense of caring for one another, and a basic optimism that – in spite of these horrifying acts -there are still things we can do to make the world a better place.” If only I could have seen back then that it would be not only those capacities in the US population that would be sadly undermined over the years that followed by our government (and the vast complicit parts of the news media), but also many fundamental portions of the US Constitution and the country’s respect for the rule of law, as well.
I guess I couldn’t even conceive of that back then.
So yes, all of us, inside and outside the United States, have reason to mourn the murder of many of the best of American values over the past five years.