Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [94]
It goes on like this for, oh, three thousand words or so and includes all kinds of misinformation, including the fact that Kofi Annan is the “secretary general of the United States.” I am sure he would be interested to know that.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Particularly when I see passages like this:
The first cases infected with AIDS in the world comes as evidence to prove what is told in the Hadith, Mohammed’s prophetic tradition. The prophet Mohammed has told us … the bad results caused by appearing and spreading practicing the adultery in one society. Declaring carelessly practicing such things bring God’s torture. God may send the plague disease as a torture on those people or some other strange diseases which are not known by their ancestors. So AIDS … comes to prove the prophet’s speech and as a torture fallen down on the humanity that keeps away from God’s right way.
The disease, she also informs us, “is not limited to the sexual odd people” and will spread more rapidly with the advent of the Internet in Yemen, because education is very dangerous.
I cannot possibly run the story. It’s a judgmental rant and contains almost no facts. I am sitting at my desk staring at the piece when Luke walks in.
“What now?” he says when he sees my face.
“Believe me, you don’t want to know.” What would Najma say, I wonder, if she knew that Luke is gay? The cognitive dissonance might just do her in. Everyone loves Luke.
“Let me see the story,” he says when I tell him.
I do, and a few minutes later Luke is back in my office, equally appalled. “Okay, I can see why we’re not running it.”
“On a technical note,” I say, “if AIDS is meant to punish homosexuals, why is it that lesbians have the lowest infection rate?”
“God likes lesbians better?”
“Funny, I always picture God as a straight man.”
“Straight men love lesbians.”
“Incidentally, what’s the Arabic word for lesbians? For some reason my dictionary doesn’t have it.”
“There are no lesbians in the Arab world. There are women who have sex with each other, but no lesbians.”
The next day, I call Najma into my office and ask her to sit down next to me. I am so nervous that my hands tremble and I hide them in my skirts. It is important to me that I do this right. I do not want to risk offending her religious beliefs or losing my temper. Keeping my voice as calm and steady as possible, I explain to her that the Health and Science page is no place for opinion or judgment. What you have written, I say, is more a sermon than a piece of journalism.
“I have great respect for your beliefs, and naturally you are free to think what you want, but you may not put your personal beliefs in this newspaper. The only place in the paper that should show any evidence of personal beliefs is the Op-Ed page.”
She listens and nods, her dark eyes serious. She does not argue or resist what I am telling her.
I go through her entire story, line by line, explaining to her every error. I explain which contentions go against science and which are simply un-provable. Education, I say, is much more likely to prevent the spread of AIDS than to increase it. I show her places where she is judging people. “It is not our role to judge,” I say. “It is our job to lay out the facts for people and let them make their own opinions. Let’s leave the judgment up to God.”
She nods and seems almost ashamed. We talk about the definition of the word “fact.” We discuss the importance of studies being conducted by reputable universities and medical research centers, published in reputable journals, and peer reviewed. This is all news to her.
And oh! I can’t help myself! I have to know what she will say! I ask her why lesbians so rarely get AIDS if it is meant to punish homosexuals.
This is obviously not a point she has ever considered. “I don’t know,