Loss and Purpose

Dear Colleagues,

I wrote you yesterday about the sudden death of our dear colleague Vivek Chopra, our regional director for technology and engineering. We’re all still absorbing the news. This is a great loss. Deirdre Kline from our U.S. leadership team arrived yesterday in the UAE. I’m grateful she’s there with our local team. We’ll continue to offer our support.

Over the past two decades Vivek worked faithfully for MBN. He started as a young man. We had a number of virtual exchanges. We met in-person during my recent trip to Dubai. I’m stunned he’s gone. Take not a moment in this life for granted.

Never forget how privileged we are to have work of such meaning and purpose. And in times like these. We’re funded by the U.S. Congress and granted full editorial independence— how else to be credible amidst the tsunami of disinformation and manipulation? — in order to provide millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa with accurate and responsible information about America, about human rights in the region, and about the malign influence of the world’s leading authoritarians — China, Russia, and Iran.

We’re not an advocacy group. We’re certainly not here to impose anything on anyone. We’re a media organization — but one with a compass. We believe in decent accountable government, rule of law, political pluralism, tolerance, and respect for diversity.

Times Like These

It can seem like the world is upside down.

Last week, the United States sanctioned a network involved in selling oil to the Assad regime and China, generating revenue for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. The sanctions targeted twenty six companies, individuals, and vessels associated with the al Qaterji Company, a company that finances a militia in Syria that’s connected to a Hezbollah unit specializing in arms smuggling.

Corruption and thuggery flourish. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the al Qaterji Company uses Beirut and Istanbul as hubs for its money laundering.

Digital authoritarianism is brazen. A UK citizen faces a year in prison after he posted a critical Google review of a small business in one of our countries. The gentleman in question posted the review back home. When he returned for a holiday to the country in question he was arrested and indicted on slander charges under the nation’s cybercrime laws.

Tools of old-fashioned tyranny are making a comeback. In Iran, we’ve reported how the regime has been transferring dissidents — women in particular— to psychiatric hospitals. The practice has become routine since the eruption of the Women, Life, Freedom protests that erupted in 2022.

During Soviet Communism, dissent was defined both as a criminal act and symptom of mental illness. “Sluggish schizophrenia” became a formal diagnosis. “A crime,” said Krushchev, “is a deviation from the generally recognized standards of behavior, frequently caused by a mental disorder.” Today, China uses psychiatry in a systemic way for political purposes.

America Today

America seems upside down. Polarization, fragmentation, and sectarianism are getting worse . In much of our political discourse, narratives trump facts. Striving for truth is losing currency. Demagogues feast on grievance.

Find ways to change pace and maintain perspective. I’m reading history from another turbulent period — and finding distraction in jazz. In mid-November 1961, New Orleans Mayor Vic Schiro started New Orleans Jazz Week. The city’s first New Orleans Jazz Museum opened at 1017 Dumaine Street in November that year.

Those were difficult days. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides, a nonviolent protest campaign to challenge segregation in the Deep South. There was ample unrest. On Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Anniston, Alabama bus station shortly after 1 pm. A mob of Ku Klux Klan members attacked the bus with pipes, chains, and baseball bats. Violence spread.

Jazz was dissent, opposition, integration. Maria Golia’s book on jazz great Ornette Coleman (1930-2015) is dizzying and gritty history.

There was a time when Blacks playing in white music venues were revered, and threatened. Some clubs had chicken wire up on the stage to protect musicians from bottles thrown from the audience. There was white on white violence, too. In Fort Worth, Texas, the club “The Four Deuces” would have “three ambulance nights,” if that was the number of vehicles needed to transport the injured during the course of an evening. Here’s Coleman’s Free Jazz from 1961.

Coleman said he thought Forth Worth was rough until he got to Louisiana. He worked as a day laborer in New Orleans. In Baton Rouge, he was badly beaten by audience members who smashed his sax. “‘Cause I had a beard then, and long hair like the Beatles,” Coleman laughed it off.

Rule of law struggled to sink roots. A waitress named Dorothy at the Fort Worth Rocket Club kept a diary. Dorothy wrote of a mob man discussing “insurance” with the waitresses — two bucks a night, so they don’t get their arms broken. Dorothy’s husband Dick stood by, she recorded:

He was a very good shot with a gun. Every night at closing time at the club, he sat across the street in the shadow of a large warehouse, a loaded gun across he knees. He told me that if I ever came out of the club and found any of the mob waiting for me, or if they followed me out of the club, I was to hit the ground and he would take care of them.

*****

Ornette Coleman’s biographer Maria Golia is an American author who lived in Cairo for twenty years. She’s written books on the social and intellectual history of Egypt.

Vivek Chopra was our colleague and friend. He was a man of decency and integrity. Mourn Vivek’s loss. Honor and celebrate his life. Stay the course with our vision and values.

Sincerely, Jeff