Journalist Hala Gorani on Gaza, mental health and reporting and Middle Eastern pride | Salon Talks

Welcome to Salon Talks. I'm Dean Obeidallah.  Today we're with award-winning journalist, Hala Gorani. You've known her  for years of anchoring on CNN, now she's with NBC News. She has a brand  new book out, "But You Don't Look Arab, and Other Tales of Unbelonging." Hala,  welcome to Salon Talks. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. So I've known you for years. You've  interviewed me a few times, this is the first time I get to ask you questions. Your  book's a great book. Congratulations on it

. Thank you. You have a line in there where you write, "Born  in one country, raised in another with parents from somewhere else entirely." Tell us about  your journey, how all of this makes sense. Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me,  and it didn't growing up. Now of course, I've come to make peace with my set of overlapping  identities. My parents are from Syria originally, born in Aleppo. They moved to Seattle, Washington  before I was born. I was born there. My parents split up when I

was six years old. My mom  moved to France, so I moved with her there. French became my native tongue, even though  English is now my strongest language because I've been working in English as a journalist  for 25, 26 years. And then Arabic, of course, is that language spoken at home and Arabic food  and going back to Syria before the war, summers, etc. I'm married to a German who's right there  sitting off-camera. I live in London. I don't know how many more. I was partly brought up  in Algeri

a. So there is so much going on that it's always been a lifelong search for me  to try to figure out who I am. And really it's a natural human impulse, I think,  to know what makes us who we are really. And have you figured that out? I think I figured out writing this book, I  figured out that the journey itself is maybe where I belong, and it's what attracted  me to journalism. It's what attracted me to being a foreign correspondent, to trying  to find my story reflected in other people and the

people that I cover. I write in the  book about being in Haiti and meeting this shopkeeper and recognizing the pale-skinned  man and asking him where he's from. When he said "Syria," I was like, "Brother."  In the middle of this post-apocalyptic, post-earthquake, miserable situation, recognizing  something in a perfect stranger in yourself. It's also interesting, in your book you write  about your great-grandmother who was in the Sultan Abdulaziz's harem. I've never met  anyone who had a family

member in a harem, but I don't think it's what people think. It's a  little bit what they think, but it's not exactly what they think, the way you explain it. Share a  little bit about that and your great-grandmother. Well, I did research into my family and  women are very poorly covered in history. We have photos of my male ancestors wearing  the Fez and the Ottoman military uniform, but women were rarely photographed. Their  stories were rarely highlighted because they weren't stories of typi

cal accomplishment in the  male sense. They don't rise in the ranks of the military. They don't become ministers of security.  So I went down that path and I learned that in the Ottoman Empire, and I'd heard this story  told through the female members of my family, that my great-great-grandmother during the  Ottoman Empire had been taken against her will kidnapped and then inducted into the  Sultan's Harem. This was not uncommon women who came from the Slavic areas of the Ottoman  Empire that ex

tended all the way into Bulgaria into what is now the Circassian Mountains  would be taken because of how they looked. This is the effect of colorism at the  time that still exists today. The pale, the blue eyed, the high cheekbones, this is  where some of my physical features come from. So your great-grandmother who was in the harem,  but also in there, you talk about there's the being inducted against their will. It's horrible,  obviously. But it's not like in the movies where there's just wom

en in a tent waiting for the  sultan. These women are educated in a way, intentionally, almost to be women of  society. I never thought of that part of it. It's very interesting because the word  "slavery" has a connotation in this country, which is a little bit, not different, because  obviously these women were the victims of a form of sexual slavery. There's no doubt about  that. But they were slaves and at the same time, women of society. They were masters  of other slaves, but at the same t

ime, they were the toys, the objects of the will,  of the will of the men, of the sultans and of the higher ranking women. So there was this  constant contradiction and pull in their lives, but ultimately they were not the mistresses of  their own destinies and that much is very clear. In your book, you go through the history of  Syria and the role that Europe's colonization played. Why was that important for you  to share with people the real history of a country that doesn't get much press  ex

cept during the time of the Civil War? Right. Well, because I think the history  of colonialism in that part of the world informs a lot of what we're seeing today. So  much of what causes the tension, the strife, the sectarian wars, some of those are the  responsibility, of course, of the leaders of the region. Not everything is the result or the  fault of the colonial history of those countries, but it is some of the starting point of what  led to where we are today. These completely artificial

ly created countries that essentially,  don't always make logical sense. Lebanon is an example of a country where you have a north,  a south, and a center that are three very disparate sectarian groupings cobbled together  by the French colonial masters and in Syria as well. And it's also the story of a time that  is, there's a certain nostalgia despite the fact that Syria was a French mandate, from my  mother's generation, where they were educated in French schools and the Jesuit religious  ins

titutions, which were the high level elite academic institutions in Syria. I talk about  that also just to, I think, share with the reader some of what makes Syria a much more complex  story than what we see in the news every day. And if people know the history, they  might have some understanding of what's happening today and they don't always. In my  family's side, my dad's Palestinian, that it was the British mandate of Palestine so they were  colonized by the British at one point. In a way,

they took control of it after World War I. But  you also share something else, especially you, I think, your book title, "But You Don't  Look Arab," which I get all the time. Well, I'm half Arab, half Italian, so I'm Mediterranean  looking. But it also tells you what people think Arabs should look like when they say that. So what  has it been like for you when people say to you, "But you don't look Arab?" Do you have  a set of responses you usually give or? I have a whole paragraph rehearsed. I

was born  there, exactly what we discussed here at the beginning. But I think also I try to tell people  that like any population, any ethnic grouping, people don't all look the same. It's not like  we're all flying in on a carpet and all come right out of Aladdin kind of thing. I like  being able to tell people that this part of the world is actually very much the product of  human migratory flows that have come in and out of what we call the Near East from Europe, and  then onto other parts of

Asia and the Far East for centuries. Of course, then ultimately are  going to have people who look like you and me. Well, it's mixed, but also I think so much of  our fellow Americans understanding of what an Arab should look like is from film and TV,  from the years, especially pre-9/11 movies. That stereotype. Where they were casting Indian  and Latino Americans to play Arabs because they wanted them to look  darker. When in reality there's a mix, there are very dark and there are very,  very

light and people don't get that. It's like northern Italy as well, you'll  have very blonde, very blue eyed people. My mom's Sicilian, so I'm both southern. We're  very close together. So how did it impact you as a journalist? You talk about in your book  a little. You go to the Middle East or Arabs see you when you're doing your journalism,  but you don't look Arab to them, in any way. No. Not to Arabs either. How did that affect you and how did it affect within the world of media?  Did it hel

p or hurt you? Well, look, I think you never know if anything  has helped or hurt you when it comes to your ethnicity or your origin, because nobody's going  to come up to you and be like, "You know what, your name's a little weird, we're not going  to put you in prime time." I don't know if it had an impact. I can only wonder if I had been  more typically European or Western in my name, in my origin and my religion, whatever it is,  would that have made the path easier for me or was it more of

an uphill battle? I know for instance,  I write in the book that I was raised in France, and when I was sending out my resumes and my  friends were sending out their resumes as well, I had in my "Other" category the fact that I  spoke Arabic and I wasn't getting any callbacks. A friend of mine from university  said, "Listen, if I were you, I'd remove that because it might not be helping  you," which is kind of abject when you think about it. I did remove it and I slapped on  a picture and I chan

ged my name from Basha, which is my dad's name, to Gorani, which is  my mom's name, which sounds more European, Italian, Balkan or whatever and then I got  a lot more callback. Anecdotally you can come to the conclusion that perhaps having  Arabic as a spoken language and a typically Arab sounding name in France in the 90s, I don't  know about now, wasn't necessarily an advantage. You are born in one place, raised in others,  you have this journey in the way looking for who you are. But I was th

inking back at  one point in your book you wrote November, 2017, you got to be the first  Arab-American to host a show on prime time on CNN International.  So there was still a sense of pride. Of course. You were still an Arab-American the whole  time, so why did it matter to you and why did you mention that in the book that  you were the first Arab, because you're absolutely true and it's a great honor  and it's a testament to your work ethic. Well, it's two things, first, people remind you  of

it. So you get a lot of, "I'm so proud of you," from people you've never met, Lebanese, Jordanian,  Syrian. I think it's a part of the world that's going through a major crisis and having someone  who represents in the eyes of people who are from there, accomplishment is something that they  celebrate and I never take that for granted. I think for that reason, it's a part of me I  don't forget. Second reason is Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-French novelist and writer, amazing,  said, "You recogniz

e yourself most often in the most attacked facet of your identity." So if  someone is more critical of the Arab side, for whatever reason, because you're lumped in with  terrorists because you're considered necessarily rejectionist, violent, whatever, then you hold  on a little bit stronger to that part of your identity, I should say, because that's where you  feel that you need to prove yourself the most, to tell people that, no, you're wrong  about this. How can hundreds of millions of people

all be cast in this same way or  described with similar negative attributes? Well, that comment really resonates with me  because pre-9/11 I was really a white guy, and I tell people, on September 10th, I went  to sleep a white American, September 11th, I woke up an Arab. But in the post-9/11 world,  as time went on, I get more and more touch with my Arab heritage because the demonization of the  community. And even with my faith as a Muslim, my mom's Catholic and my dad's Muslim, and  as time w

ent on I gravitated more to Islam. That was part of the demonization, you become  emotionally invested in what you're defending. Yeah, that's exactly how Amin Maalouf explains it,  which is it's that facet of who you are. For me, it's been more a question of trying to find,  to explore that facet of my identity rather than embrace it more. Because I've always  been very international, very secular, non-practicing in the sense of religion.  Though I can absolutely respect everyone's practice and

everyone's religion, whatever it  is. But for me, it's more a question of that, of going to try to figure out what the life of  my great-great-grandmother was in the harem of the sultan, something that I didn't necessarily  feel was something I needed to do 20 years ago. Sure. That's very interesting. So look,  you've done a lot of work in the Middle East, you've covered war zones. What  is it like? Is there an emotional toll at times when you're seeing  things that are just horrific? So I've th

ought about this a lot. I've  always thought of myself as someone who can compartmentalize horror in the sense that I  just came back from Rafah in Egypt where I covered an evacuation flight of children wounded in Gaza,  some of the were amputees, completely traumatized children. And you do that, you write the piece,  the piece airs, you fly back to London, and then that night I have a dinner in a restaurant and  I'm able not to think about that. However, I will say that I think it lives somewhe

re in there.  And with Syria, to give you an example, because Syria is where my family comes from, I think it  did in the end take a huge mental health toll on me in the sense that I started really getting  a lot more anxious and panicky at one point, and that was at the tail end of six or seven  years of really watching every frame of video coming from Syria. I associate those two things. It's not that I immediately react, I think there is a delay and when that happens, you put two and  two tog

ether and you realize that a human brain is not designed to be exposed to this much misery and  bloodshed every single day. That's me, I can only imagine the people who are actually going through  it and what they're experiencing and what mental health toll that will take on them. But some of  the most just hardened conflict reporters end up breaking down that are much tougher than me.  I'm not a conflict reporter in that sense that I don't go out and cover only war, I do a whole lot  of other s

tuff. But yeah, I think it does take its toll. And what I saw maybe on that flight,  it's just that it went to the back of my head, and then another little piece will come on top of  it and come on top of it, and one day it'll all come out and you'll start crying. For a while,  I couldn't watch a single frame out of Syria. When I was anchoring my show, I would take  my earpiece out when there was a Syria story because I couldn't hear any of the crying  anymore. I couldn't do it. I'd tell my prod

ucer, I'd be looking at them, "Tell me when the story  has three seconds left," and I'd put the earpiece back in and then I'd go to the next story.  There was a whole year where I had to do that. I think we all find ways to cope with  things that are truly uncopeable, like you shouldn't be exposed to it.  Then the drum beat continues. You've covered a lot of conflicts in the Middle  East. Is this in Gaza, is this different? It's different in that we are not in Gaza. There  is definitely a push f

rom my colleagues to get inside the Gaza Strip to be able to report. This  is not to say that the reporters on the ground aren't doing a heroic job, they really are,  and there is absolutely no doubt that their work has brought to light some of what's  going on inside of Gaza. But there needs to be independent international journalism  happening inside Gaza right now, and it's not. There have been letters written, appeals made,  and yet that's not made any difference so far. And who controls who

can enter? Well, you have the Egyptians  controlling on one side, Rafah, the Israeli government as  well, not allowing access. And neither one will allow journalism? You can go in ... the Egyptians, no. If you  want to go into Gaza with the permission of the Israeli government, you go on what's  called embeds, so embedded with the IDF. Okay. So you live in London now, when you see the  coverage of the Middle East of this conflict, specifically, the one in Gaza now, is it  different? I know you

can't watch everything, and maybe there's the equivalent of the Fox News  over there that shows a different side to it, but is international coverage of Gaza conflict  different than what you see here in the States? So I'll say one thing I've noticed is different.  There've been other Israeli military operations and conflicts between Hamas and Israel over  the last few decades. There was a really, really deadly one in 2014, but nothing  has compared to what we're seeing now. I would say the bigg

est difference is the scale,  obviously the destruction of the infrastructure and the residential buildings. There's that.  There's the obviously death toll and horrific toll of injured and women and children  killed as well. The biggest difference is that now the content coming out of Gaza is  on social media. So a lot of younger people, especially who are watching it  on their apps, on their phones, are getting another side of the narrative. So  it's a little bit different than 2014 where when

you were getting your news, you were mainly  getting it from "legacy media organizations." It's hard to say what the long-term impact of  that is, but what do you think might be the impact of these sort of citizen journalists who  are on the ground in real time sharing things? And what I see, for example, on TikTok, it's  peer-to-peer, a younger person in the States watching someone around their age in Gaza,  Palestinians generally, and saying, "Here's what we're going through," and it's having

an  impact on young people in the states. We see this. I agree and it's not just peer-to-peer, it's also  big media organizations in the Middle East on social media platforms that are reaching younger  people in Western countries. So you have another maybe view of the conflict reaching younger  people who may not have seen it before social media was so widespread and available. So what  that's doing is you're seeing a lot more impact on public opinion in the younger generation  of social media

users. And you see it very, very clearly. The folks my age, for instance,  much more likely to watch news as an appointment program, sit in front of their TV and stuff  like that. It's very different to say, my nieces who are in their 20s who are on  their phones all day and don't even own a TV, and they're seeing a lot more of the raw  unedited footage from a conflict zone. How do you, as a journalist dealing with say,  the intensity of a conflict with Gaza cut through what's misinformation or

disinformation? You might  have Netanyahu peddling a certain propaganda. You might have Hamas wanting to say things to help  their side. What do you do as a journalist? Well, I will say one important thing here,  and this is something that of course you'd expect a journalist to say, it is a skill.  You do what you did before TikTok invaded our airwaves and our phones, you check. You  check that this is factually correct. You check that it's the person who's quoted who  actually said this. Oftent

imes you'll see a piece of video that's three weeks old presented  as something that happened yesterday. You have to be careful. That takes time and it takes  skill. You make mistakes, don't get me wrong, we all do. When we do, we admit that  we've made them, that's very important. I wouldn't say covering this conflict, though the  scale is bigger, is different from covering Syria, for instance. I think that you have to be just  as precise and just as rigorous as when you do anything else. Again

, I'll go back to saying  that the journalists on the ground who have been feeding us some of this content, without  them a lot of this work would be impossible. The big media organizations do have production  teams that they used to work with before October 7th who are still continuing to do the  work on the ground. So there's also that. It's interesting how younger people, but also,  it's also because I studied the polls so much, you have younger people who  view this conflict differently, but

also older Black people and middle-aged  Black people are viewing this in the same way that younger people of all different  backgrounds and they're not watching TikTok. It's just I think they come to  the conflict with a different mindset. Sure, yeah. Let's talk to 2024 before we wrap up here. You  wrote about covering Trump. I like this very much. You said, "I had covered dictators and I  had covered presidents and democracies before, but never a man with autocratic tendencies  in a democracy

." So what does the media do in 2024 covering a guy who will be the GOP  nominee, barring something we can't expect, he'll be the nominee. They have to  cover him, but the guy aspires to be a dictator. He's running on retribution.  He's pledged to use his DOJ to go after Biden and critics. It's things we've never  seen before. So what do you do in the media? Listen, I do not envy my friends in U.S.  Political journalism because it is such a tough job because it involves constant fact  checking.

And so literally, that becomes almost all you do. All you do is fact check, fact  check, fact check. My type of journalism, I'm not as interested in interviewing senators  and congresspeople. I'm interested in going to the places in the U.S. where there are lots of  people who vote for somebody like Donald Trump. I want to figure out what's going on. I think  the more we have that, and I think the more we understand the impulses that lead people, also,  what is it that is leading to such a mistr

ust of the mainstream of the establishment? There  is something there in America and in other parts of the world. Look at Viktor Orbán in  Hungary. Look at the situation in Poland. Look at how populist politics in France are  gaining ground. Marine Le Pen is at over 40% approval rating in a country like France. What's  going on there? People mistrust establishment politicians, they view them as corrupt. They view  them as bought. They view them as not working for them. So is something like Trump

, is Orbán, are  they the symptoms of that or are they the cause of the problem? That's a question that I would  ask myself. I'm not saying I have the answer, I'm just saying that's the question I would  ask myself when I cover any extreme political movement, extreme in the sense that  it's on the fringes of the mainstream. In the years you've done journalism, have you  seen a political figure like Donald Trump in the United States where it's not just what he's  saying, his supporters, and I've

talked to some, will repeat what he has said, and there's  no ability to fact check? There's nothing. It doesn't matter. You can say, "Two plus  two equals four." They go, "Nope, it's five because Donald said it was five." And you're like,  what do I do? I have no idea what I can say now. So Trump is a particular character. He's like  a character that someone has created for a film that you wouldn't have believed existed 10 years  ago. But what he's saying is being said in other countries. For i

nstance, look at Brexit in  the UK. Brexit was always, the decision to leave the EU by the UK, always an emotional  decision by voters. It was not based in fact, because for instance, you could say, "Oh,  we don't want immigrants." But you could tell Brexit voters, immigrants bring more in  tax money than they take out in assistance and public assistance and it wouldn't  matter. So a non-rational, what I mean by that is a decision not supported by the facts,  cannot be then countered with facts.

Correct? Right. So this is the same thing I think in all the  populist emotional campaign messaging that we see in other parts of the world, where fact  checking is useful because it's journalistic and it's our job, but the purpose of it is not  to convince anyone not to think the way they're thinking. That's not our job as journalists.  Our job as journalists is to explain what leads people to vote in emotional ways, and that's  what interests me. But I do see parallels between the messaging h

ere and what I see in  other parts of the Western world and beyond, by the way. Look at other countries  in Asia where you have people who are whipped into a nationalist frenzy.  You see it in many other places. You're a journalist. Donald Trump has refused  to denounce Vladimir Putin when asked point blank about him killing journalists. With  Navalny, he's not criticized Putin at all, who was a pro-democracy activist for being killed  in a prison, while President Biden has said he was murdered,

he believes he was murdered by Putin.  What are your concerns about that going forward? Look, I don't think it'll be much different  from the four years that Trump was in office in a foreign policy sense. Domestically, that  I don't know. But in a foreign policy sense, I think it's going to be more of the same.  I think my question would be how will world leaders then react? Will they, à la Emmanuel  Macron try to placate them and be buddy buddy, or will they be okay, here's a world  leader tha

t we have to work against. I agree. It's also interesting what you mentioned  how foreign leaders will look at him if they go, "Okay, he won, but he can only be one  term so we just have to survive a few years. We build our own little coalition. We  leave the US out." We have a 22nd amendment, which I hope still will exist,  that he can't run for another term. It's possible. I know that in the same  way the Ukraine War brought European most, European allies together, is it possible  that if they

feel there's some pushback by an eventual Trump administration that  that will lead European partners closer together? I don't know, these are all  hypotheticals. We'll see. I don't know. We'll see. We have enough on our plate now. When we  get to November, we'll have another discuss. Well, Hala, congratulations on the book. "But You Don't Look Arab," Hala Gorani.  It was great chatting. Thanks for being on Salon Talks. I appreciate it and thank you for  tuning in to Salon Talks. I'm Dean Obeid

allah.