At a time when the media — and, indeed, the world — are looking ahead, warily eyeing what is next, journalist/author/scholar Michael Ignatieff is urging that the press explain what is happening by putting it in the context of history. In a talk on Wednesday at Harvard, Ignatieff identified three key moments that, properly explored, will help the media explain last week’s terrorist attacks.

• The kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the true starting point of Middle Eastern terrorism. That assault, in turn, was inspired by the Arab world’s humiliating defeat in the Six Day War of 1967 — a defeat that, according to Ignatieff, many Arabs saw as calling into question " their very masculinity. "

• The post–World War II alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia — a " pillar " of US policy in the Middle East by which the Saudis agreed to keep their oil flowing in return for American protection of the Saudi royal family. Ignatieff noted it is that deal, more than anything else, that is at the root of Osama bin Laden’s rage.

• The violent unrest in Russia in the 1860s and ’70s, touched off by middle-class young people who were disgusted by the corruption of their fathers’ generation — a situation remarkably similar to that in parts of the Arab world today. At the heart of Middle Eastern terrorism, Ignatieff said, is " a whole generation of not the poor and dispossessed, but the well-educated beneficiaries of modernity in the Arab world. " He urged reporters who wish to understand this generational war to read Russian novelists such as Dostoevsky and Turgenev.

" There are no experts on this subject, " Ignatieff warned. " This is too big a subject for expertise. " Still, Ignatieff brings considerable credentials to the discussion. Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, he is a veteran broadcast and print journalist. He is also the author of several books on genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, among other places, as well as a biography of the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

A passage from a piece he wrote for the New Republic earlier this year seems appropriate to the moment, even though he wrote it as part of an essay on genocide rather than terrorism: " Most moral principles take root within tribal boundaries and remain confined by the tribe’s allegiances and interests. According to this conception of the ethical life, morality articulates identity and identity depends on difference. "

His Wednesday talk, at the Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, was an informal exchange that focused more on questions than answers. One of the most intriguing questions he said journalists must ask themselves is, " Whom can we trust when we try to find out about this story? " Expect much disinformation as the war on terrorism proceeds, he cautioned — and he cited news reports that one of the suspects in the World Trade Center attack left behind a bag with the Koran in it as so ludicrous that it was almost certainly an example of officials’ lying to reporters.

" Sources will feed us things that they know to be untrue, " Ignatieff said. " You could end up being disgraced trying to do an honest job. "

Issue Date: September 20 - 27, 2001