I knew a boy once in Rome. A good boy. A smart boy. Charming to his peers. I might have wished to emulate him. He did well in school, rode a motorbike, danced in discotheques, helped his mother through a difficult disease. Later, I discovered details: The boy was a criminal, a thief who sold drugs by night. He was not as he appeared. He had darkness inside. Beware, I was told, of what is concealed.
I knew a woman once in Chicago. A beautiful woman, clever and professionally successful. She had intelligence and wrote with immense grace. She worked for a rival organization and was coveted for her insight. Her manner, in the daily ways of the world, was beyond reproach. I might have wanted to be liked by her. Later, when she was suddenly dismissed, I was told the truth: She had embezzled money. She had also blackmailed a civic leader with whom she was having an affair. When I appeared shocked, I was told simply, "Don't be naive."
Three years ago in Hamburg, on assignment to cover tennis stars, I saw groups of Arab students. They usually wandered together, joking, chatting and lining up for action films. My Hamburg experience was repeated elsewhere in Europe -- Arabic-speaking men drifting through busy crowds. Who paid much mind?
Now, hindsight says that was not only unwise, but naive.
Among the lessons of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, writes The New York Times, "is just how easily terrorist plotters can blend in with innocent foreign students in large Western cities like Hamburg, making their detection so challenging even when the police have them directly in their sight."
Hamburg was apparently the meeting place for the terrorist cell believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks. In its report, The Times interviewed a Muslim man who recalled several of the hijackers as "seemingly nice young men." Another hijacker was involved with what the newspaper called "an active young woman who loved snorkeling and horseback riding." Yet another plotter was called "a dapper 43-year-old native of Damascus." The Times concluded: "The Hamburg cell members were indistinguishable from hard-working Arab and Muslim students seeking only to gain skills and education."
These are earnest but unsettling portrayals. I am troubled that hidden evil should have physical or racial properties, that Hamburg's "sleepers" should somehow have provided a betraying tip, a means through which to identify their motives that better fits commonplace notions of a lack of innocence.
German authorities are being blamed for failing to see the hidden enemy: duped by the nice, by the dapper, by pretty horseback riders; duped -- to paraphrase Hannah Arendt -- by the banality of normalcy. The same democracy that protects ethnic "seamlessness" dulled investigative prejudices. Now, apparently, it's time to reinstate the seams. It's time to read motive into suspect beards and olive faces In a region of maturing rightism, that's a bad-news invitation.
I recall once interviewing a star U.S. football player and his ailing mother in their working-class home in the Virginia suburbs. He said, "I hope my mom sees me from heaven." A year later, barred from playing by an injury, he shot his mother and himself. A policeman at the scene shook his head. "We don't look hard enough until after, 'cause that's the only time we can really see."
Christopher P. Winner's e-mail address is cpwinner@praguepost.cz
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