Sunday, January 6, 2013

Sunday Salute - XLII


NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent, Richard Engle, is a person I respect and admire.  He regularly puts himself in danger to report on an area of the world in turmoil.  You can see when he interacts with the people of the middle East that he has genuine respect for them and cares for them.  He brings a unique perspective to the reporting.  jcs

Richard Engel (born September 16, 1973) is an American journalist and author who is NBC News's chief foreign correspondent. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008 after being the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut Bureau chief. Engel was the first broadcast journalist recipient of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his report "War Zone Diary"
Prior to joining NBC News in May 2003, he covered the start of the 2003 war in Iraq from Baghdad for ABC News as a freelance journalist. He speaks and reads Arabic fluently and is also fluent in Italian and Spanish.
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Engel grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. He has an older brother who is a cardiologist.  His father, a former Goldman Sachs financier, and mother Nina, who ran an antiques store, feared for their son's future prospects because of his dyslexia ...

...On December 13, 2012, Engel, producer Aziz Akyavas and crew members John Kooistra and Ghazi Balkiz, were abducted in Syria. They were moved to various locations throughout the time they were missing. Engel and his crew said they believed that a Shabiha group loyal to al-Assad were behind the abduction, and that the crew was freed by the Ahrar al-Sham groups five days late

The war in Iraq is not just in Iraq anymore. It is across the region and Iraq is really a fault line for a power struggle between Iran and the Arab world, the Sunni Arab world. Someone is going to have to rearrange these pieces and put it back together.

That the idea that democracy is the solution, that over time, decades, people will look back and say, giving people free choice, giving the people of the Middle East a free choice, they will eventually choose moderation.
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Because in certain societies, not everyone, the idea of everyone being created as an equal is not universally accepted. There are other power structures in play.

People didn't want to believe that things were as bad as they were and now we're seeing an opposite situation. People don't want to believe that there has been some progress.

I have free choice. I can leave at any time. There are a lot of people over there who don't have that choice.


Previous Salutes
Maya Angelou

 Brad Pitt  
Bishop Desmond Tutu             
Betty White       

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