Salon’s Joanna Smith Rakoff subtly turns on the heat in this in-depth ’02 interview with Ronson:
http://dir.salon.com/story/people/conv/2002/03/14/ronson/index.html
Because Ronson’s books go off in so many tangents, often, I feel as if sometimes readers might easily miss an extemely relevent bit of info.
For example, Salon questions Ronson on his choice to agree to watch over some money which he is told will be used to fund terrorist attacks… Ronson admits in the book that he was torn over what to do. As a journalist, he wants to be objective. But still…how can you be objective in such a situation?
From the interview:
This morning I was on this Fox television show and the audience was shouting things like, “Why didn’t you just get a gun and shoot the guy? Why didn’t you just do that? Why were you such a coward? How are you going to help us destroy the axis of evil?”
And yesterday, I was on “Fresh Air” and Terry Gross said, basically, “You portrayed these people as ludicrous, harmless buffoons but you were wrong, weren’t you?”
SALON: Is she right?
My view is that the book is accurate. The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they’re human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous. It would be easy to portray them as one-dimensional demons, but I wanted to do the opposite. Just because they’re buffoons it doesn’t mean they can’t fly planes into the World Trade Center. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
SALON: Right, but there were a few times when you were in a position to do something — and you didn’t. At the end of your year with Omar Bakri, for example, he asks you to watch the money he’s been collecting throughout the year — money for Hamas that, as you say, “will go to kill Jews in Israel” — and you think about taking the money.
Well, that was obviously a really difficult thing. When I was writing the chapter, I thought, This is an uncomfortable truth about what happens with this kind of journalism — when a journalist gets too close to his subject. It was a moment about journalism more than anything else. But now, after Sept. 11, I can’t help think that we’re in the kind of climate where you’d actually want me to take the money. If I had taken the money I probably would be selling more books here in America.
