Sherine Tadros will give you the same response she told the United Nations about why she wanted to quit news reporting to pursue policy making. “My job ends at the wrong point,” the award-winning SKY News correspondent turned Deputy Director of Advocacy and Representative to the United Nations for Amnesty International argues. “I ask questions and try to expose what’s going on. But then I leave and move on to the next story before anything is done. Before the refugees resettle or go back to their homes. I’m tired of reporting and moving on. I want it to be my job to do something about the suffering I’ve witnessed.”
Growing up in the UK, Sherine struggled to make sense of her Egyptian and Middle Eastern roots. “Like so many immigrants, I constantly felt torn between my two homes and identities and, as a result, often felt like I didn’t belong anywhere,” she recalls. “I talk in the book about how kids at my school called me a ‘halfie’ – half-British, half-Egyptian – and how different I was compared to them. Not just my dark hair and eyes, or my name, but also my everyday life. My British friends didn’t spend hours at church every weekend, or spend their evenings watching Arabic movies. And then came Al Jazeera English and suddenly my identity crisis, and the fact I was a ‘halfie’ became an asset – something to be proud of rather than confused about. The book is called Taking Sides not just because of my decision to leave journalism for activism, but also because of the cultural choices I felt I had to make.”
With a degree in politics from SOAS University of London and master’s degree in Middle East Politics to her name, her career as Middle East correspondent and news anchor for Al Jazeera English and SKY News saw her report from the 2008 and 2014 Gaza Wars, the Arab Uprisings, and the rise of the Islamic State group in Iraq. “I remember speaking to a woman in Iraq who had fled the fighting in her town and was living in a makeshift camp in another part of the country,” Sherine reveals. “She described the modest home she left behind, the small grocery shop down the road, the smell of fresh bread every morning, and the cafe where her husband and his friends smoked shisha. She spoke with so much love about this neighbourhood that we both knew had been destroyed by ISIS fighters and no longer existed. But sitting there in the tent, her clothes thrown on the floor and a small stove to make tea – that wasn’t her home and it wasn’t her choice to be there. She still wanted to return to her town, even if it looked very different and the buildings weren’t there. I think that for her, home meant where the streets and smells were familiar and where she felt she belonged.”
An Emmy nomination and her awards for human rights and journalism show that Sherine’s bravery in the face of fear cannot be called into question, but the fact she took this courageous step during a period of intense personal heartache after her fiancé left her on her wedding day proves the strength or her spirit. Today as Deputy Director of Advocacy and Representative to the United Nations for Amnesty International, based in New York, Sherine leads a team of senior advocates to lobby for the protection and promotion of human rights around the world, and Taking Sides, her newly released memoir shares her astonishing story: “The aim throughout is to inspire you to think about how to change the world, and make you believe that you can.”
Sherine’s memoir purports to be about “love, war, and changing the world” – and the way she can somehow find love in the midst of war is a testament to her extraordinary determination to be a force for good. “I think that love is the human part of war, and the driver for changing the world,” she reflects. “In my reporting, I tried to find points of connection between the people telling me their stories, and the audience watching at home, wherever they may be. Often those stories were about love, between a man and his wife or a mother and her daughter. That’s the way to change the world – to listen, to empathise, and to believe that you can and should strive to make a difference.”
A PERFECT MATCH
WORDS: Sherine Tadros
In this extract from her memoir, which explores identity, and finding her sense of purpose and belonging between two cultures and serves as a touching full-circle moment, Sherine recalls the day she told her parents – “who told me a long time ago that if I was going to put them through hell, I should at least write a book about it”- that she wanted to be a journalist
The first time I set foot in a newsroom was in the BBC headquarters in White City, London, the summer after the 9/11 attacks. I have a memory of flying paper and scattered worktables lying in the shadows of a manicured set, where perfectly made-up presenters sat at big desks, smiling into even bigger cameras. I was instantly drawn to the magnificent mess behind the scenes. I was there as a pseudo-expert to advise one of the senior producers on a long-format piece they were running about the Middle East. By now, I had completed my undergraduate degree and was still living with my parents while undertaking a master’s in Middle Eastern politics. I had become completely engrossed in the subject, and my parents encouraged my studies, despite the fact that they didn’t seem to be leading to a career.
Learning about the Middle East wasn’t just an academic pursuit for me. It connected me to my family and its past. I wrote my dissertation on Egypt during its socialist experiment in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when my mother had been forced to flee in the middle of the night after the government confiscated her father’s properties and businesses, rendering them homeless. My father, too, had witnessed armed guards force their way into his home and confiscate the cotton factory my grandfather had spent his life building. The soldiers wouldn’t even let his father go back upstairs to get his glasses. In large part, this period defined how my parents came to feel about Egypt, why they left, and why they never wanted to live there again.
Immediately after 9/11, I started writing policy briefs about Iraq and Al Qaeda for my academic supervisor. Suddenly, Arab experts were in high demand, and my obsession with the region was proving useful beyond the university circles I was used to. From the British foreign office to think tanks and newsrooms, I was invited to explain the politics and governmental structures in the Middle East to officials, experts, and journalists. I embraced using my historical knowledge to analyse the present moment, and relished being part of a growing conversation about combatting extremism in the Middle East. Questions about the strength of the terrorist group Al Qaeda, and how much of a global threat was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, were key to determining what would happen next. These were tough and complicated issues, yet some politicians were rushing to answer them and making big errors in the process.
I ended up staying at the BBC for most of that day, silently watching from the corner of the newsroom as the journalists stood seriously in small circles with pens in their hands, discussing what to cover and how. I heard the words ‘axis of evil’ a few times. It had been a few months since US President Bush had coined his famous sound bite, but it was still a major topic of conversation, including in the BBC newsroom. The US and its allies had invaded Afghanistan, and in Iraq Saddam Hussein had turned down another request from the UN for a weapons inspection. The Americans were making noises about another invasion. They were talking about how the entire region — my region — was alight.
On one of the big screens next to me, I saw an analyst discussing how it was likely that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the merits of going to war. At one point, one of the producers in the circle ran over to his desk, picked up the phone, and instructed the director to play ‘street pictures of Baghdad’ over the voice of the analyst. While he spoke about war and destruction, the viewers could see the faces of the people who would bear the brunt of it. Ordinary people, walking, shopping, smiling. Children playing, an old man selling bread.
It struck me that these journalists were deciding not only which information people were receiving, but also controlling how that information was consumed. It was as if someone had let me in on a secret — my understanding of the world around me was shaped by these people, the people who processed events and reported them to everyone else. They made decisions that influenced my thoughts and opinions, and thus to some extent my actions, as well as everyone else’s. The news didn’t just happen, it was made — and it was the journalists in this newsroom who did that. What enormous responsibility these people have, I thought. What an opportunity, not just to witness the suffering and injustice happening right now, but to alert the rest of the world, to do something about it. It was in that moment, sitting quietly in a newsroom, that journalism found me. Or maybe it was the other way around. Like many love affairs, it’s hard to say for sure who instigated it.
I went home after my visit to the BBC and announced to my parents that I was going to be a reporter — it was the perfect job for me given my passion for the region, its people, and the events that were unfolding. I described the newsroom — the giant cameras and the words scrolling inside the teleprompters, clever people sitting at messy desks covered in half-filled cups of coffee. My father asked me a few questions, but said very little. He was still eating his dinner, slowly taking the skin off his roast chicken, dipping it into garlicky yoghurt, and placing the chunks in his mouth
My mother was cleaning the stove, carefully taking off the burners with rubber gloves so that she could clean underneath them, thick suds coating the surface. She seemed engrossed in the task, but I knew she was listening; I could see her smiling when I got animated. Ideas like these were usually met with vague amusement from my parents. In fact, I don’t remember them ever saying no or forbidding me to do anything; they would just stay quiet until the idea passed. At times, I felt that they were proud of my sense of adventure, or at least my father was. But it was often hard to reconcile their encouragement of me to pursue my own path with their instinct to protect me and keep me close.
When I was choosing which university to attend, I had picked one that was outside London, which would have meant moving out of my family home. My parents barely said anything about it at the time, but I overheard my mother on the phone saying how worried she was that I would be moving away, questioning whether I was ready. Once, I heard her crying to my father about it, and even wondered whether she meant for me to overhear. Neither my sister nor my brother had left home until they got married. I was upset with her for not trusting me, but I eventually stayed at home anyway after not getting good enough grades for my first-choice university. I believe they would have let me go had I got in, but I would have felt guilty for leaving. Now, I was proposing another adventurous plan that would take me far away from them, but they probably didn’t believe it would ever really happen. “So, what do you think about me becoming a journalist?” I finally asked them. “Insha’Allah,” my father replied, not paying much attention and getting back to his plate.
Taking Sides by Sherine Tadros (Scribe) is out now.
