I was seated between high-level members of the Iranian and German Foreign Ministries. “You know that Bahrain used to be part of Persia?” the Iranian said. “It’s very important to us.” He went on to say that “the suffering of Bahrainis is of great concern to my countrymen and -women.” And then he added that Iran had asked the Bahraini opposition to participate in elections some years earlier, a revelation that surprised the German diplomat seated on the other side of me.
“They would not have done it if we hadn’t pushed them,” the Iranian said.
“So they do actually have influence on the opposition?” the German diplomat whispered to me in German. “When the opposition visited us, they denied any links to Iran. Unbelievable.”
The Iranian knew every main opposition member by name. He was “so glad,” he said, that human rights organizations were following the abuses in Bahrain so closely. He also knew the al-Khawaja family and said they had many supporters in Iran, calling them “great fighters for human rights.”
It was unsettling to hear him talk about human rights given the killing and imprisonment of protesters in Iran. I decided to press him on this point. “So when Assad or al-Maliki—both of whom, I believe, are backed by your country—commit human rights abuses, it doesn’t seem to be such a big issue. Is it because they are mostly hurting Sunnis?” I asked. “But then, in the case of Bahrain, your newspapers are full of articles, and so are the Iranian-backed channels like Press TV.”
He didn’t answer me.
In the summer of 2012, things began to change at Der Spiegel. The people who had hired me got new jobs, and the man who had told me years earlier that I might be mistaken for a Taliban spy was promoted. I felt as if I was in the wrong movie. It sure wasn’t All the President’s Men.
I was grateful soon after to learn that I’d been awarded a fellowship at Harvard. I happily set off for Cambridge, where I spent a year researching long-term strategies of terrorist organizations since the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring. I also worked with Nick Kulish to finish our book The Eternal Nazi, which was published in 2014.
But the truth was that I was in a deep crisis over my profession. Being a journalist of Muslim descent who helped track down the true story of a Nazi doctor accused of hideous crimes against the Jews made me fodder for rumors and accusations. The Arab Spring had also had a profound effect on what counted as international reporting, with one online outlet after another starting up. “Citizen journalism” seemed to be the new big thing, but I worried about what such activist reporting would do to what we call “truth.” If readers and viewers got used to a kind of journalism that told them only one side of the story, how would their views of the world ever change?
What would people like Maureen Fanning say? Would someone else ask again why no one had reported that the Arab Spring was turning formerly stable countries into security threats? That in fact it was contributing to the sectarian rift that was increasingly dividing the Arab world? That some of those who claimed they were on the streets for democracy did not share the democratic values of the West?
Soon after finishing the fellowship in 2013, I was in Dubai having dinner with my brother and some friends when I received a call from my sister Hannan. I realized that she had tried several times before, but the restaurant was so loud that I hadn’t heard the phone ringing.
“The special unit of the police was just here,” she told me. “They said there is a threat against your life.”
At first I thought it was a bad joke, but her voice sounded anxious.
“I swear I’m not joking. They said they have to speak to you immediately and left their number. You have to call them right away.”
I couldn’t understand what was happening. Who was threatening me and why?
I called the woman in charge of the German police branch that specialized in terrorism, and she explained that her colleagues from a different police branch and the intelligence services had asked her to immediately get in touch with me. “A very reliable source told us that there might be an imminent attempt to kidnap or even kill you. There is some talk about a Daniel Pearl scenario.”
I was beside myself. “Who? Why? Where is this coming from?”
“I can’t tell you much now, but it’s related to the region you are in now. It has some jihadist connection to people you interviewed before.”
“Could my family be in danger because of this?”
“It’s best if you come back as soon as possible, and we can discuss this in person.”
I tried to stay calm but I felt guilty that I might have put my family in danger. I also felt very alone.
I asked Hannan not to tell our parents anything. I flew back to Germany the next day and arranged to meet with the special branch people a day later.
The night before the meeting, I received an alert on Twitter. Maryam al-Khawaja had added my name to one of her tweets.
There was a link to an article she had coauthored for the magazine Foreign Policy that was a response to a piece I had written for the Daily Beast about Sameera Rajab, the Bahraini communications minister. Rajab was an unexpected character: a powerful Shia woman and mother of three with complicated family connections to the opposition. Al-Khawaja and her coauthor accused me of being a shill for the Bahraini government, using Rajab as an example of women’s progress when she was the exception, not the rule. “Mekhennet fails to question any of Rajab’s official policy statements,” they wrote. “She does not engage Rajab on her complicit role in the violations committed against Bahrainis. She misses the chance to do what journalists are meant to do.… Mekhennet’s article on Rajab does not come as a surprise since her pieces on Bahrain have a precedence of uncritically embracing state narratives. This is certainly not lost on the Bahraini regime, which previously granted her an interview with the king, then several months later, an interview with Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa.” Though I’m anything but a major player in Bahraini politics, the piece mentioned my name eight times. The authors had never bothered to ask for my side of the story.
Great. So now along with the jihadists, I have these other extremists attacking me, I thought. I wondered if this new threat had anything to do with these people in Bahrain. Sure enough, shortly afterward, one of my German intelligence sources called. “Did you see Foreign Policy?” he began. “You are mentioned by name, and they imply all kinds of things between the lines. This is not good, Ms. Mekhennet.”
It wasn’t as if I had told them to write this, I said. In fact, I’d had no prior knowledge of it.