Previous SH: I am putting the finishing touches to my next psychological thriller, “Kind of Cruel,” and working on an outline for a TV series. In my head, I am also working on ideas for a self-help/popular psychology book for embarrassed British people, called ‘How to protect your physical and psychological boundaries without looking like an idiot in public’.
JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?
SH: Two things really surprised me while I was writing “The Cradle in the Grave.” After all the research I did into the real-life cases of Clark, Cannings and Patel, I ended up none the wiser as to their respective guilt or innocence. I wasn’t even able to make a guess, in any of the three cases. There was plenty of evidence to support whatever story a person might want to tell. That was a little scary. Also, I found that I had sympathy for everyone involved. Doctors who send innocent women to prison for the murders of their babies don’t do it because they’re evil. They do it mistakenly, because they genuinely want to protect and defend children. And women who smother their babies don’t do it because they’re wicked, but rather because they’re desperate and ill. If society was more compassionate and less harshly judgmental, more people could admit to the mistakes they’d made and there would be fewer unsolved mysteries.
JG: What would you be doing if you weren’t a writer?
SH: I would either be a country singer in the style of Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffith, or else I would be a psychotherapist – a bossy one, who would get cross if patients didn’t promise to leave their unsuitable partners and tell their controlling parents to get stuffed immediately.
For more on “The Cradle in the Grave,” visit the Penguin Press website.
Next More than dozen killed in Pakistan protests over anti-Islam video
But as tragic as it was in Benghazi, and today in Pakistan, where more than a dozen Pakistanis were killed and over 200 injured, the number of demonstrators has been small — except in Beirut and Khartoum, where there were about 10,000 each.
As an old South Asia hands told me in Pakistan and India years ago: “You don’t have a demonstration until you have at least 100,000, or a million people, in the streets.”
The demonstrations should be taken in perspective. When former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to Karachi on Oct. 19, 2007, there were, according to the BBC, over 200,000 people surrounding her caravan.
On Sept. 16, “hundreds” of young men, according to Pakistani officials, attacked the U.S. Consulate in Karachi. They were led, according to reports, by Jamaat Islami (The Islamic Party). The attacks in Islamabad were led, according to reports, by Jamiat Ulema-a-Islam (Party of Islamic clerics), both prominent fundamentalist political religious parties tied to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
While most Muslim around the world are surely hurt by the trailer, very few are so angry at the U.S. that they are demonstrating and killing fellow Muslims.
In Pakistan, demonstrators attacked a Pakistani Press Club in Wari, a small city near the Afghan border, injuring Pakistani journalists. Demonstrators killed a Pakistani journalist in Peshawar. On Sept. 20, in Mogadishu, Somalia, according to National Union of Somali Journalists, two suicide bombers killed three Somali journalists and wounded four others.
There have been very few demonstrations in India, the second largest Muslim nation in the world. Why? India is a democracy where people can vent their frustrations at the ballot box.
Islam means submission to God. Democracy means rules of man. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and other fundamentalist organizations, call democracy a western religion. The Islamists demonstrating are angry not just at America, but at modernity, at the secular world, and at democracy. They are few in number.
Jere Van Dyk, CBS terrorism consultant, is the author of “Captive, My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban,” Times Books, 2010.
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