• BBC coverage
• In pictures: Lahore attacks
• Inside the Taliban

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MARCO WERMAN: This is The World.  There is a growing sense of crisis in Pakistan.  The country has been under pressure from repeated attacks by Taliban militants in recent days.  The latest came today.  Gunmen dressed in police uniforms staged three simultaneous attacks in the City of Lahore.  The militants targeted buildings used by Pakistan’s security forces.  There were also two car bombings in Northwest Pakistan.  Various attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than a 150 people.  The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool is in Islamabad. Aleem, what is the latest on the ground in Pakistan?  How are authorities explaining why they couldn’t prevent these very audacious attacks on several sties?

ALEEM MAQBOOL: Yes, it’s extraordinary how things have changed.  A couple of weeks ago things were relatively calm.  The number of attacks had decreased.  Now we’ve had eleven simultaneous days where things have been going on.  We’ve seen attacks in Islamabad, in Peshawar, in Swat and in Rawalpindi in the main army headquarters over the weekend.  And now these audacious attacks in Lahore, coordinated attacks in broad daylight.  Now, a couple of weeks ago the government was boasting that they had broken the back of the Taliban in their words. Well, they’re speaking in a very different language now. They’re talking about not underestimating the militants.

WERMAN: Many of these gunmen were wearing suicide vests and blew themselves up when they were cornered, right?

MAQBOOL: Yes, and that is what the government is saying.  They’re saying look we can put in all the security we want, but if there are people who have no regard for their own lives who are prepared to blow themselves up, then what are we to do to defend against that?  It’s very, very difficult.  What is needed, of course, is an attack at the root of the issue in Taliban territory in the tribal areas, and that’s something the government had been talking about.  They had been saying they were about to launch a new major offensive against the Taliban.  It just feels like the militants have tried to seize the initiative.

WERMAN: Now, the Pakistani Province of Punjab is next to India.  It’s the most powerful and populated province.  Some are saying it’s increasingly vulnerable.  Just how vulnerable are we talking about?

MAQBOOL: You raise a very good point.  This isn’t just about the tribal areas any more.  This is a very different problem now where militancy has infiltrated into the very fabric of society in Pakistan, and what the government is saying is they recognize that.  But this isn’t just their problem. This is a problem which affects the whole world, global security.  The most complex problems in the world they feel here in Pakistan, and they need much more help from the outside world if they’re going to deal with it effectively from the United Kingdom, from Europe and particularly from the United States.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad.  Thank you.

MAQBOOL: You’re welcome.

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• BBC profile

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MARCO WERMAN: Ryan Crocker served as the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan and also to Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon.  After 37 years in the Foreign Service, Crocker retired in February.  He says based on his experience in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, Washington needs to make a long-term commitment to the region.

RYAN CROCKER: I think we’re going to have to be very flexible and very agile in dealing with the challenges in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.  They were years in the making.  They’ll be years in the solution.  And I think the right focus is going to be somewhere in between a narrow or too narrow kind of terrorism strategy and nation building in a western model. I heard one Afghan specialist talk about good enough governments in Afghanistan as a goal.  It may never look like a western democracy, but I think Afghanistan can aspire to a level of governance that will bring general stability to the country. Therefore, protecting core Afghan and western interests.

WERMAN: What about winning hearts and minds there?  I mean, we saw how difficult it was in Iraq and you certainly saw that up close having been the Ambassador there.  I mean, Iraq had an existing infrastructure, greater potential, you could argue, for some limited democratic change.  Afghanistan on the other hand has been described as almost medieval and doesn’t seem to have the same foundation to put in those building blocks of democracy.  I mean, are we in a sense maybe wasting our time trying to win people over in Afghanistan?

CROCKER: I think it’s never a waste of time. Any counterinsurgency anywhere in the world has to rely on the population, securing the population, supporting the population.  Clearly in Afghanistan it’s going to be a different challenge than in Iraq for the reasons you mentioned.  The institutions simply are not there and the infrastructure is not there.   But other institutions are.  We’ve seen from the beginning in Afghanistan a reliance on the Jirga system.  So institutions are there.  They may be more informal, more unique to Afghanistan.  We need to understand them and we need to listen to the Afghans as to what will work.  There is a long history of violence and militancy in Afghanistan, which we would ignore or very grave peril.

WERMAN: But if we don’t ignore it, I mean is it an easy enough kind of sell to the American public to say we’ve had this long rocky military history of conflicts and we should be there for it?

CROCKER: Well, it’s important to do, I think, two things here in America.  First is to outline a positive strategy.  This is what the Administration is deliberating right now, what our goals are, what the means are that will be necessary to achieve those goals, what the costs will be.  And then to do a second thing, which is to talk frankly about the alternatives.  We walked out of Afghanistan once after the Soviet withdrawal at the end of the 1980s, and I think the fact that we left Afghanistan to its own devices charted the road to 9/11.  So we’ve seen that movie before.  I don’t think we want to repeat it.  But again, I think the administration has to lay out both the positive way ahead and then talk frankly about the alternatives which I see as not very good.

WERMAN: Do you support an uptake of U.S. troops to Afghanistan even to the maximum level of 60,000 which is the number that is being kicked around right now?

CROCKER: We have this saying in the military that troops to task.  That means you’ve got to lay out the task.  What is it that you want to achieve and then you talk about the resources, troop numbers and other resources?  So the first thing the Administration has to do is be very clear about what the task or tasks are, and then talk about the resources including troops that will be necessary to achieve them.

WERMAN: I wonder if you ever have a kind of a looking glass feeling that you are seeing events on the ground in Afghanistan, in Iraq and the region, and then you come home to this political debate on various other topics that don’t always mirror the realities?

CROCKER: Well, again, I’ve spent my career largely overseas and largely in the broader Middle East.  Most recently, of course, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan.  I am actually happy to come home to what is truly a great nation that has a lot of different interests; the health care debate of course occupies us all.  At the same time, I do encourage my fellow citizens not to lose track of the challenges overseas, not to decide we don’t want to do it any more, it’s costing too much because these things have long histories and these histories have a way of circling back and biting us hard if we lose our focus.

WERMAN: You’re retired now from the Foreign Service, correct?

CROCKER: I am.

WERMAN: Right, at the ripe old age of 59?

CROCKER: Now 60, I’m afraid.

WERMAN: Still not a bad age to be retired at.  You’ve gone back to Spokane, Washington and I read that when you got back there, you and your wife had plans to build on 13 acres.  So while the house is being built meantime you’ve found another place to live on Craig’s List, the same three-bedroom house you grew up in as a kid.

CROCKER: It’s a great story.  That is exactly right.  When we got to Spokane in April looking for a place to rent while the house was built, I found my mother’s old house that she had sold in 2005 available, and we moved right back in.  That was the house I was born into 60 years ago.

WERMAN: And it’s kind of interesting because at the age of 60 I mean you’ve been around the globe, had an extraordinary diplomatic career that put you in the historic hot spots, Baghdad twice, Islamabad, Kabul, Beirut where you almost died in the 1983 bombing.  How does it feel to let go of the reigns of this pivotal moment, and now you’re literally back where you started as a kid?

CROCKER: Actually, Marco, it is a great feeling.  I am proud to have been a part of what I call the Long War.  It will be a very long war. I had no intention ever of trying to see it through because unlike the great campaigns of World War I or World War II, we have no idea where this is going to end.  I think I picked a good time to leave the field and I leave it to very, very able men and women whom I have enormous confidence in as this fight goes forward.

WERMAN: Ambassador Ryan Crocker, thank you very much for your time.

CROCKER: Thank you.

WERMAN: Ryan Crocker served as a U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007.

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• BBC coverage
• Flu.gov

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MARCO WERMAN: We turn now to Europe. Health authorities there are also encouraging swine flu vaccination especially for people in high risk groups. But there’s a lot of skepticism among patients and health workers.  The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.

GERRY HADDEN: The German Government is urging everyone to get a swine flu vaccination.  But according to a recent poll just 20% of Germans say they’ll seek it out. One reason many give for not getting the vaccine is that the H1N1 virus has so far turned out to be relatively mild.   Misha Ude is a medical worker in Hamburg.  She says she sees swine flu patients daily and isn’t worried about catching the disease.

MISHA UDE: [In German]

GERRY HADDEN: She says I’m a nurse in a hospital.  In the last month we’ve had about 30 swine flu cases come in.  They get checked out and go right back home.  It’s nothing serious.   Many health experts in the U.S. would disagree with that statement.  Yet in Germany among doctors concerned about any serious swine flu outbreak remains muted.  Frank Ulrich Montgomery is Vice President of the German Medical Association. He says fears of swine flu are overblown.

FRANK ULRICH: I think it is just an ordinary normal flu and if we hadn’t had the pandemia planning, if we hadn’t had the most alarming reports from Mexico and the U.S. at the beginning, we probably would never have done so much about this disease.

HADDEN: Montgomery says his group only recommends the new vaccines to high risk patients.   He says preliminary tests have shown the vaccine to be effective, but he wants to see more research on the possible risks before recommending the vaccine to the public at large.

MONTGOMERY: You have to test very large numbers of persons to find out the real risk and the long-term risk of vaccinations. Therefore, more important for us is to balance out the risk of vaccination with the risk of the disease itself.

HADDEN: Montgomery says his skepticism is shared by doctors across Europe.  In Spain, leading swine flue Epidemiologist Antoni Trilla says he hears the same thing from physicians, but he doesn’t share their doubts.

ANTONI TRILLA: There is some sort of non-scientific reasoning in saying that this is not a safe enough vaccine.  I don’t think there is strong evidence for saying that.

HADDEN: But on the other hand Trilla does think U.S. health officials are pushing the vaccine a little harder than necessary.  For instance, when it comes to healthy children.

TRILLA: We don’t recommend now to have the vaccine to healthy young kids. It’s quite different from the United States where they are pushing forward the vaccination of the younger people.  Here we only restrict the vaccine to the higher risk.

HADDEN: Last month the E.U. described three groups as high risk, health care workers, pregnant women, and anyone over six months with pre-existing conditions, such as lung or cardiovascular disease.  The fact that otherwise healthy people are not on that priority list might explain why the European public isn’t rushing out to get vaccinated.  Trilla predicts that if the disease doesn’t become more severe over the flu season, by next spring Europe will be awash in unused doses of swine flu vaccine.   For The World I’m Gerry Hadden in Barcelona.

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• I’mHalal search engine
• BBC: A beginner’s guide to Islam

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MARCO WERMAN: Yesterday, there was another question on the subject in the British Parliament.  Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked how his government would prevent future attempts to keep Parliamentary debate out of newspapers.  Here is what he said.

PRIME MINISTER BROWN: This is an issue where an injunction has been awarded but it’s been awarded in the context where it has to remain a secret, and people are not told what the outcome is generally.  The Justice Secretary has talked to the parties concerned.  He is looking into this issue, and I hope that on the basis of what he suggests progress can be made not just in this case but in more generally to clear up what is an unfortunate area of the law.

WERMAN: Tweeters and other Internet users face severe access restrictions in several countries around the world.  China and Iran, for example, most of the time any restriction on the Internet is frowned upon by users.  But our next story turns the issue on its head.  Cyrus Farivar reports on a new Internet search engine designed to help Muslim Internet users avoid certain kinds of content.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Halal is an Arabic adjective meaning something that is permissible in Islam.  The opposite of halal is haram, or “forbidden.”   That explains the message you get after you search for “alcohol” on IMHalal.com.

SOM POURFARZANEH: Oops, your search inquiry has a haram level of one out of three. This means that the search results fetched by IMHalal could be haram. If you still think the results will be clean, click me.

FARIVAR: That’s Som Pourfarzaneh, a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He studies Muslims in America, like himself. He says IMHalal is an example of Muslims trying to negotiate their theology and their values in a secular, public sphere like the Internet.  IMHalal.com was created by Reza Sardeha, a 20-year-old Iranian studying business in Amsterdam.

REZA SARDEHA: Our goal was actually to create a safe and clean environment for those people and Muslims from all over the world who really don’t want to bump into explicit content.

FARIVAR: Sardeha says that he consulted for months with imams and other Muslim scholars in the Netherlands to come up with a list of search terms that could potentially be problematic for observing Muslims. His site launched in early September.  It has three levels of warnings for users.   The first one being for relatively minor things that are haram, like alcohol and pork.

SARDEHA: Level 2 is probably a search term which could be risky because some keywords for example like the term sexual education is perfectly fine. People still got the chance to click through and see the result and inform themselves.

FARIVAR: So what’s Level 3?

SARDEHA: Level 3 is really a no go. If you get a Level 3, the content that will be fetched as highly inappropriate, and therefore you won’t get the chance to click through.

FARIVAR: This isn’t the first religious themed search engine.  There are already a number of Christian ones, and at least one Hebrew language ultra-Orthodox Jewish search engine.  In January, a Moroccan company started “Islamic Google,” a way to filter Google searches for Islam-friendly sites. And in June, a Saudi company even launched NaqaTube, a clean and Islamically pure version of YouTube.  Sam Pourfarzaneh says there’s a growing demand for such websites.  Porfarzaneh also points out that the finer points of what exactly is Haram and Halal are up for constant debate depending on the particular religious school or tradition.  Still, in its first two weeks of operation IMHalal reported that it had received hundreds of thousands of visitors to its site. Some are skeptical that Muslim Internet users around the world will really embrace the concept of a restrictive search engine.   Helmi Noman is a Yemeni researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He studies the Internet in North Africa and the Middle East, which he says is already very restrictive.

HELMI NOMAN: Governments and authorities implement and impose different forms of censorship, installing cameras in Internet cafés, requiring Internet users in cyber cafes to provide their names and I.D.s before they can use the services in Internet cafés in addition to arresting and harassing online writers and activists.  So I do not think that users in the region would add another layer of filtering by using these services.

FARIVAR: But the creator of IMhalal is optimistic. Reza Sardeha says he’ll continue to improve the searching mechanism, and he hopes that by this time next year IMHalal will be the number one search engine in the Middle East.   For The World, I’m Cyrus Farivar.

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• BBC coverage
• Guardian coverage of twitter thread
• Richard Wilson’s Twitter feed

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Earlier this week, Twitter trumped the news media again.  It also trumped a British court. The court had placed an injunction Britain’s “Guardian” Newspaper.  The Guardian was prohibited from reporting on a particular issue should it be raised in Parliament. The issue concerned Trafigura, a multi-national oil company accused of dumping waste at various sites in Ivory Coast. Well, the issue was raised in Parliament, and the Guardian did not report on it, but word did get out in no small part due to Humans Rights Campaigner Richard Wilson.

RICHARD WILSON: I was just posturing around at home and I was sat at my laptop and happened to be looking at Twitter, and I saw this very shocking message from the editor of the Guardian saying that the Guardian had been banned from opposing a Parliamentary question, which to my knowledge nothing like that had ever happened for probably a couple hundred years.  So it was quite a shocking thing.  So I immediately got Googling and tried to figure out what was this Parliamentary question that had they had been forbidden from reporting.  And it didn’t take me very long to find it because they’d given us the name of the law firm Carter-Ruck.  And there was only really one question that it could have been once I looked at the website.  Ironically, it was to do with Carter-Ruck’s attempts to suppress freedom of speech around a rather controversial oil company called Trafigura.  As soon as I saw that question, I copied the text of the question and published it in a few short tweaks on Twitter and literally within minutes I saw that hundreds of other people were repeating that message and passing it on and the gag was on its way to being overturned.

WERMAN: So clear something up for me.  I mean, was there kind of no knowledge of this gag order?

WILSON: There was no knowledge of it until the Guardian reported it.  That’s one of the scary things, and as it happens …

WERMAN: Does that mean there was a gag order on the gag order?

WILSON: There was a gag order on the gag order.  And I don’t know how the legal system works in the U.S., but this is quite an odd phenomenon because actually for all we know there could be other gag orders on gag orders, and we just wouldn’t know about it because the media has been forbidden even to say that some issue or other has been served with an injunction.

WERMAN: And so what ended up happening was while the gag order applied to the media, it did not apply to Parliament and you were then basically reiterating what Parliament had said, which was outside the gag order, is that right?

WILSON: Actually, I’ve checked it out and I think technically I probably was in contempt of court because the gag order as it had been applied had said you can’t report what’s being said in Parliament, and I was reporting what had been said in Parliament along with all these thousands of other Twitter users.

WERMAN: So what happens now?  Does this make the gag order null and void or are you going to have to face some legal proceedings because you might be in contempt?

WILSON: The outrage that came out on Twitter and the way that the information spread gained such a high profile that midway through the following day the law firm backed down and decided not to contest the Guardian’s attempt to get the gag overturned.  So thanks to a combination of different factors, arguably Twitter being one of them, we can now talk about that Parliamentary question.

WERMAN: Now, you work also part-time for Amnesty International.  Is this kind of case or this case specifically one that you and Amnesty are working on right now?

WILSON: I don’t represent Amnesty.  I work as a fundraiser for Amnesty and I was really completely doing this in a personal capacity.  Amnesty obviously has been involved in the case and that’s one of the reasons that I’m familiar with the details, but I’m not involved in any sort of official thing for Amnesty.

WERMAN: Richard Wilson a Human Rights Campaigner who started this Twitter uprising in the U.K.  Thanks for talking to us.

WILSON: Thank you.

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MARCO WERMAN: Well, help may indeed be on the way from the U.S.  President Obama today signed a huge aid bill for Pakistan. The legislation offers $7.5 Billion in non-military assistance over the next five years.  The original version of the bill had set off a whirlwind of debate in Pakistan. Critics said conditions written into the package infringed on the country’s sovereignty.  Not so, say the Congressional authors of the legislation, but Washington does want Pakistan to make some changes.  Here’s The World’s Matthew Bell.

MATTHEW BELL: Pakistan’s powerful military leaders didn’t like the way Congress put specific demands into its aid package. The demands added up to a U.S. desire for more civilian government control in Pakistan and more results when it comes to the military’s crackdown on extremist groups.  Ensuing political crisis in Pakistan prompted the Foreign Minister to make a last-minute visit to Washington this week.  And yesterday, the American authors of the Aid Bill took an unusual step.  They added a clarification to the legislation.  Democratic Senator John Kerry said the new language clarified one thing in particular.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY: The legislation does not seek in any way to compromise Pakistan’s sovereignty.  It does not seek to impinge on the national security interests or even to micro manage any aspect of Pakistan’s military or civilian operations.

BELL: Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi said he was satisfied with the clarification.

SHAH MEHMOOD QURESHI: I’m here to strengthen the partnership between Pakistan and the United States between democracies, between two democracies, and I’m glad that I saw democracies function.

BELL: The irony here of course is that Qureshi’s repetition of the word “democracy” came during a visit that was forced on him by Pakistan’s military elite.  Tarek Fatah says those elites see the writing on the wall or in Congressional legislation, to be more specific.  Fatah is a Canadian writer and a former Pakistani political activist. He says those conditions from Congress amount to a complete u-turn for U.S. policy toward Pakistan.

TAREK FATAH: Up to now, the Americans have dealt essentially with the commanders in chief of Pakistan armed forces, and the civilian authorities would never really know what sort of money or equipment was coming in.  It used to be outside the budget of the Pakistani government, and parliamentarians were never supposed to ask the question of what money went where?

BELL: Fatah applauds what Congress is trying to do.  He says the absence of civilian oversight in Pakistan has given the military elites, and their political allies a free hand.  And he says they’ve used that free hand to support the same extremist groups that are fighting U.S. forces across the border in Afghanistan.

FATAH: Unless there’s democracy in Pakistan, the Taliban will always find a helping hand from the armed forces and no matter how many American troops go to Afghanistan, there will be more people who will be volunteering to come and fight the Americans from the Pakistani side.

BELL: But Pakistan is becoming more democratic says Timothy Hoyt.  Hoyt is a South Asia expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. And he says encouraging that democratic evolution by making specific demands tied to U.S. aid is an important shift for Washington.

TIMOTHY HOYT: It is a subtle change on the civilian democratic front.  It’s a less subtle change on the military front where we’re also saying look we’re going to provide Pakistan with a lot of money, but most of that money needs to go to the economic sphere because we believe that is where Pakistan needs it most and it will contribute most in the long rune to security.

BELL: Hoyt says the symbolic significance of the new aid package is enormous.  $1.5 billion a year for the next five years would keep Pakistan among the top three recipients of U.S. foreign aid.  He says that should send a powerful message to the Pakistani public about Washington’s commitment.  For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  Across the United States and around the world, vaccines for the H1N1 swine flu virus are starting to reach patients.  It’s been just over half a year since the first cases of swine flu turned up in Mexico, sparking concerns of a killer pandemic.  The pandemic has materialized, but it’s not as deadly as originally feared. And now that the vaccine is available, a large number of people are declining to get it. In a few minutes, we’ll hear about medical professionals in Europe who are not recommending the vaccine to many patients.  But we begin with the view in the United States.  Dr. Jay Butler is with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  He directs the CDC’s 2009 Influenza Vaccine Task Force.  He joins us from Atlanta.  Dr. Butler, what is the CDC position?  Who should get the new H1N1 swine flu vaccine?

DR. BUTLER: Well, the recommendations for use of the vaccine in the United States really focus on the five groups that seem to be the most heavily impacted by the virus.  That’s children age six months through 24 years.  That includes college age persons.  Adults with underlying illnesses age 25 through 65, pregnant women, people who live with or care for infants too young to be vaccinated, that is younger than six months of age.  And health care workers who haven’t necessarily been at higher risk of infection but are at risk of transmitting this influenza virus just as they can be at risk of transmitting seasonal influenza viruses.

WERMAN: So you and the CDC maintain that healthy adults don’t need the vaccine?

DR. BUTLER: Well, they’re much lower on the priority list.  The vaccine is available.  It’s a voluntary program, and certainly one of our biggest challenges is having enough vaccine for people who desire to be vaccinated.

WERMAN: Now, as far as the virus itself, there is a perception that the H1N1 virus is relatively mild, at least when it infects healthy individuals.  And a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the vast majority of people hospitalized with the illness had actually underlying conditions. Does it really pose a threat to otherwise healthy people?

DR. BUTLER: Well, certainly the greatest misnomer in all of medicine is it’s just the flu and H1N1 is also under appreciated just as seasonal flu is.  We’ve had dozens of deaths in children in the United States already, and 20 to 30% of those deaths have occurred in kids who were otherwise completely healthy.  It’s important to remember that deaths are just a tip of the iceberg.  We hear a number of reports of intensive care units with several kids who are on ventilators, or echlo [PH] devices, life support, really fighting for their lives against infection with H1N1.  Pregnant women are of particular concern.  Over 6% of all the deaths in the United States related to H1N1 infection have occurred in pregnant women even though at any given time only about 1% of the population is pregnant.

WERMAN: So where do things stand with the vaccine rollout in this country?  How many doses are now available, how many will be available and do you think you’ll have enough to vaccinate everyone who wants it?

DR. BUTLER: Well over 10 million doses of vaccine have been made available, and must of that has been distributed already.  Additional vaccine becomes available each day.  So far, about half of that vaccine is in the mist form that is applied as a spray to the nose, and about half is injectable form.

WERMAN: Okay, Jay Butler, Director of the CDC’s 2009 Influenza Vaccine Task Force.  Thanks very much for your time.

DR. BUTLER: Well, thank you very much.

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MARCO WERMAN: So what is the public to make of the differing recommendations on opposite sides of the Atlantic?  Are Europeans too blasé about the risks of swine flu?  Are Americans too worried?  Robert Dingwall is director of the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham in England.  He says people in some parts of Europe view the H1N1 virus more casually than Americans do.

PROFESSOR DINGWALL: I think that’s true to some extent to Mainland Europe.  It’s certainly not true of the United Kingdom, and that’s partly because Mainland Europe is a little bit behind the curve in terms of the number of cases that are being experienced and the number of deaths which are taking place.  The U.K. and the U.S. are in a broadly similar position.  Both of us have had a lot of cases.  Both of us have had a number of deaths.  You know, we can see the consequences of not vaccinating people, and that I think has given perhaps a little bit more urgency to the efforts of governments and public health planners in our countries than would be the case in some parts of the European Mainland.

WERMAN: One thinks of Europeans as being maybe more accepting of disease, but they also seem more leery than we are in this country of manmade risks like genetically modified foods and pollutants in the environment.  Would you agree with that?

DINGWALL: Well, I think there are some important cultural differences here, which partly come down to different ways in which Europe and the United States think about nature and they think about the benefits that science and technology are bringing to them. But there’s also a difference in the way that they understand the risks of not doing things.  I mean, it’s conspicuous that Americans take preventive medicine rather more seriously, at least in part, because they’re more concerned about the consequences of getting ill.  And you need to remember that whether you’re in the United Kingdom or the National Health System, whether you’re in Mainland Europe where most people are covered by some form of social insurance, if you get sick somebody else picks up the tab.  And so if you don’t get vaccinated and you get sick, it doesn’t mean that you’re heading for the personal or family bankruptcy.

WERMAN: Right.

DINGWALL: That I think that leads people to evaluate the risks and benefits in slightly different ways.

WERMAN: So sum it up for us.  I mean, is one approach on one side of the Atlantic better than another approach on the other side?

DINGWALL: Well, I’m not sure that I would say whether one approach is better than another.  I would say that different countries are operating within different national cultures, and the right solution in one country is not necessarily directly exposable to another.

WERMAN: And finally Professor Dingwall, did you or will you get vaccinated against H1N1?

DINGWALL: Well, I’m not in the priority group because I’m under 65 and otherwise in good health.  However, my wife who is a retired health professional who is over 65 and has an underlying health condition will certainly accept the vaccine when it’s offered to her.

WERMAN: Robert Dingwall, a Sociologist at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of medicine and law.  Thank you very much for speaking with us, Professor Dingwall.

DINGWALL: Thank you.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: The Western Wall in Jerusalem is Judaism’s holiest site.  Some eight million people visit the wall every year.  That includes new immigrants who head there straight from the plane to become Israeli citizens. But the rabbi in charge of the wall has now banned such ceremonies. He says they make too much noise.  But the government Immigration Agency says more about whether women and men should be allowed to sit together at the ceremonies.   Linda Gradstein reports from Jerusalem.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: Some 200 new immigrants to Israel this week attended a ceremony where they received their Israeli citizenship less than 24 hours after arriving in the country.  For many, it’s an emotional moment that they’ve been anticipating for years.  But instead of being handed  their blue I.D. cards at the most resonant site in all of Judaism, they’re in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency Building in Downtown Jerusalem. Jewish Agency spokesman, Michael Jankelovits, says it’s not what the immigration agency had wanted.

MICHAEL JANKELOVITS: It is a symbol with which Jews from all over the world can identify with, and it’s emotional the day after you land in Israel that you are given your identity card at the Western Wall.

GRADSTEIN: But he says the Jewish Agency, a secular body, will not agree to have men and women separated as the rabbis at the wall had demanded.  Thursday is Bar Mitzvah Day at the Wall.  At the security check point hundreds of Israelis are trying to push their way through. There are separate entrances for men and women.  At the Wall itself, a high barrier separates the sexes. Women climb on white plastic chairs to see over into the men’s side.  More than a dozen Bar Mitzvahs are being held simultaneously.  The women throw candy at the male worshipers. On the large white stone plaza a few hundred feet from the wall, there’s no separation between men and women and tourists and Israeli.  It was here that the Jewish Agency used to hold the ceremony.  Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi in charge of the site for the past 14 years, says the reason he has now turned the Agency down has nothing to do with gender separation.

RABBI RABINOWITZ: [Interpreted]  The Western Wall is not a banquet hall.  A Jew comes here to pray, to look at the stones, to think about archaeology.  He doesn’t want to hear microphones and applause.

GRADSTEIN: Rabbi Rabinowitz says the Jewish Agency is welcome to bring the new immigrants to a prayer ceremony at the Wall as long as they obey the Orthodox rules and men and women pray separately.  But his demands have caused tension in a country where resentment of the Orthodox’s power has been growing.  Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the Executive Director of the Israeli movement for Progressive Judaism, says its time for the secular majority to take back the Wall.

RABBI GILAD KARIV: We are speaking about who is shaping the spiritual and national narrative of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and we are talking about our ability to shape a pluralistic society.

GRADSTEIN: The new immigrants, just one day in Israel, have already become part of this debate. The Jewish Agency says they’re working with the rabbis to find a site for their ceremonies where they can at least see the Western Wall.  For the World, I’m Linda Gradstein in Jerusalem.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.