What the Muslim World is Watching [al-Jazeera]

[Resolution_242]

By Fouad Ajami
(NY Times Mag 11/18/01)

Al-Jazeera is not subtle television. Recently, during a lull in its nonstop coverage of the raids on Kabul and the street battles of Bethlehem, the Arabic-language satellite news station showed an odd but telling episode of its documentary program "Biography and Secrets." The show's subject was Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Presenting Che as a romantic, doomed hero, the documentary recounted the Marxist rebel's last stand in the remote mountains of Bolivia, lingering mournfully over the details of his capture and execution. Even Che's corpse received a lot of airtime;
Al-Jazeera loves grisly footage and is never shy about presenting graphic imagery. The episode's subject matter was, of course, allegorical. Before bin Laden, there was Guevara. Before Afghanistan, there was Bolivia. As for the show's focus on CIA operatives chasing Guevara into the mountains, this, too, was clearly meant to evoke the contemporary hunt for Osama, the Islamic rebel.

Al-Jazeera, which claims a global audience of 35 million Arabic-speaking viewers, may not officially be the Osama bin Laden Channel—but he is clearly its star, as I learned during an extended viewing of the station's programming in October.
The channel's graphics assign him a lead role: there is bin Laden seating on a mat, his submachine gun on his lap; there is bin Laden on horseback in Afghanistan, the brave knight of the Arab world.
A huge, glamorous poster of bin Laden's silhouette hangs in the background of the main studio set at Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, the capital of Qatar.

On Al-Jazeera (which means "the Peninsula"), the Hollywoodization of news is indulged with an abandon that would make the Fox News Channel blush.
The channel's promos are particularly shameless. One clip juxtaposes a scowling George Bush with a poised, almost dreamy bin Laden; between them is an image of the World Trade Center engulfed in flames. Another promo opens with a glittering shot of the Dome of the Rock.
What follows is a feverish montage: a crowd of Israeli settlers dance with unfurled flags, an Israeli soldier fires his rifle, a group of Palestinians display Israeli bullet shells, a Palestinian woman wails, a wounded Arab child lies on a bed. In the climactic image, Palestinian boys carry a banner decrying the shame of the Arab world's silence.

Al-Jazeera's reporters are similarly adept at riling up the viewer.
A fiercely opinionated group, most are either pan-Arabists—nationalists of a leftist bent committed to the idea of a single nation across the many frontiers of the Arab world—or Islamists who draw their inspiration from the primacy of the Muslim faith in political life...."


"...Consider how Al-Jazeera covered the second intifada, which erupted in September 2000. The story was a godsend for the station; masked Palestinian boys aiming slingshots and stones at Israeli soldiers made for constantly compelling television. The station's coverage of the crisis barely feigned neutrality. The men and women who reported from Israel and Gaza kept careful count of the "martyrs." The channel's policy was firm: Palestinians who fell to Israeli gunfire were martyrs; Israelis killed by Palestinians were Israelis killed by Palestinians. Al-Jazeera's reporters exalted the "children of the stones..."

Since Sept. 11, I discovered, Al-Jazeera has become only more incendiary..."

http://www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Spring02/ajami.html

[delver]

1. Al-Jazeera, Islam and 9/11

Doesn't it seem that Al-Jazeera or the Arab world in general would be sympathetic to the idea of US complicity in 9/11? Would they not welcome information that showed the US to be even MORE evil? I have not heard anything about an Arab 9/11 Truth movement...

Are they too caught up in the illusion of a clash between east and west, or are the Arab elites just playing their side of the dialectic to keep the masses in check???

In response to the actual article, it's kind of hard not to see Al-Jazeera's point: those who fight the empire ARE freedom fighters...

[Resolution_242]

2. Conspiracy theories in Arab discourse

Conspiracy theories in Arab discourse

Fawaz Turki, Special to Arab News

This column is not given to coining aphorisms on the fly, but one readily came to mind the other day as the public debate in the “Arab street” and in some quarters in the Arab media took up the issue of the Sept. 11 attacks on America. Conspiracy theories are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

The most startling aspect of this phenomenon is that conspiracy theorists have managed to insinuate themselves into the mainstream of the Arab discourse despite their far-fetched and bizarre ideas. What is even more startling is that no major event in our modern history has ever taken place that these folk did not feel the need to attribute a conspiratorial dimension to.

And if you think Arab conspiracy theorists are a fringe group whose kooky notions are merely tolerated by the public (like their counterparts in the US who believe, for example, that President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, and that the landing on the moon in 1969 was a hoax), think again. The input of Arab conspiracy theorists about political events, especially those with a sensational or dramatic hook, is of a radically higher order, and commands a more scrupulous hearing.

Take some recent cases.

When Princess Diana died in that car crash in September 1997, some Arab commentators wrote with a straight face, and in respectable journals, to boot, that her death was the result of some diabolical plot by British intelligence to end her life rather than see her married off to an Arab Muslim. A not insignificant number of Arabs embraced that story.

A few months later, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in Washington. How did the story play out in some quarters of the Arab media and in the “Arab street”? It was seen as a conspiracy by the “Jewish lobby” and the “Christian right” to remove Bill Clinton from office, presumably because he was progressively coming round to the idea of a Palestinian state. It had nothing to do with the American president’s penchant for hitting on
women; and Lewinsky (who conveniently happened to be Jewish)was seen as an agent-in-place put there in the White House by “Jewish cliques.”

In November 1999, plotters were out there hatching their plots when EgyptAir 990 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean with a tragic loss of 271 lives. Conspiracy theorists this time attributed the disaster, again with no corroboration to back up their assertions, to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, whose operatives allegedly sabotaged the Egyptian airliner to achieve the twin goals of killing the 22 Egyptian army officers on board and to destroy the Egyptian tourist industry.

The Mossad, it now appears, is at it again. According to these conspiratorialists, it was none other than Mossad agents who were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mossad’s motive? To blacken the name of Arabs and Muslims in the United States and to enable Israel to have its way in Palestine.

We need evidence, guys, evidence — unassailable, objective and concrete evidence. Where is the darn evidence here?

The “evidence” that these folk present to support their claim is that “4,000 Jews” (in some quarters the figure is given as “5,000 Jews”) did not go to work at the World Trade Center on that fateful day because they had been warned to stay away from the site of the impending disaster. The claim becomes considerably less plausible when you think here how improbable it would have been for 4,000 American Jews to be alerted beforehand about the disaster at the Twin Towers with nary a word leaking to a single American Gentile anywhere in New York.

Oh puleeze!


In another version of this plot, a plot “way too sophisticated to mount” by those who now stand accused of it, the Mossad is not the culprit at all, but homegrown terrorists. On Sept. 21, for example, a columnist for the Egyptian daily, Al-Akhbar, wrote in this regard that “it is impossible to suspect the Al-Qaeda organization or any other Middle East organization of the act.” He suggested that it must have been the “American right.” It is dizzying to imagine the confusion it must have taken to make a writer (a writer!) write that.

That this kind of convoluted analysis, analysis backed less by fact than whimsy, should find its way into the public debate is pitiful. It does nothing less than destroy our hold on reality, for a public debate injected with sloppy ideas that are not thought out is a public debate that places us outside a genuine engagement in the global dialogue of cultures.

A critic (as commentator, editorialist, writer and the like) has immediate and special responsibilities toward defining the political tenor of his age. He must ask whether, through his work, he is contributing to the dwindling of that age’s reserves of moral scrutiny or, conversely, to a sane articulation of the link between word and world, mind and reality, in it.

We embrace conspiracy theories at a cost. And the Arabic language pays it. Let us not, I say, debase our great language by using it as a vehicle of intellectual dissimulation and political kitsch, for it is in language that human grace is defined, and in it that we as Arabs find the prime carrier of our equally great civilization.

http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=9884 (Link now expired)