New Media in the Middle East
Centre for Middle East Studies
© 2006: Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies
and the contributors
Working Paper Series No. 7
Graphic design: Anne Charlotte Mouret
Print: University of Southern Denmark
ISBN10 87-7674-169-9
ISBN13 97-887-7674-169-3
The Working Paper Series can be obtained by
University Press of Southern Denmark,
Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M.
Denmark
Phone: +45 66 15 79 99
www.universitypress.dk
or by
Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies
[email protected]
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
5
By Augustus Richard Norton, University of Boston
NEW MEDIA IN THE MIDDLE EAST – AN INTRODUCTION
9
By Jakob Feldt and Peter Seeberg, University of Southern Denmark
CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST STUDIES – A SHORT
PRESENTATION
25
NEW MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURES, TOOLS & SHAPING THE PUBLIC
SPHERE
26
By Jon Anderson, Catholic University, Washington DC
WHO SAYS WHAT ON THE ARABIC INTERNET? NOTES ABOUT
CONTENT OF ARABIC INTERNET MESSAGES
43
By Ammar Bakkar, Al Arabiyya Net, Dubai
THE RE-FEUDALIZATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: LEBANESE
TELEVISION NEWS COVERAGE AND THE LEBANESE POLITICAL
PROCESS
55
By Nabil Dajani, American University, Beirut
THE RHETORIC OF BIOTERRORISM IN MEDIA AND FICTION:
IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. COUNTER-TERRORISM
66
By Lars Erslev Andersen, University of Southern Denmark
VIOLENCE, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND ISRAELI MEDIA
80
By Jakob Feldt, University of Southern Denmark
REIMAGINING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES IN CHILDREN’S PROGRAMS ON
ARABIC SATELLITE-TV. INTENTIONS AND VALUES
105
By Ehab Galal, University of Southern Denmark
3
THE MIDDLE EAST MEDIA AND THE WEST. ARAB MEDIA BETWEEN
PLURALISM AND IDEOLOGY
120
By Miriam Gläser, MEMRI, Berlin
MCARABISM. INSTANT NATIONALISM AND SATELLITE MEDIA IN THE
ARAB WORLD
133
By Khalil Rinnawi, College of Management, Tel Aviv
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Foreword
By Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University
Access to the media—even in a society with “mature” media—does not
necessarily mean that viewers or readers are well served or accurately informed
by the mainstream offerings. This is illustrated by the United States where more
Americans now rely on “The Daily Show” for their political news than any other
news program. This is noteworthy because Jon Stewart, the late night show’s
host, is a bright and acerbic comedian and most of the “news” that he “reports” is
farcical and fanciful.
In fact, the show is broadcast on the Comedy cable channel. This is more
a commentary on the banality of “real news” offerings than a criticism of
Americans. Jon Stewart’s loyal viewers may not be missing much by foregoing
famous but deeply-flawed news stations such as Fox or CNN. Indeed, one of
Stewart’s signal accomplishments was to so ridicule “Crossfire”, an obnoxious
CNN show famous for inane ranting, that the network chief cancelled the show
out of embarrassment.
So without suggesting that the advent of the new media in the Middle East
heralds an era of enlightened public service broadcasting, richly informed debate
in Internet chatrooms, or careful and impartial news reporting in the print media,
I would like to assert that the new media in the Middle East, the topic of this
volume, is important and fascinating even if the substance is sometimes
disappointing. The contributors to this volume highlight both the shortcomings
and the potential of the new media.
The increasingly vibrant Middle East media has helped to promote the
lively questioning of political systems and politicians, and it is also a lens
through which to glimpse the concerns and demands that define Middle East
societies today. The media in the region are resurgent and dynamic, but for
westerners viewing from afar these developments are hidden from view not just
by barriers of language and distance, but also by metaphors that betray
stereotypes rather than reveal reality. This is especially true of the Arab world,
where pluralism has always been more marked than prevailing western opinion
would suggest. For instance, think about common references to the “Arab street”
as though there are not gradations of opinion by class, locale, gender, and
education in Arab societies even in strife torn societies.
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Despite the mayhem that sadly grips major parts of Iraq, it should by now
be amply clear that simple-minded labels, whether sect, religion, tribe or
ideology reveals very little about what makes a people, much less a society tick.
It is a privilege therefore to offer a few thoughts on the political context
that one encounters in the Middle East, as well as the burgeoning and lively
electronic regional media that belies lazy stereotypes about contemporary
societies, as well as essentialist claims about historical patterns in Islamic
societies such as those made famous by the historian Bernard Lewis.
Essentialists like Lewis imply that ideals and attributes rooted in the
bedrock of Islamic history are somehow transported from one generation to
another over the course of history, even overshadowing contemporary political
developments in shaping the worldview and political perspectives of Twenty-first
century Muslims. In reality, the rise of Islamist ideologies in the contemporary
era is a modern phenomenon clearly connected to the technological advances
underpinning the new media.
The prevalence of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, especially in
the Arab world, hardly needs to be demonstrated. Regional governments have
often sought to depoliticize public space by discouraging and dissuading any
efforts by citizens to organize groups or initiatives independent of efforts
expressly blessed by government. Jon Anderson notes in this volume how those
sitting on high perches bestow patronage on the cyber-entrepreneurs in order to
attempt to shape dynamic the Internet as part of the public sphere.
But the instruments of authoritarian power are vertical by nature and are
not always well suited to controlling the horizontal Internet. As Ammar Bakkar
illustrates here, a variety of voices, some quite critical, are being to be heard on
the Internet, including extra-regional communities, women, liberals, alongside of
proponents of extremism and violence. While the Arab world has lagged all
regions of the world in Internet access that is changing and demand is now
exploding, as evidenced by the ubiquitous cyber café.
Particularly beginning in the 1990s, increasing numbers of people have
become politicized in the sense that they feel that there are political remedies to
the problems that afflict them. The media has been central to the widening
patterns of politicization. In this regard, the importance of the new media is to
help sensitize heretofore marginalized people to the prospect that life chances can
be improved. This is basically what Khalil Rinnawi, borrowing from Benedict
Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community,” refers to as McArabism.
6
Visitors to cities like Cairo, Damascus or Riyadh in the late 1990s will
recall the excitement of bleary-eyed Arab satellite television viewers who were
up much of the night captivated by debates and call-in shows on al-Jazeera.
Inevitably, the result of deepening politicization is an interrogation of power and
sometimes a willingness to contest not only political authority, but religious and
cultural authority as well. Although government efforts to shape if not control
the dissemination of political communications persist, censorship is less effective
than in the recent past and sometimes it only serves to parody the abuse of
power.
The ability of personalities like Shaykh Yusif al-Qaradawi, whose lectures
and commentaries transfix millions of al-Jazeera viewers nightly, to articulate his
viewers’ concerns and offer remedies within the moral economy of Islam
suggests the degree to mere autocrats may find their power eroded, as Mirjam
Gläser suggests in her chapter.
As we strive to comprehend the Middle East, perhaps we should ask why
should Cairo or Rabat be less susceptible than Copenhagen to the pace of global
change and globalization? International travel and widespread labor migration,
increasingly globalized trade, and the penetration of all but the most remote
geographic nooks and crannies by radio, television, cellular telephones, fax
machines, computers and inexpensive printing and reproduction technologies
mean that the flow of information in the Middle East is constant and lively.
Members of Twenty-first century Middle Eastern societies debate their
religion, justice, politics, as well as what should be on TV while juggling jobs,
rearing children and navigating the trials of quotidian life. What is revealed in
this volume are not tales of an inscrutable, exotic Middle East, but a mélange of
themes and puzzles such as what role television (and religious broadcasting in
particular) should play in socializing children who would prefer to watch rather
familiar western programming.
There is little doubt, based on the intense discussions in the regional
media, which many people yearn for better government. It is all the more ironic
that the horrors of September 11 led the United States government to “discover”
political reform in the Muslim world because prior American opposition has
often stymied reform. A good example is the Palestinian authority, which
emerged from the Oslo accords of the early 1990s, when the prospects for
Palestinian democracy were brushed aside by Israel and the United States in
favor of supporting the autocratic Yasir Arafat.
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Today, people are justifiably suspicious of externally sponsored quickfixes—two Thomas Jefferson aspirins at bedtime and you are the democrat by
morning—and they only need to glance at the headlines from Iraq to understand
that the pace of change needs to be carefully calibrated.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of September 11 and after the disastrous
invasion of Iraq, conditions for reform have sometimes worsened rather than
improved across the Muslim world. Leaders like Husni Mubarak have used the
“war against terrorism” to deny any space to the opposition and deny any
exercise of basic human rights to whom they choose. We should not expect
creative thinking about reform and political change to come from the regimes in
the Muslim world.
They are too embedded in privilege and too insecure in their power to
think deeply about fundamental political, cultural or economic reform. The
discourses that will give shape to change must emerge from society. The new
media offers the potential of providing the space—alongside the predictable
dross and wildly popular shows such as Star Academy, the Lebanese talent show
that captivates audiences across the Arab world—for the key debates in the years
to come.
Stay tuned.
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New Media in the Middle East – an introduction
By Jakob Feldt and Peter Seeberg, University of Southern
Denmark
As the sick man does not skip and leap around,
his wishes do so all the more
(Ernst Bloch: The principle of hope)
…the overall framing of New Media in the Middle East
has swung from high hopes to dashed expectations
(Jon W. Anderson, Nov. 2005)
In their widely acclaimed collection of essays ”New Media in the Muslim
World”, which already has become a contemporary classic, Dale F. Eickelman
and Jon Anderson claims that ”new media blur boundaries and link public
spheres that are Islamic with those that are technological, secular, and political,
based on class as well as sect, on ’cold’ ties (such as bureaucracy and duty to the
state) as well as ’warm’ ones of family and immediate community. They provide
channels for hate groups, too, but their very porousness offers little basis for
exclusivity.” 1
When Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies decided to arrange an
international conference covering the New Media in the Middle East it was with
this problematique as a kind of starting point – the core notion being that of
”porousness”. The fact that new media is spreading in the extremely closed
Middle Eastern societies provides hope but does not issue any guaranties of
progress. One can hope that the new satellite media can bring together the Arab
masses and contribute to create or even reinstall a kind of a pan-Arab identity but
it is necessary not to be naive and overly optimistic. The repression by the
ultraconservative Arab regimes – within the media taking place through
censorship and information control – has not changed just because the media
scene has underwent changes, momentous as they might seem.
And momentous they do seem: the news channel Al Jazeera – a pan Arab
24-hour satellite news and discussion cannel that was created in the tiny
peninsula-Gulf state Qatar (the name Al Jazeera means the peninsula) – is today
1
Eickelman, Dale F. & Anderson, Jon W. (2003: New Media in the Muslim World. The
Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, second edition, preface, p. xi.
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considered to be the by far most influential news media in the Arab world. It has
in a few years – the station began broadcasting in late 1996 – established one of
the worlds strongest brands – comparable to the most known international
company-brands (it was in 2004 appointed number 5 after Apple, Google, Ikea
and Starbucks as the 5 strongest brands in the world!).
In April 1996, BBC World's Arabic language TV station, faced with
censorship demands by the Saudi Arabian government, was shut down after two
years of operation. Many former BBC staff members joined Al Jazeera. In the
beginning, Al Jazeera tried to increase its viewership by means of presenting
controversial views regarding for instance Syria's relationship with Lebanon. Its
well-presented documentary on the Lebanese Civil War in 2000-2001 gave its
viewer ratings a boost. However, it wasn't until late 2001 that Al Jazeera
achieved worldwide popularity when it broadcast video statements by Al Qaeda
leaders.
What made this channel possible in a region very little inclined to freedom
of expression? The venture became possible when the British educated and
compared to the other leaders of the conservative GCC-states progressive Emir
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, of Qatar decided to liberalize the conditions
for the media. It was part of a political process in the administration where the
Emir of Qatar wanted to get rid of the political influence from the Information
Ministry and therefore disbanded it – a kind of coincidence had created of the
fastest growing and influential news channels in the world.
But the freedom of speech of Al Jazeera is not without constraints. It is
often mentioned that the channel is suspiciously silent on Qatar and no doubt
there is some truth to that – the journalists of the station simply stays clear of
issues that bear on Qatar itself. Another important aspect of this is the question of
funding. The Qatari government has been spending huge amounts of financial
resources each year to sustain the network, which has not had success in
attracting enough advertisers to finance the journalists, the correspondents and
the technical staff and equipment.
On the other hand: to claim that Al Jazeera simply is a tool for the Emir of
Qatar in his pursuing of a foreign policy is hardly justified. As it is expressed by
the UAE-media professor Mohammad Zayani: ”In fact, Al Jazeera’s function as
an instrument of Qatari foreign policy is hard to discern as Al Jazeera’s political
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discourse is often incompatible or at least out of sync with Qatar’s foreign
policy.” 2
The success-story of Al Jazeera is part of the new media reality in the
Middle East. It is the most outstanding example second to none in the Middle
East as almost anywhere. But the point – and a good reason for arranging a
conference – is that Al Jazeera is only outstanding in its scope. A plethora of
other satellite channels, local TV-stations, radios and news papers have been
established in the region within the last decade– especially after the year 2000.
But the story is not only about this kind of media. Another important
media revolution takes place within the internet – in the long run completely
impossible to control even though it has been tried to diminish the spreading of
this media in several of the Middle East states. Heavy repression has been
pursued within this field – not least in Iran, Libya and Syria – through arbitrary
and frequent closing of Internet-cafés, prosecution of individuals, groups and
organizations posting anything unwanted at the net, restrictions on web hosting,
access to new equipment etc.
According to Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) Arab countries
has made considerable strides in communication technology, especially when
you look at the United Arab Emirates: ”With the creation of Dubai Internet City
in 1999, an integrated electronic business, research and development society,
UAE demonstrated that it had made progress in ICT. The creation of Dubai
Media City (DMC) marks another milestone on the road towards providing a
modern infrastructure for an advanced Arab media. DMC has already attracted
some major TV channels, including Al-Arabia, MBC, CNN and Reuters TV.” 3
2
Mohamed Zayani: Introduction – Al Jazeera and the Vicissitudes of the New Arab
Mediascape. In Mohamed Zayani (ed., 2005): The Al Jazeera Phenomenon – Critical
Perspectives on New Arab Media. London. Pluto Press.
3
Arab Human Development Report, Bulding a Knowledge Society, p. 62.
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In 2001 there were less than 18 computers per 1.000 persons in the region
compared to the global average of 78,3 computers per 1.000 persons. The
number of computers is increasing, but still the Arab World is lagging behind
when it comes to comparison with other regions, as can be seen from the figures
above and below. According to AHDR ”the low number of Internet users in Arab
countries is due to a number of factors, the most important of which are:
computer and Internet illiteracy, the high cost of the lines used and high personal
computer prices and access fees.” 4 But it is not only a question of illiteracy and
high costs. It has more profound reasons, which has to do with the regimes of the
region: ”People do not have sufficient access to the media and information
technologies, compared to world rates and to other countries in the region, and in
proportion to the population of the Arab world. The social and intellectual
benefits of mass media and communication are diluted ny government
restrictions on content and by superficial market preferences. The public relates
to the media as a passive recipient, rather than an active participant. In other
words, cost, political culture and social context militate against knowledge
diffusion through new technologies.” 5
The phrase ”political culture” is something of a euphemism in this context.
The reason for the fact that the Middle East is lagging behind when it comes to
4
5
AHDR, p. 64.
AHDR, p. 64.
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internet access – not only in comparison to the countries in the West but also
compared to other regions in the world – has to do with the kind of states we are
dealing with the Arab region: weak, repressive states, afraid for political reasons
to allow the public to join globalization – and broadly speaking this is part of the
reason for the overall tendency for the Middle East to ”escape” some of the
advantages of gloalization.
The idea of arranging the conference
In arranging the conference we took the liberty of exploiting Eickelman &
Andersons ideas from their book, discussing the impact of the new media on
political processes and the creation of a civil society in the contemporary Middle
East. The primary focus was on the new satellite channels like Al Jazeera and Al
Arabiyya but we wanted also to cover the traditional media in the Middle East,
state television, papers etc. An important aspect of this is the fact that the new
communication networks are reshaping the media in the Middle east region.
They are linking the public sphere to a global discourse that used to be cut off.
The main objective of the conference was therefore to discuss the impact on
political processes of the new media in the Middle East in general and the media
coverage of the Middle East in connection with the debate about democracy in
the region knowing that the media are tools shaping the public sphere and in this
respect can be exploited by the harsch regimes wanting to stay in power.
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We chose therefore to let the following subjects constitute the main themes
of the conference:
1. The Emerging Public Sphere in the Arab World, discussing The New
Media, Civic Pluralism and the Struggle for Political Reform, Models of
Media Influence in the Arab Middle East and New Media Infrastructures,
Tools, and Shaping the Public Sphere.
2. New Media in the Middle East - reviewing the situation of the Media in
the Middle East with focus on the New Media and the public sphere in the
region
3. Terrorism and the Media, discussing The Rhetoric of bioterrorism in
media and fiction: implications for U.S. counter-terrorism and Violence,
Conflict and National Identity in the Israeli Media.
4. The Middle East Media and the West, diskussing Lebanese television
coverage and the Lebanese and regional political process and Arab Media
between Pluralism and Ideology.
5. The New Media: Redefining Muslim Identity, analyzing McArabism:
Instant Nationalism through the new media in the Arab World and
Reimagining Religious Identities in Child Programmes on Arabic
Satellite-TV – Intentions and Values.
The participants were from various parts of the world, representing research
institutions in the Middle East, Europe and USA. But as an intregrated part of the
panels we also invited several leading figures from the New Media in the Middle
East, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiyya etc. It turned out very fruitful to let the
“traditional” academic audience analyze and discuss these complicated matters
with the professional practitians from the media!
New Mediascapes, the Muhammad-cartoon controversy and radical
mobilization
"Denmark and the Danish people are not
enemies of Islam or any other religions."
Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen
The conference took place October 31st and November 1st 2005. One month
earlier, a Danish daily newspaper, Jyllandsposten, had printed 12 cartoons of the
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Islamic prophet Muhammad, which later caused one of the most difficult
situations for Danish foreign policy in recent history. It is a strange fact, though,
that at the conference there were very few discussions about the cartoons. There
were heated debates about stereotypes, intellectual controversys on relations
between the West and the Middle East, but only to a very limited degree there
were references to the cartoons – which three months later displayed radical
mobilization thorugh media to a degree almost unprecedented in modern history.
The background behind the whole story was that a cultural editor of
Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, had commissioned twelve cartoonists to draw
cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The reason for that, according to the editor,
was that he felt provoked by the fact that a Danish writer, Kåre Bluitgen, had
difficulties in finding artists to illustrate his children’s book about Muhammad.
Danish artists had been reluctant to provide these images due to fear of violent
attacks by radical muslims.
On September 30th the cartoons were printed in the newspaper. Two
weeks later a peaceful demonstration took place outside the Copenhagen office
of Jyllands-Posten. On October 19th ambassadors from ten countries requested a
meeting with the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, but he refused
to meet the ambassadors, on the grounds that he could not infringe on the
freedom of the press. Later the same month a number of Muslim organizations
filed a complaint with the Danish police claiming that Jyllandsposten had
committed an offence under the Danish Criminal Code. The result was an
aquittal, but not without reservations. The verdict of the trial was known 5
months later (see below).
During November several European newspapers published one or several
of the cartoons and on December 2nd the Pakistani political party Jamaat-eIslami was said to offer a us$ 10.000 reward to anyone who killed one of the
cartoonists. It was later discovered that this was a considerable exaggeration –
the Jamaat-e-Islami claimed to be wrongly cited, having merely suggested that
the Pakistani government might suggest such a reward.
On December 3th the first delegation of five Danish Imams landed in
Egypt. The delegation returned 8 days later, having had meetings with The
General Secretary of the Arab League Amr Moussa, the Egyptian Grand Mufti
Ali Gomaa and the Sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar university Muhammad Sayid
Tantawy and Muhammed Shaaban, an advisor to the Egyptian Foreign Minister.
Several of the meetings were arranged by Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, Mona
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Omar, one of the ambassadors that had requested a meeting with Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, the Prime Minister of Denmark.
On December 17 the second Danish Imam delegation travelled to Lebanon
and returned to Denmark 31 December 2005. In Lebanon they met the Grand
Mufti Muhammad Rashid Kabbani and Hizbollah leader Sheikh Muhammad
Hussein Fadlallah. Imam Ahmed Akkari also visited Syria to present their case to
Grand Mufti Ahmed Badr-Eddine Hassoun. A smaller delegation travelled to
Turkey while individuals visited Sudan, Morocco, Algeria and Qatar, where Abu
Laban briefed Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
On January 1st. 2006 the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen
maked his yearly New Year's speech, where he said: "I condemn any expression,
action or indication that attempts to demonise groups of people ...". This is seen
as an attempt to soften his earlier stand, where he refused to receive the
ambasadors of 10 muslim countries. During January several European
newspapers publishes one or several of the cartoons, amongst others the
Norwegian Magazinet and the Brussels Journal, both of which publishes all 12 of
the cartoons.
On January 24th Saudi Arabia issued a public condemnation of the
cartoons, two days later it recalled its ambassador from Denmark and all over
Saudi Arabia a consumers boycott took place. Later in January and the begining
of February the cartoon-controversy, as it is named, reached its peak.
The Prime Minister of Denmark on January 30rd said that he personally
distanced himself from the cartoons, but reiterated that it was out of the question
that the government could intervene in what the media wrote. On January 31st
armed gunmen from al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades stormed the European Union's
office in Gaza and threatened to kidnap the workers unless they received an
official apology for the cartoons from the EU.
The same day the Danish Muslim Association claimed to be satisfied with
the apologies from Jyllands-Posten and the Prime Minister, and said they now
will help improve the situation. They claimed to be deeply sorry and surprised
the case got this far. On February 3rd Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen met with several Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen. Egyptian
ambassador responded that Rasmussens attempt was inadequate and that
Denmark should try harder to ’appease the whole Muslim world'. The cartoons
are widely published, several Arab ambassadors are recalled from Denmark, and
boycotts of Danish products are removed from retail chains all over the Middle
East.
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On February 4th the building which houses the Chilean, Swedish and
Danish embassies in Damascus was set on fire after being stormed by an angry
mob – apparently a demonstration had gone out of control and the Syrian
authorities did not appear to do much to stop the incident. As a response to this
incident, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a warning urging Danish
citizens in Syria to leave the country immediately. The Danish ambassador had
asked the Syrian government for proper protection of the embassy before the
attack.
The incident in Damascus was followed by a similar incident in Beirut on
February 5th, where the Danish consulate was set ablaze during a demonstration
and caused property damage in the Christian neighborhood Ashrafiyeh. Two
days later the Danish embassy in Iran was attacked. Firebombs are thrown at the
building, but no damage seemed to result from the angry demonstrators. Again
here it seemed that the authorities did very little to prevent the demonstration to
escalate.
In the next weeks demonstrations took place all over the muslim world,
burning the Danish flag and drawings of Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen. Toni Blair and George W. Bush both offered their support to
Denmark.
On February 10th Abu Laban from Islamisk Trossamfund named Denmark
a nice and tolerant country and called for the violence to stop. On February 27th
the European Union expressed regret over the cartoons of Muhammad, but
condemned violence against European interests.
On March 15th the Director of Public Prosecutors in Denmark decided that
Jyllands-Posten was not in violation of Danish law. The document at the same
time established that: ”It is thus not a correct description of existing law when the
article in Jyllands-Posten states that it is incompatible with the right to freedom
of expression to demand special consideration for religious feelings and that one
has to be ready to put up with “scorn, mockery and ridicule”.”
Gradually from this time on, it seemed that the matter was cooling a bit
down, but it happened very slowly, the Danish Foreign Ministry was still on high
alert and the Danish export to the Middle East suffered a major setback. In a lot
of countries in the Middle East and elsewhere in countries with large or small
majorities or minorities of muslims protests were still heard of as demonstrations
or statements by organisation or state leaders – on April 24th even by Osama bin
Laden, who called for boycott of Denmark and punishment of the cartoonists.
17
As the rather short description above suggests the cartoon controversy
became an extremely difficult situation to handle for the Danish ministry of
foreign affairs. It was obvious that it was a tremendously complex phenomenon
to deal with and that it wasn’t possible to solve the problem within a few weeks
or months for that matter. The cartoon controversy was about freedom of speech
– when the ambssadors requested a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister they
claimed that he had to do something to avoid islamophobic, blasphemous
depictions of the prophet Muhammad. At the same time it was obvious that we
had to do with a phenomenon where the media became a part spreading the story
in every respect and thereby contributed to the drama.
It was described as Denmarks worst international crisis sine World War II
and one of the reasons for the radicalization was the initial refusing of meeting
the ambassadors by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister. It is a
paradox that the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2003 has mantained a
Middle East programme called the Arab Initiative, the idea of which is to
promote dialoque with the Middle East, civil society, human rights and
democracy – a campaign which so far has had good results and has resulted in
lots of contacts between Danish and Middle East NGO’s, projects of various
kinds, contacts on state-level to enhance the ideas of the Danish initiative. In a
few months it seems that the whole set up had been in vain.
The reason for the succes of the forces which wanted the turmoil was
achieved through the media – the media in the Middle East as well as in the
West. It is another paradox of the cartoon controversy that it would not have been
possible without the media and especially the New Media in the Middle East. As
such the whole tragic history reflect a new reality where radical mobilization is
possible in an unprecendented scale due to development of media to which not
everyone has access – that is exactly not the point in the Middle East. But more
than ever before in history – also in the Middle East. The cartoon controversy
would not have been possible without the New Media.
The bloggers, the satelite channels, the local and regional TV-stations was
for a period full of opinions about Denmark, about the West, about islamophobia
and prejudices. The agenda were not new. On the contrary: some of the agendas
were seen before more than once. It was about weak, corrupt regimes trying to
divert the attention of their poor and angry population from the internal problems
in their countries. It was about the ongoing power struggle between radical and
moderate muslims (for instance between OIC and the Arab League). It was about
Denmark as a convenient occasion: a small country unable to hit back. And
18
maybe it was about an international struggle of values – the stuggle about setting
the agenda amongst international actors: states, organisations, -scapes.
A widespread anger in the Middle East about alleged western double
standards is also part of the story: why does an Austrian court sentence the
Holocaust-denier David Irving to three years in prison for claiming that the
Holocaust did not result in as many victims as the historians have maintained
since World War II? Israel can have nuclear weapons, Iran can under no
circumstances. Not to mention the crisis in Iraq with all the tragic incidents, Abu
Ghraib as the moral low point, the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the
Palestinians etc.
And simply what was perceived as arrogance from the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten refusing to apologize and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen denying foreign ambassadors the right to dialoque. An arrogant West
is not a new experience for the Middle East. The New experience is that a radical
mobilization is a possibility that might shake the arrogant West from time to
time. The new Media-scapes are part of the new setup – as such the cartoon
controversy is not the same old story. Simply because the story could not and
would not have been told without the New Media of the Middle East.
Media, Democracy and Politics
Inherent in most analysis and discussion of the new satellite and internet media in
the Middle East are the themes of democratization and political reform. As such
the interest in the new media is from the very beginning politically charged and
in many ways connected to American and European ambitions of political
changes in the Middle East. Middle Eastern satellite television and internet
became the hope and the sign of political changes to most observers, academics
and journalists alike but now 10 years after the media revolution, we have not
seen the political reforms hoped for or the development of a modern, civil public
sphere that is usually considered one of the cornerstones of a democratic society.
Yet, as mentioned earlier, the new media are more popular than ever, and
continuingly expanding, and are consumed all over the Middle East and most of
the rest of the world. There is no doubt that this media revolution is a significant
event in modern Middle Eastern history but we might ask ourselves whether our
optics for viewing this development isn’t too focused on the basically political
wish for reforms in the political systems of the Middle East.
Modern mass communication has been debated and analysed in relation to
both cultural and political structures of European and American societies for
19
more than 50 years. The knowledge and criticisms derived from these analysis’
can be divided into roughly two perspectives on modern mass media, namely the
perspective inspired by Horkheimer and Adorno from their 1944 classic
‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, followed up by Herbert Marcuse in his ‘OneDimensional Man’ (1964) which basically claims that modern mass media
produce retroactive needs and diminish the possibilities of criticism, and the
more conventional perspective also very popular in relation to the Middle East of
pluralisation and democratization of the public sphere.
In relation to the study of media in the Middle East, the critical perspective
derived from the school of critical theory is rarely seen as an analytical prism.
While the latter perspective that claims that increased access to a variety of
private media offers and the lack of direct state control lead to lessening of the
totalitarian and authoritarian potential of states and rulers is very popular. It
seems that missing impact on Middle Eastern politics of the new media opens the
door for a wider plurality of analytical perspectives that can include the
experience that privatization of media sources might not be one of the
cornerstones of democracy and freedom.
In the Middle East, however, we find a contradictory development that
questions the optimistic perspectives that per se consider the development of
modern, capitalistic mass media as an almost evolutionary step on the way to
pluralism and democracy. Most of the contributions to this present volume
address this analytical problem but from very different angles. It simply seems
that it is quite possible to uphold authoritarian rule and state control with most
aspects of society even though most citizens of the Middle East can watch many
relatively free and diverse TV channels and go on the internet to get more or less
uncontrolled information about almost everything. This experience leads to a
new line of questioning that seems fruitful to the study of the Middle East but at
the same time less encouraging for our hopes that Al-Jazeera will facilitate a
revolution in the Middle East.
This new line of questioning has two intervowen threads. One leads,
hopefully, to a reconsideration of the role played by mass media communication
in the shaping of a pluralistic, free and, what might be even more important,
tolerant public sphere. The other thread leads to a more direct and critical
engagement in messages and civil education of Middle Eastern media. It is
simply difficult to find signs that read as a mass media influenced pluralisation
and democratization of the Middle Eastern States. Increasingly, it becomes
interesting to analyze the actual TV programmes to get an idea of which ideas of
20
politics, culture, community, religion, tolerance and so on that they actually
communicate in order to understand both why this development seemingly does
not lead to democratization and to understand the effect of the new type of media
on the already existing public sphere. In this volume, we find several
contributions that engage critically in the media products of the Middle East
leaving the evolutionist perspective behind and thereby contribute to narrowing
the gap between general media analysis and analysis of Middle Eastern media.
To a large extent, this gap is the result of one of the dilemmas of Area Studies,
namely the political undercurrent of ‘what would be good for the Middle East’,
and it is a gap that certainly needs to be narrowed if not closed completely.
In his ‘L’islam mondialisé’ (2002), Olivier Roy argues that the new mass
media communication, focusing on the internet, does not lead to a pluralisation
of public debate or public cultures. Actually, the opposite is the case in Roy’s
opinion because the new mass media distribute culture products that are
produced with the lowest possible common denominator in mind. Modern mass
media products rather than educate in a democratic spirit sell stable identities that
reassure the majority of consumers of their basic world view. Often, conflict and
violence on TV serve to stabilize the world along lines of demarcation between
‘us and them’, ‘legitimate and illegitimate’ and so on. In this respect, Middle
Eastern media are no better than Western media and probably much worse from a
general perspective.
With Roy it is not difficult to argue that though the new media operate on
different terms than the state controlled media the ideas of Islam, the West,
Israel, Jews, USA, terrorism ect. communicated through these channels are
evidence of a radical simplification that does not lead to tolerance or democracy
for that matter. In this respect, the classic critics of mass media communication
Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse of the tradition of Critical Theory
and the criticism they have inspired in modern culture and media analysis seem
to have a number of points regarding our general perception of mass media; one
of the central points being that pluralism, a tolerant and democratic public
sphere, and peaceful relations to others are not features inherent in the type of
media that we generally applaude as cornerstones of democracy. Indeed, this
critical perspective might even make us consider whether or not the new satellite
stations such as Al-Jazeera contribute to the radicalisation of public opinion in
the Middle East due to the way this station lives from its sensationalism and
uncensored display of violence and bestiality.
21
The new media of the Middle East are on many accounts a topic worthy of
continued attention. It is obvious that we in the coming years will witness
political and cultural effects of the new media on a variety of issues from
religion, gender, child culture, national and regional identities and not the least
conflicts such as the Iraq War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this volume,
not many questions are answered but many relevant questions for further
exploration are asked and a number of different Middle Eastern media contexts
are touched upon. As the new media will continue to expand itself in the Middle
East, our critical questioning should follow accordingly.
The contributions
This perspective is the reason for the plurality contributions of the anthology,
which in the following are shortly introduced. Therefore, rather than solely to be
focusing on the important or even inevitable discussion about media and
democracy, the articles introduce to a broad range of problems in connection
with media in the Middle East.
In Jon W. Andersons article New Media Infrastructures, Tools & Shaping the
Public Sphere he takes the opportunity of refocusing and updating his and Dale
Eickelman’s article from their anthology ”New Media in the Muslim World”. He
claims that ”in the years since that book and the projects it assembled, the overall
framing of New Media in the Middle East has swung from high hopes to dashed
expectations.” According to Anderson the expectations attached to the Internet
were especially optimistic – framed as they were as largely alternative media.
Analyzing the New Media would, and as such Anderson modifies his earlier
views, have to take into account at least the following elements: Cultural
practices, notably of content producers, material practices and social-political
practices. By the latter Anderson refers to the way in which the actors are
forming alliances and building coalitions among the players actually
implementing the Internet.
Ammar Bakkar takes in Who says What on the Arabic Internet? Notes about
content of Arabic internet messages the challenge of interpreting the internet
reality in the Middle East. By inventing a model of understanding the different
”voices” (Bakkars term – defined as ”communication of individuals in
representation of themselves”) to be found in Arabic cyber space. Bakkar’s point
is that in societies where communication is usually controlled by the regimes the
22
”spontaneous voices seem to become the most credible part of the Arabic
internet. Bakkar is optimistic by the impact of the internet on societies in the
Middle East but sees at the same time reasons for scepticism attached to the fact
that the internet also is highly used by groups that resist change.
Nabil Dajani discusses in his The Re-feudalization of the Public Sphere:
Lebanese Television News Coverage and the Lebanese Political Process the
television news of Lebanon in so far as it can be seen as (another) obstacle to true
democratization. He analyses the Lebanese media by taking a point of departure
in the first 15 minutes of the evening news on a randomly chosen day, a Tuesday
in October 2005. It is Dajani’s point that the purpose of the news is not to inform
the Lebanese people or serve a public interest. If that was the case, they would
focus on corruption in the government, the fiscal debt or things like that. In stead
the media are diverting the citizens from their genuine problems and offering a
pseudo-reality without any democratic meaning.
Lars Erslev Andersen argues disturbingly in his The Rhetoric of Bioterrorism in
Media and Fiction: Implications for U.S. Counter-Terrorism that President Bill
Clinton and his closest staff were intensely occupied with fiction that speculated
over catastrophic attacks on the U.S. with biological weapons such the works by
novelists as Richard Preston (The Cobra Event 1997). This basically ‘imaginary’
fascination made apocalyptic scenarios very real for the American leadership and
it makes us questions the degree to which rational and logically argued analysis
have an influence on decision making or whether it is the ‘literary plots’ that we
speak the world with that direct such significant issues as American security
relations to the Middle East.
Jakob Feldt discusses in his Violence, National Identity and Israeli Media the
role of mass media in making sense of violence and conflict. Through analysis of
Israeli historical documentaries and commemorative TV, Feldt argues that
though Israeli mass media are pluralistic and democratic, it nevertheless educate
to certain moral lessons and certain forms of public conversation that in effect
reinforces the conflict with the Palestinians. It is argued that Israeli TV is highly
normalizing and strongly committed to a historical determinism of suffering,
defence and liberation. This makes it reasonable to question whether modern, and
post-modern popular media actually contribute to pluralism and democratic
public conversation.
23
Ehab Galal’s study of children’s programmes in his Reimagining Religious
Identities in Children’s Programs on Arabic Satellite-TV. Intentions and Values
focuses on the identities offered to children watching children programmes on
the channels al-Majd and Iqraa. Galal argues that though different in scope both
channels educate children to preserve traditional Muslim family values and
gender roles. In Galal’s view it is questionable whether these children’s
programmes enable Muslim children to navigate in pluralistic societies.
Mirjam Gläser addresses in her contribution The Middle East Media and the
West. Arab Media between Pluralism and Ideology the controversial issue of
perceptions of the West, Israel and Arab self-identity in Middle Eastern media.
She argues that the construction of a ‘West’ against ‘us’ is often present in Arab
media and that this construction is anchored in conceptions of inferiority,
humiliation and national dignity. This feature of Arab media obstructs the critical
glance at the Arab societies themselves in Middle Eastern media.
The last article of the collection is Khalil Rinnawi’s McArabism. Instant
Nationalism and Satellite Media in the Arab World, in which Rinnawi coins the
term McArabism: ”a situation in which citizens throughout the Arab world
receive identical nationalist pan-Arab content via transnational media, just as one
can get the same Big Mac at any McDonald’s outlet.” Rinnawi discusses if it is
meaningful to consider part of the media in the Middle East as being a kind of
tribal media, to be differentiated as a) mobilization press, b) loyalist press and c)
diverse press (in private hands and to a limited degree critical to the regime – like
Lebanon, Kuwait or Morocco). The Arab are claimed to have a harmonising
effect on public opinion – thus McArabism.
24
Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies – a short presentation
A few words about Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies. Our institute
was established in 1983, it is 22 years old and formally a part of the Institute of
History and Civilization at University of Southern Denmark. We are 15
colleagues doing research on the modern Middle East, on Middle Eastern
relations to Europe and on modern Arabic. We have 8 different studyprogrammes on the Middle East, modern Arabic, migration studies etc. Centre
for Contemporary Middle East Studies is the largest research institute focusing
on contemporary Middle East in Scandinavia.
For further information – look at our website www.humaniora.sdu.dk/middleeast
25
New Media Infrastructures, Tools & Shaping the Public
Sphere
By Jon W. Anderson, Catholic University, Washibgton DC
First, my thanks to the organizers not only for the invitation and for grouping
with Richard Norton and Naomi Sakr, but also for placement in a panel whose
topic, “The Emerging Public Sphere in the Arab World,” evokes how Dale
Eickelman and I (1999) framed “New Media in the Muslim World” as an
“Emerging Public Sphere.” In this frame and in this company, I take this as an
invitation to refocus and update our argument in that book, which a French
reviewer reduced to what he called a “formule lapidaire” – namely, new people,
new media, new interpretations, new politics.
Revisiting, if not updating, is apt, for in the years since that book and the
projects it assembled, the overall framing of New Media in the Middle East has
swung from high hopes to dashed expectations. Particularly in the realm of the
Internet, which serves as my proxy for the intersections of new media and
information technology across the region, high hopes fixed the “new” primarily
as alternatives. The Internet, along with allied NMIT in satellite television and
others, was framed largely as alternative media (Alterman 1998). This view
resonated a more widespread view at the time that envisioned a direct translation
of flattened hierarchies and decentralized information flow into democratic
renewal, even a disintermediation of politics. And for regional specialists, it
recycled earlier hopes vested in television two decades before to open closed
worlds and clotted politics (Lerner 1958).
Early optimism crashed either with the market bubble in Internet stocks or
against structures of authoritarian states in the region. In either case, enthusiasm
faded, analysts turned elsewhere, and the parochial argument became absorbed in
larger debates about decline of the state generally and its particular resiliances
regionally. Talk of alternatives being ushered in by new information technologies
faded as states proved able to master, and even to structure, those technologies
and so their roles as media of communication, and some of the early analysts
moved on to recording that. For every indicator of alternatives, others could be
assembled of cooptation; and pessimists returned to the litany of limited access,
slow penetration, state and cultural censorships – adding up to a “not ready”
verdict (e.g., Alterman 2000). The “alternatives” model was tried and found
wanting, at least in the face of regional political and cultural structures.
26
My own view is that the problem lies less in the region than in the
methodology of focusing on culture and politics while stipulating rather than
examining the material base and practices of the Internet. I do not mean to invoke
a technological determinism. In fact, it was an unexamined technological
determinism that underlay previous optimism. I do, however, mean that focusing
on culture and politics – the one as micro and the other as macro picture – leaves
out crucial mid-range or intermediate phenomena of implementing, organizing,
delivering information technologies and the new media that depend on them,
implement their properties, and so expand the public sphere (Anderson 2000) .
That is, I would modify my original model that focused on enhanced agency and
urge that a better account of the public spheres of new media and that shape new
media has to take account of more data about the underlying information
technologies and to relate three kinds or levels of information:
• Cultural practices, notably of content producers. For this, my proxy has
been online Islam (Anderson 2003); others look at TV, but largely in terms
of broadcast shows.
• Material practices, notably network forms. A start on this has been
provided by Naomi Sakr’s recent study of the ownership of satellite
television in the region (Sakr 2001).
• Social-political practices, by which I mean forming alliances and
building coalitions of diverse players that actually implements the Internet
(or satellite television, which I don’t deal with here).
My intent here is to shift from the simple tracking from culture to politics, which
presumes that technology is the link in that it affects each equally, and to posit a
material base that is not so much technological (in machines) as architectural (in
network forms).
Let me take these briefly in order.
Cultural Practices: Getting Islam On-Line.
I have described the process of getting Islam on-line as essentially three steps or
phases. Those so inclined could imagine a dialectic that starts with technological
adepts, typically students in science and engineering who typically were studying
overseas in the high tech precincts where the Internet was developed and in use.
Like others, they brought avocational interests online as well, in their case
interest in Islam and in seeing it represented in this new high-tech medium. What
they brought on-line were, first, texts of Islam – the holy Quran and collections
of traditions of the Prophet – which had been elevated in status to sources in the
27
“political” Islam initiated by Al-Afghani and Ridah, and were made accessible to
newly literate generations by the spread of mass education in the post WW II
independence period. Also typically, tracked early into science, these adepts were
turning to religion in young adulthood; without the text-interpretive skills of
madrasa educations, they also launched listservs and other online forums for
discussing Islam, particularly as it related to their lives. This was largely
confined to those with Internet access – particularly scientists but also other
academics and in time the professionals they trained – until that access expanded.
A second phase ensued with the World Wide Web, which brought the
Internet to a wider public; with this much more user-friendly technology,
activists – both official and oppositional – came on-line, typically with the
avowed goals to present “correct” Islam. Technologically, the Web made the
Internet into a publishing medium, which facilitated “content” managers, while
the earlier Internet facilitated tech adepts. What came with the web were
established and institutional voices from traditional Dawa organizations to
radical Islamist movements, from madrassa to governments – all intent not just
on pushing religion in to this new medium, but on speaking for it there.
Another phase emerged toward the end of the 1990s that reflected both
diversity of content and professional execution that I have called “modulation.”
By that, I mean efforts to modulate Islam to conditions and concerns of modern
life, such as those of Internet users, as well as modulate ed to the tone of middle
class professionals who come on-line for work and leisure. Here, the
technological shift is from static publication to more active forms involving data
processing, and so requiring close work between content providers and designers
of “back-end” databases and “front-end” user interfaces that, together, restore
some of the interactivity of the pre-Web internet and, so, facilitate the
development of specifically on-line communities.
I would make three summary points about this process. First, it involves
shifting orientations to the sources and discourse of Islam .
28
Fig 1.
Initially, tech adepts drew on a popular discourse of Islam that had arisen since
Mohammed Abduh, one that connected it to social issues, and on a notion of
texts as sources (Anderson 2005). They were followed by officialising voices
who presented an elite discourse about those texts and oppositional one who
drew social experience into popular discourse. In turn, they were followed by
modulators who linked social experience to a more elite discourse – if not quite
to the full-blown textual hermeneutics of the ‘ulema, then to an Islam wholly
orthodox in theology while vernacular in expression.
Second, these shifts are neither determined by technologies of the times,
nor do they represent simple appropriations of technology. The shifts from
character-based Internet to graphics-based Web applications, and from the simple
HTML programming of the initial web to the more dynamic XML-based Web of
today with user-configurable interfaces that interact with immense databases do
bring forth new people and new possibilities; but more importantly, they bring
forth new configurations of actors.
29
Fig. 2
And in that, they participate in a larger process of coalition-building and alliance
formation, to which I will return.
My third point is that the process observable in Islamic cyberspace can be
seen also in any other cultural domain’s intersection with the Internet – and with
much the same results, which I won’t describe here but merely assert likewise do
not reduce either to alternatives or to appropriations. Here, let me indicate
parallels in the Middle Eastern space and a scheme for rendering the common
sociology.
30
Fig 3
That is, what we see in both the Islamic space and in the Middle Eastern space is
a sequence of phases.
• Creole Journeys, largely in diasporic populations, some of which return
“home” with commitments to modernization (of religion, government,
society) and the 1970s tools of interactive computing, wide-area
networking, and management information systems. Their Internet tools are
listservs, archives, newsgroups.
• Elite Contention, largely in “homeland” contexts, usually connected to
new models of globalization (of markets, including media; also skills),
who focus more on managing information as a resource or “cultural
capital,” and partisan
where their predecessors were more internationalist. Their Internet tools
are the personal computer and World Wide Web, particularly for
publication.
• Postmodern Nomadism, which is the province of IT-savvy “knowledge
workers” (programmers, designers, media specialists), with transnational
job circuits and orientations, albeit more regional, in which they constitute
31
a sort of internal diaspora between homes where they don’t work and
places of work where they don’t stay.
These are material conditions and modes of IT production linked to cultural
conditions and practices.
Material Practices: Network Forms
Let me turn to material bases of the Internet (and, by proxy, IT generally) and
forces shaping them, which are particularly found in network forms.
Overall, Internet reality in the Middle East differs from US ideals of
decentralized networks and open access facilitated by resource sharing, although
nominally their histories are the same. That is, in Arab countries, as in the US,
the Internet begins in the public sector; but instead of privatization of public
sector assets, as happened in the US when the NSFNet backbone was turned over
to MCI in the Reagan administration, public sector institutions continue to
dominate the Internet in Arab countries. There, its material shape is a chain
whereby state Telecos provide the link to the international Internet, or are
mediators to it for Internet Service Providers to businesses, universities,
government, and individuals, including the ubiquitous Internet café.
Fig. 4
32
Part of the rationalization for this model is the assignment of different
technologies to each level. These are ATM or Frame Relay for the state PTTs, IP
(Internet Protocol) for the ISPs, LAN (Local Area Network) technologies for
offices and corporations, and various end-user applications for individual users.
One problem with this model is that it is incompetent to contain the
component technologies. That is, there is very little to keep ISPs from getting
into the business of international call termination with their Internet connections
or telephone service with VOIP, as the business plans of many ISP startups
envisioned. Contrariwise, there is no reason that telecos cannot provide IP, as
many now do in the form of Broadband or DSL service. Just as telecos see ISPs
as telecoms resellers, so ISPs see Internet Cafes as reselling their service (IP);
and relations between the two are often problematic, subject to regulatory
disputes and intense lobbying. And any large organization is little different from
a whole country, except insofar as it has external as well as internal regulations.
The result is that from a carrier’s point of view, the Internet is a business of
telecoms reselling.
There are various ways this can be instantiated in material networks.
Schematically, these range from the UAE solution, in which IS is provided by the
phone company, which is effectively the ISP to all subscribers. At the other end
is the Jordanian model, which separates ISPs from the phone company by
regulating what service (ATM or IP) they can provide, but permits organizations
and companies, including Internet cafes, to provide IP to users. Saudi Arabia and
Syria have intermediate solutions built around the concept of a National Data
Network owned by the phone company in Syria and the concept of a national
Gateway in Saudi Arabia to which licensed ISPs are attached. Where centrallyplanned Syria monopolises the business, state-capitalist Saudi Arabia controls
access to the resource.
33
Fig. 5
These differences not only implement different industrial policies at the macro
level – from central planning to state capitalism to more open capitalism – they
also entail different notions of ideal users, ideal uses, ideal delivery and ideal
mode of direction. And this describes the infrastructure of getting the Middle
East online, or at least the macro aspect of different social architectures, which
set the conditions for grassroots networks. They are, indeed, organized in terms
of alternatives – alternative telecoms, market segmentation and media techniques
to “pull” audiences to media instead of “push” it at them. And the larger context
is one of transitions, too, from the independence generation focused on national
security to one more concerned with national welfare, in domestic proliferation
of international forms of expertise, and in the transnational labor market reaching
ever more up the scale.
34
Fig. 6
But all of this describes a structure of relations. We have to look elsewhere for
the processes that produce it; and this is where my colleague, Michael Hudson of
Georgetown University and I have found a pattern of alliance-seeking and
coalition-building surrounding the new technologies.
35
Fig. 7
Social-political practices: coalitions and alliances
In four Arab countries where we studied Internet implementation, as I call it, or
Internet pioneers, as Professor Hudson prefers, we found a consistent pattern.
The Internet that seemed to explode into public prominence everywhere in the
mid-1990s, and to be tied to disintermediation in politics as well as in economics
(the “flattened hierarchy” model), did so on a base laid by public sector
technocrats laboring for a decade or more well out of public view.
In each country, they formed a cadre born after 1945 and before 1960, who
grew up in newly independent states and went or were sent abroad for technical
educations, which they brought back to apply to the development of their nations.
The best and brightest went particularly to premier institutions of their former
colonial powers or patrons, to UK in particular, but also France for Syrians, and
to the US for Saudis, and brought back the latest in computing- and enterprise
engineering, which they applied to modernizing administration much as civil
engineers applied their skills to transport infrastructure.
For such efforts, they commonly found patronage at the highest political
levels, and typically just below the ruler. In Jordan, their locus was the Royal
Scientific Society, actually a government think-tank and research shop, under the
patronage of then Crown Prince Hassan. In Egypt, their locus was the IDSC, or
36
Decision Support Center of the Cabinet office, where graduates of MIT, the
Ecole Polytechnique, McGill and others mastered public sector finance and
generated models for IT-based decision support. A corresponding locus in Saudi
Arabia was the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology, a sort of
combination of the US National Institutes of Health, which conduct research, and
National Science Foundation, which finances it. For Syria, the point of
accumulating such talent was the Syrian Computer Society, nominally a
professional organization (but not a syndicate), but whose president was first one
and then another son of the ruler.
Such patronage was important for several reasons. It provided political
cover, a site outside the bureaucratic chain of command, and financing, certainly
more secure and generous than, say, for comparable work at universities. These
resources provided projects involving other agencies, on the one hand, as well as
providing networking and contacts for technical specialists with policy makers,
on the other hand. It provided an applied, problem-solving focus, when that was
apt, but also for rallying around shared competencies. Above all, it provided
“clubs” that were neither merely voluntary associations nor collections of “kings’
men” – that is, within the establishment, but capitalizing on ties outside it.
Among the more important outside ties were three. At the individual level,
alumni networks connect graduates to their schools, several of which such as
MIT internationally and the American University of Cairo regionally maintain
active networks. Other alumni networks are based in military schools, long a site
of elite recruitment. Also, at the individual level, many moved through the
international world of UN or UNDP conferences, temporary assignments to their
bureaus, service on international standards committees and other forums for
making both professional contacts and contacts with power. Such networks were
based on jobs and created through career tracks. A third kind is more
institutional.
These are outside ties to development agencies and international programs,
such as EuroMed or USAID beyond or in addition to UNDP or ESCWA
programs and bureaus. Here, patronage is mediated by technical specialists, who
in providing conduits for it develop cultural “capital” both with their internal
(national) and with external (international) patrons.
This situation began changing in the mid-1990s with several shifts. One
was a shift of international patronage from a paradigm of modernization to one of
globalization, and with that from infrastructure projects to promotion of markets.
Essentially, international aid programs went looking for different local clients,
37
and in the private sector in preference to the public sector. Another shift has been
at the top, as rulers from the independence period are being replaced by a
younger generation – King Hussein by Abdallah II in Jordan, Hafez Al-Assad by
his son Bashar in Syria, King Fahd buy Abdallah in Saudi Arabia; the current
Prime Minister of Egypt was its first Minister for Information and
Communication Technology and previously head and founding member of the
IDSC.
With this shift came also a new cohort, effectively a shift in patronage
away from public sector figures. Many members of the current Syrian
administration were colleagues of the now-president when he was president of
the Syrian Computer Society, including the Ambassadors to Paris and
Washington, deputy ministers of communications, governor of Damascus, and
others. In Jordan, public sector technocrats were eclipsed in the latter 1990s by
another cohort, of businessmen, patronized by the new king; while in Egypt,
former members of the IDSC moved as well into new IT businesses that provided
services they designed while in public service.
In other words, with generational succession has come a shift of patronage
from the public to private sector, partly aided by shifts of international patronage
at the top and partly mediated by conversion of public sector assets into personal
networks below the topmost levels.
What we found in each case of Internet implantation were the emergence
of champions near centers of power, an emergence based on new technologies
that were not contained within old institutions. In some cases, existing
institutions competed over them; in others, they fit no particular institutionalized
way of doing things; in yet others, new technologies involved different external
partners and so appeared as new, in some cases as competing, resources or forms
of “capital.”
Typical strategies involved demonstration projects or piggy-back projects
that recruited additional friends. The IDSC won its spurs by rescheduling Egypt’s
public sector debt and then leveraged that credibility to push for information
networks to support decision-making at all levels of government, including the
Internet; the Internet came to Saudi Arabia in the form of connections for telemedicine and got its first public demonstration in Jordan at the 1995 MENA
conference through facilities of the University’s major medical center.
What ensued were periods of extensive alliance-seeking and coalitionbuilding around the new technology. Some involved looking for external
patronage, such as from USAID in Egypt and Jordan, from EuroMed in Syria.
38
Some involved bringing new players into telecommunications, already set in
motion by international pressures to divest state monopolies in favor of open
regulatory regimes.
A common point where these activities collected was around the state
telephone companies, some of whom sought new allies, while others retrenched.
In some cases, such as Egypt, this succeeded in creating a data system
independent of the telephone company. In Syria, successive proposals from the
Syrian Computer Society to establish Internet service, on the grounds of special
competence in the engineering, were met by counterproposals from the state
telephone company to acquire such competencies for itself. In Saudi Arabia, an
initial 140 potential applicants to provide Internet service quickly dwindled to 70,
then to 30, then to less than ten as it became apparent that the government would
not permit IS to become a new source of rent. By setting the wholesale price to
ISPs through the state teleco and regulating the retail prices that ISPs could
charge, Saudi policy pushed IS toward firms that could leverage it to develop IT
businesses – from network installers to digital media firms to database providers.
There is more, but the basic story is that such shifts have broken older
coalitions and set in motion intense efforts to build new alliances. In turn, these
have, as one participant put it, “let everyone into each others’ business.” To the
example of telecoms reselling could be added many others; but one recent
dramatic one is particularly telling.
In 2003, millions of Arabs were transfixed by Star Academy on Future TV
from Lebanon, a live broadcast contest for best Arab singer, who would be
chosen by votes of the viewers. Voting was by Internet and telephone,
particularly by SMS messaging from mobile phones, which had by that time
become ubiquitous throughout the region. They had eclipsed the number of
private landlines in the previous year, and were operate across systems
transparently (like the Internet, but unlike the Internet not cost-free). For this
event, the single largest source of revenue has been reported by Amman’s Arab
Advisors Group as $4 worth of mobile-phoning for the voting. If true, this is
nearly one-fourth the total estimated ad revenue of all private Arab satellite
television channels (if that estimate is also accurate); and this does not count
revenues to ISPs, Internet cafes and other providers for on-line votes.
This was widely hailed in the Western press as a positive indicator of
hunger for democracy – one even evoked comparison to the Federalist Papers
(MacKenzie 2004) – and was quickly fit to the idiom of “alternatives.” That is, it
indicated an alternative venue for democratic impulses, and so a positive
39
indicator of hunger for democracy or at least acquaintance with its apodictic
mechanism. But it also indicates something else, and perhaps more interesting.
Convergence has long been noted at the technical level. It is a watchword
in the trade press, and was in fact predicted by the political scientist, Ithiel da
Sola Pool almost a quarter century ago (1990). In addition to the now-familiar
“death of distance,” Pool anticipated that the convergence of computing and
communication would facilitate two further socio-technical convergences – first,
of all data in to a single stream, and second of work and leisure in a single digital
sphere. Focusing on the technology, the principal mechanisms he identified were
the spread of digitalization, which would link channels, and a convergence of
computing and communication. This points to material practices or bases for
networking and to key cultural sites that we now call e-commerce and etainment. But it left undeveloped the additional social and political mechanisms
of convergence or through which convergences are met, negotiated, effected –
that is, alliances and coalitions.
In the case of the Internet in the Middle East, both similarities and
differences with its implementation in the US are limited. Similarities point to the
crucial role of the public sector, particularly as an arena for the coming-together
of interests and, more importantly, expertise. Differences lie in what happens
next in the important organizational middle ground, and that includes the
following:
• Champions emerge, advocating for the Internet as both site of
development and tool for development, and proceed to seek partners and
allies who would rally around these goals.
• Patrons in high places are important for access to resources, but first for
space to work, develop demonstration projects and applications.
• Leverage arises from the lack of fit with existing industrial-bureaucratic
arrangements becomes a third point of leverage; gaps become points of
contention, which leads to
• Seeking allies to form a community of interest and expertise that do not
fit existing boxes.
• Finally, building coalitions that will support a new sector. These include
experts, financiers, regulators, business partners. This includes
• Regimes for converting and sharing value (including revenue-sharing).
There is no particular imperative to translate techno-structural features of the
Internet (its horizontal, distributed organization) into social-political ones.
Indeed, Arab governments have proved adept at shaping the Internet in their own
40
image or existing industrial policies at the level of the material base, which they
control, at least internally. It escapes, like satellite tv or mobile phones escape,
that embrace only by leveraging unique technical properties to find additional
partners or allies within and without the national sphere.
The ‘alternatives’ model has brought out points of conflict – notably with
telecos and over media – but at the expense of over-interpreting as cooptation the
convergences that are actually happening. I think that this is because the logic of
networking is not fully realized. Some have called this a logic of immanence,
which may sound a little mystical; but all it points to is the socio-logic of
interaction that whom one interacts with, and how, is as important a determinant
as more interior features of purposes, values, interests.
There have been many calls to adopt network perspectives. Their value, I
am suggesting, lies in retrieving the convergences which better capture what is
going on than focusing in terms of alternatives. The place to look, and to ground
network perspectives, is the alliance-formation and coalition building that give
them effect.
41
Bibliography:
Alterman, Jon. “The Middle East’s Information Revolution.” Current History 99
(633): 21-17, 2000.
Alterman, Jon. New Media, New Politics? From Satellite Television to the
Internet in the Arab World. Washington: Washington Institute for Near East
Politics, 1998.
Anderson, Jon W. “New Media, New Publics: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere
of Islam.” Social Research 70(3): 887-906, 2003.
Anderson, Jon W. “Wiring Up: The Internet Difference for Muslim Networks.”
In Muslim Networks: From Hajj to Hip-Hop, Bruce B. Lawrence and Miriam
Cook, eds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Anderson, Jon W. “Producers and Middle East Internet Technology.” Middle
East Journal 54(3): 419-31, 2000.
Arab Advisors Group. “Arabic Superstar’s Voting Grosses over US$ 4 Million in
Voting Revenues Alone.” August 23, 2003.
Eickelman, Dale F. & Jon W. Anderson, eds. New Media in the Muslim World:
The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Second Edition, 2003).
Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle
East. New York: Free Press, 1958.
MacKenzie, Tyler. “Found in Translation.” Wall Street Journal. September 24,
2004.
Pool, Ithiel da Sola. Technologies Without Boundaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990.
Sakr, Naomi. Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the
Middle East. London: IB Tauris, 2001.
42
Who says what on the Arabic Internet? Notes about content
of Arabic internet messages
By Ammar Bakkar, Al Arabiyya Net, Dubai
Abstract
The internet has changed the nature of public communication and dialogue in the
Arab world. This paper introduces notes and observations about the types of
messages that are exchanged over the Arabic internet, about the characteristics
of the creators of these messages, and the effects of these messages. These notes
should guide content analysis, survey, and qualitative research concerned with
examining the content of Arabic internet messages.
Creating Arabic New Media Messages
The internet has deeply changed public and mass communication in the Arab
world. In the pre-internet era, Arabs had only limited channels of public
communication, which were strictly controlled in most cases. That explains why
Arab governments have, for years, resisted the establishment of internet networks
in their countries, as they have felt that this new kind of media would change the
nature of communication in all Arab countries. Their guess was evidently correct.
To do a content analysis of the Arabic internet is highly significant
because it explains the details of a major communication phenomenon that
changed the Arab world for ever. The notes and suggestions below are
introduced to assist attempts of examining and understanding the content of the
Arabic internet by researchers.
These notes are based on a close observation of the Arabic internet since
1996 as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma (USA), a column
writer for years on the internet (USA), a manager of the first Arabic news portal,
bab.com (Saudi Arabia), a manager of a web development company (Saudi
Arabia), a presenter of a weekly show on the internet (Saudi Arabia), a professor
of mass communication at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab
Emirates), and currently a Chief Editor of Alarabiya.net, one of the most popular
news portals in the Arab world (United Arab Emirates).
The Arabic internet is operationally defined as all content on the internet
that was produced by people of the Arab world. That includes all content in
43
Arabic language, in addition to English content that was written by Arabs in the
Arab world or by immigrants to the west of an Arabic origin.
In this piece, I introduce my categorization of the kind of producers of
content on the Arabic internet. This includes the establishment, voices, civil esociety, and business organizations (including media organizations). This content
appears in several formats: websites, forums, blogs, and mailing groups. The
paper also mentions briefly some possible consequences of the communication
on the Arab internet, as described in these notes. The figure below shows a
model-like diagram of these factors.
Creating NM Messages
•The
Establishment
• Voices
•Civil E-Society
• Business
Organizations
(including Media)
The New Media Scene in the ME
What?
Interfering Variables:
Effects:
Effects:
• News portals
• Organizational
• Forums
• Blogs
• Arab Governments
• Culture & Habits
• Business Situation
• Reform
• Extremism &
anti-change
• Virtual Communities
• Establishment Control
The Establishment
For the Arab world, the establishment includes the government, which is always
large and highly dominating, and loyal non-profit and private organizations. The
Arab governments have always tried to dominate all aspects of their citizens’
lives. They also have the financial power to start projects, in comparison to the
private sector that is weakened by poor economy. Even if the fund is available, it
is always safer to connect the projects to the establishment. On the other hand, as
developing countries, Arab governments respond to their development
responsibilities by initiating various projects.
44
For these reasons, which vary from a country to another, the establishment
is the owner of a large number of websites in the Arab world. Another factor that
came clear after September 11th events is the external and internal political
pressure on the establishment in the Arab world. The internet became a tool for
the establishment to send external and internal persuasive messages against
different types of pressure.
If you look at the source of funding for Arabic websites, you will see that
so many of them are financed by governments, loyal organizations (including
media), and affiliated ideologies. This is a reason why the presence of the
establishment is so strong on the Arabic internet, and why the governmental
views are widely distributed on the Arabic cyber space.
However, despite high spending on the internet by governments, Arabic
governmental websites are poor in content, usability, e-services, not to mention
e-government applications. That happened because of factors such as corruption,
weak procurement systems, lack of experience, and lack of strategy.
As a result, Arab Governments need to be encouraged to focus on the einitiatives in order to offer information, and encourage involvement. New media
in developing countries can be used for empowerment, inclusion, and better
community service. In more conservative Arab societies, the new media can be
used to encourage the participation of women.
Voices
Voices are defined as communication of individuals in representation of
themselves and not of organizations they belong to. Before the internet, only
government-approved voices were allowed through limited and highly controlled
channels. However, a vast change came with the internet that voices are no
longer controlled in any sense. People have now a large quantity of channels to
express themselves, to be heard, and to answer to other voices. The establishment
and organizations are putting efforts to control the channels, rather than
controlling voices that own their freedom as soon as they log on line.
That is not the only reason why Arab voices are important to be examined
and analyzed. In societies where communication is usually filtered and controlled
by the establishment, spontaneous voices seem to become the most credible part
of the Arabic internet. In addition, unlike other types of content, voices enjoy a
high rate of interaction with each other. The discourse associated with these
endless conversations is also highly critical in understanding the nature of
communication in the Arab world after the internet. In other words, how people
45
react to other voices is different from their original voices in a way that needs to
be taken into consideration.
Some voices are “higher” than others. They are higher because they are larger in
quantity, use stronger expressions in terms of judging other voices, opinions, and
ideas, control the platform, and are organized based on ideology or cultural
beliefs. Voices start “screaming” when they put efforts to exclude other voices.
They scream so no other voices are heard.
Because of high voices and screaming on the Arabic internet, content
analysis of Arabic messages should take that into consideration. Quantity of
messages on the internet does not represent the distribution of Arab internet
users. A minority of Arab users might produce the majority of internet messages
if they intend to do that. Survey research and qualitative research should support
content analysis research to produce more accurate conclusions about Arabic
voices on the internet.
On the other hand, the internet is becoming a main forum of dialogue for
the Arab world. This forum should be protected from different ways of
screaming. Based on notes below about extremism on the Arabic internet,
moderate voices need to be encouraged and supported. In addition, higher voices
create illusion and misconceptions about the reality of Arab world. Decision
makers might make the wrong decisions and change if they hear higher voices
instead of all voices.
Identity of Arabs on line is fluid (not fixed). Using nicknames, or masked
identities, which is the case for most Arab voices, allows the emergence of a
different identity, much more emotional, irrational, and disappointed. Masked
voices are excited about freedom, but in the same time they feel the weakness in
front of globalization.
A major different thing about the Arab identity on-line is that it is much
more individualistic than the normal collectivist identity for an Arab person.
Arab societies are highly collectivists, but when people set in front of their
computer screens, they get their individualistic identity back. Some platforms
and organized groups of voices are creating new virtual collective realities that
contain the loyal individual voices.
However, the collective pressure and the loyalty in this case are much
weaker, as people can “sign off” easily. On the other hand, for some people, the
new reality become so much evident in their lives, that one wonders what would
happen to some Arab groups if the internet is suddenly connected. It could be
something like a destructive earthquake to a small town.
46
I would categorize Arab voices on the internet to eight types of voices: extreme
voices, liberal voices, official voices, religious voices, young voices, women
voices, voices by Arab communities in the west, and elite voices.
Extreme Voices. It is obvious why extreme voices attempt to scream all the
time. Extreme voices on the net, using “high tones,” are Angry, determined,
uneducated, highly conservative, politically-oriented, and conspiracy-oriented.
They usually refuse formal channels of information, exclude others, and support
violence in several degrees.
The war on Iraq in 2003 made the extreme voices stronger; with more
people on the web listening as they search for the alternative story. The US
failure in Iraq gave extreme voices a stronger case against liberalism and the
west.
Because of the screaming and because the internet is their only venue of
communication, extreme voices are putting their curse on the Arabic internet.
Because of them, the Arabic internet became in some cases a negative factor in
the regional development. For example, we are not rushing to conclusions if we
say that the Arab internet escalated the conflict between Sunni and Shiite in the
Arab world.
For a major web forum such as Alsaha.com, angry statements against
Shiite are very common. Any Shiite users are not welcome anyway. See
statements by Aljahil (2006, July 14) and Waoud (2004, September 2). On the
other hand, in a Shiite-dominant forum like Ansar Alhusain, many statements
such as a statement by Moheb Ali (2005, July 13) put the blame of all the
problems of Muslims around the world on Sunnies.
Liberal Voices. Liberal voices are not new to the Arabic internet. However, their
voices are becoming more critical in more conservative Arab countries and
communities. The internet raised the agenda of liberal voices as so many issues
are now discussed freely on the internet. That was not possible during the preinternet era. Women Liberal issues are good examples for discussions that the
internet made it possible in most Arabic countries. However, it is noticeable that
liberal voices are sometimes aligning with moderate voices in order to face the
screaming of extreme voices. In other words, a situation is created where we
have only two poles of voices: extreme and non-extreme.
47
Official Voices. Governments found themselves in need to join the dialogue
when they realized its critical effect. Voices that support the governments are in
some cases paid, although they behave like unattached individuals. Governments
are also using the loyal media to join the dialogue. However, it is not known to
what extent governments are using loyal employees to produce the official views.
Because of the perception about “paid voices” on the internet, moderate
and liberal voices are in many cases accused by extremists on the web to be
“paid” or “intelligence employees” as a screaming tactics. For example, on
Alsaha.com, the most famous Arab forum, BMW (2005, September 12) wrote
emphasizing his support for the Saudi government efforts against terrorism.
Minutes later, a reply by Jumana (2005, September 12) was published on the
same page accusing him of being a government intelligent employee, whose
words could not be credible.
Religious Voices. Because the religious institution has been for so long under the
supervision of governments, they, in many cases, have points of views that are
consistent with general official lines. We can see that clearly in the joint efforts
of the establishment and religious voices against terrorism and extremism.
Credible religious voices are highly popular on the Arabic internet.
According to alexa.com ratings, the personal website of Amro Khalid, a religious
figure in the Arab world, is the most popular Arabic websites in some periods of
time during 2005. A noticeable phenomenon that needs to be examined is that the
variation between religious websites, that seem moderate, and religious forums
and mailing groups, which are much more extreme.
Young Voices. Voices of young people are mostly confused between all the
other voices. Arab Young people like entertainment, art, fun, and breaking the
rules, but they have no argument or rhetoric for it. In the same time, they are
bored, scared, and suppressed by the collective society. Young people use chat
rooms and mailing lists more than open forums as they try to isolate themselves.
Take for example what Al-Ameed (2005, June 28) says on a famous forum
for Saudi Sports: “I really do not understand all this discussion between the
religious people and the liberals. Our life is not about fighting others, it should be
about having fun and doing the right thing. I wish everybody keeps his opinion to
himself”.
48
Women Voices. Surprisingly, feminine voices are still weak on the internet in
the Arab world. Women issues are adopted by the liberal crowds and civil
organizations, but not distinguished as a strong voice on the net on their own. To
express themselves, women use the same isolation techniques used by young
users as they still have weak arguments. The religious voices were faster to adapt
women issues and direct women's presence on the net.
Voices by Arab Communities in the West. Arab communities in the West
enjoy the freedom and safety of speech. They do not need to use untraceable IP
addresses or masked identities to escape the prosecution by governments. That
gives them the ability to aggressively contribute to the Arabic Internet. However,
many of them are disappointed and angry at the homeland. They also lost the
ability to relate and understand the circumstances of the Arab world. Their
freedom to severely criticize, combined with their anger, is creating an extreme
type of discourse. On the other hand, Arab communities have the ability to
inspire the reform of the Arab world as they are part of the better democratic
experience in the West.
Elite Voices. The elite class in an Arabic society includes academics,
intellectuals, writers, and ideological and cultural leaders. Elite voices are still so
limited on the Arab web. The elite are usually busy with less computer skills. In
fact, the internet is seen by the Arab elites as a “waste of time” or a “place for
street talk”. Elite participation should be encouraged as it could be a major
solution to the problem of extremism on the web.
Civil e-Society
The Arab civil society is still in the start-up phase because of the so many antiactivism government regulations and behaviors. However, the web is becoming a
good option for civil activism. It is a unique phenomenon for the Arab world that
the virtual civil society is becoming more influential than Bricks-and-mortar civil
society.
Activism on the internet in the Arab world needs to be protected as the
web is becoming so critical for the survival of Arab civil e-society. Although,
most Arab people agree with the concepts of reform and civil activism, these
organizations are faced with fear and skepticism. Civil e-societies are accused in
many cases to be fronts of Western ideologies, or intelligence agencies of Arab,
Israeli, and western countries.
49
Arab Civil organizations, in general, have limited financial resources.
Their websites are poor in terms of content and structure. The interactivity is
limited with limited human resources. To survive, these organizations need
unsuspicious financial support, training, consulting and qualified human
resources.
Arab civil e-societies inside the Arab world are restricted by government
pressure, although they are more effective in terms of community building.
Organizations outside the Arab world have more freedom to create content, with
less ability to recruit supporters because of their weak community-building skills
and the foreign alliance factor. It seems that the magical solution is cooperation
among internal and external organizations in order to be able to act and publish
information on one side, and to maintain community on the other side.
Business Organizations
This paper does not intend to analyze the situation of Arabic websites as much as
to provide general ideas that assist future research. Like most other countries, the
growth of e-business is a large phenomenon that involves so many factors and
issues. However, it should be noticed the Arab market is small and not welldeveloped, which makes it hard for profit-oriented websites to survive.
Profit-oriented websites are mostly focused on internet services rather than
on content. Yahoo!, MSN and Maktoob.com, all mail and instant messaging
service websites, are attracting a large share of the Arab web advertising market,
which arrived at $5 million for year 2005, according to industry sources. Other
profit-oriented websites that are doing well in the Arab market are business
websites.
On the other hand, Media organizations (TV channels and newspapers) are
enriching the Arabic web in terms of content. Their sites are some of the most
popular in the Arab world. However, these sites receive their financial support
from the mother media organizations. None of them is making profit.
There are independent news websites that are not associated with traditional
media organizations. However, most of these websites suffer from poor
professional news standards.
The Arab audience is judging the new media with the same values they
invested in the old media including skepticism about “credibility” and source of
funding, although these sites are widely perceived as less censored. Achieving
credibility is not easy for these portals as access to information in the Arab world
50
is limited and expensive, while competition with other sites requires publishing
speed without taking enough measures of accuracy.
Effects of Current Arabic Internet Situation
Examining the effects of Arabic web-based communication is much more
complicated than analyzing the current situation. On the other hand, creating
possible scenarios of effects gives us the opportunity to work toward achieving
the positive scenarios and preventing the negative scenarios. Based on my
observations, three possible scenarios might emerge out of the current situation:
reform and change, deeper conservatism and keeping the status quo, and
establishment control.
Reform and Change
To create reform, we simply need to improve the input that comes from all types
of internet message creators. We also need to create a vision, a set of objectives
at which we think that reform has been achieved. People must see first where
they are going before they can go. The lack of vision is affecting the reform
effectiveness in Arabic world, and creating so many doubts about the whole
discourse of reform.
The internet virtual society is more qualified to lead the change because
the Arab world is collectivist, while virtual identities are more individualized.
Increasing the value of the individual should push concepts of human rights and
democracy. The cyber space is also the dialogue place which can be used to
build arguments. However, interactivity needs encouragement and guidance. In
addition, the internet is associated with change, globalization, information age,
and change to post modernity.
New is better, full of hope, and on the cutting edge. The internet is new as
well as the reformed society we would like to create. For researchers to consider
reform and change, a McLuhan question needs to be answered: does a media
technology have the power to transform a culture? Is the medium the message?
Deeper conservatism/ Anti-change
The Arabic internet is highly used by groups that resist change. That includes
extreme conservatives (political and religious), and groups motivated by
governments that are afraid of change. It is questionable whether these groups
would win the battle as the Arab world is facing so much internal and external
51
pressure and challenges because of keeping the status quo. However, the antichange rhetoric is rapidly developing in a critical way that needs to be closely
examined and faced with a moderate pro-change rhetoric.
Establishment Control
“Entering cyberspace is the closest we can come to returning to the Wild West…
the wilderness never lasts long, you had better enjoy it before it disappears”
(Taylor & Saarinen, 1994, p. 10). Governments are usually so creative when it
comes to control issues. The same goes for the internet. The extreme voices are
making it easy for governments to picture the internet as a dangerous place that
needs order. It is a question that so many people attempt to find an answer for:
how do you keep the internet safe without transforming it to an old-fashion
media that is easily monitored and directed?
The Most-Likely Scenario
The Middle East is a very hard place to predict, simply because so many irregular
forces contribute to shaping the political and social scene. The three scenarios
above for the future of the Arab internet are associated with these forces (reform
groups, conservative groups, governments, Western support, etc.).
However, by examining how similar situations within the media industry
in the Arab world have gone during the past 20 years (the TV industry, the Radio
industry, publishing industry, etc.), a most likely scenario based on that can be
suggested. The Middle Eastern media industries are usually controlled by
moderate interest-driven groups but within the rules and regulations set by the
establishment.
On the other hand, the Arab media has been so skilled in managing to give
each of the two parties, the conservative and the reformists a piece of the pie by
allowing them to appear on the media between now and then. The same scenario
might be predicted for the Arab internet, as it might become heavily regulated by
governments, owned and managed by people in the middle, but with a controlled
space for the devoted reformists and angry conservatives.
Conclusion
Since 1997, the Arab world is going through critical and deep change because of
the internet. Millions of Arabic messages are sent every day. These messages
have common features that this paper attempts to explore based on the
observations of the researcher. These notes should guide a more objective and
52
comprehensive content analysis of Arabic media messages. The paper suggests
three possible scenarios of effects: reform, anti-change, and control, with a
prediction for the most-likely future scenario.
53
Bibliography
Al-Ameed (2005, June 28). Alhayat Helwa Leman Yafhamha [Life is sweet if
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understand
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Message
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Aljahil (2006, July 14). Shouf halsoura Alshiiyah Almqurfiah [Look at this
disgusting
Shiite
picture].
Message
posted
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BMW (2005, September 12). Ma Arwaa Ma Yafaloun. Bedoounihim Alhayatu
Malaha qima [Look how wonderful what they do. Without them, life has
no
value].
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Jumana (2005, September 12). Nas Ma Testahi [People who have no shame].
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Moheb Ali (2005, July 13). Aliraq … Arqam Mu’limah [Iraq: Painful numbers].
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54
The Re-feudalization of the Public Sphere: Lebanese
Television News Coverage and the Lebanese Political Process
By Nabil Dajani, American University, Beirut
The Republic of Lebanon is a curious small state that is situated in a politically
unstable region and is currently undergoing confused and complex national
political circumstances following a long and costly civil war. It is a state with
many contradictions, a country of extreme pluralism and of deep tribal/sectarian
divisions. Divisions in Lebanon are not only on the basis of sects but there exists
“tribal” divisions within each sect.
The Lebanese media, and particularly television, reflect and in turn
reinforce the characteristics and contradictions of Lebanon’s political and tribal
confessional society. Television has helped maintain the divisions that exist
within the society and has also contributed to the alienation of the average
individual. Indeed inasmuch as Lebanese television generally appeals to
individual sects and ethnic groups within the country, it helps to sustain the
condition of sectarian and ethnic division.
Unlike all other Arab countries, television in Lebanon was introduced by
business executives and not by the government. Lebanese television began with
two private commercial television stations that were licensed by the government.
The first station was backed by the French communication network (Sofirad).
The second station was backed by a U.S. network (ABC).
During the Lebanese civil war both companies were on the verge of
bankruptcy and appealed to the government for help. The government merged
the two ailing television institutions into a new company in which the
government provided liquidity by purchasing 50% of its shares.
With the civil war escalating critically, and the weakening of the central
government, some of the warring factions established their own pirate television
stations. By the end of the civil war some ten pirate stations were broadcasting
and 36 others were making plans to go on the air. This situation generated public
debate and consequently the parliament passed, in 1994, an audio-visual law
organizing broadcasting in the country.
At present, six licensed television stations are on the air. All operate as
both terrestrial and satellite broadcasters. These are: The Lebanese Broadcasting
Company International (LBCI, formerly LBC), which speaks for the Maronite
55
Christians and represents the views of the right wing Lebanese Forces; Future
Television, which addresses the Sunni Moslems and is owned by the family of a
former prime minister; The National Broadcasting Network (NBN), representing
the Shiite Moslems and owned by the family and supporters of the speaker of the
parliament. Al-Manar, organ of the Islamic Hezbollah Party; New Television
(NTV), which began as an organ of the Communist Party but is presently owned
by opposition politicians, and Tele Liban, which is managed by a board
appointed by the government.
Television dominates the flow of information in Lebanon. According to
recent figures by an authoritative study, about 65% of Lebanese adults view 2-4
hours per day, and about 82% of the population views television on a daily basis
while 95% watch television but not regularly. The majority of viewers (71%)
tune to television during prime time (7-10pm) (the time of the main news
program as well as news panels on all TV channels). It is estimated that the
average household in Lebanon has two television sets. Television content is
distributed mostly via terrestrial broadcasting. In 2003, terrestrial television
penetration was at approximately 99% of households and cable television
penetration is among the highest in the world and is estimated to be as high as
79% of households.
A large share of Lebanese television programming consists of political
news programs, which are the most-viewed genre. Television news is usually
very serious but pays more attention to domestic politics than to issues of public
service. Any television coverage of social distress was negative, in the sense that
their presentation of information about hardships was with the intention of
exposing “the other group” and not public service. An example is television’s
coverage of the economic crisis in the early 1990s when they overstated the
threat of a financial crisis, which lead to the resignation of the government and
the extremely large depreciation of the Lebanese currency.
Because of the high degree of politicization of Lebanese society, current
political events are covered in a way that supports the views of each television
station with no respect for professional codes and ethics. An early published
version of the report by the UN international commission to investigate the
assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri noted that “certain Lebanese
media had the unfortunate and constant tendency to spread rumors, nurture
speculation, offer information as facts without prior checking and at times use
materials obtained under dubious circumstances, from sources that had been
56
briefed by the Commission, thereby creating distress and anxiety among the
public at large….” 6
A study of the content of television news shows that political figures, who
are the main sponsors of television stations, are also the main actors in a
relatively high percentage of the local news items. "Sects" are the main actors of
another small but significant group of local news items. This reflects the
environment in Lebanon, a political environment torn by sectarian grievances.
The following sample of the first fifteen minutes of the evening news on
Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 on each of the six national Lebanese television
stations provides a clear picture of the agenda of each.
The government managed Tele Liban introduced their news program by
stating that three important political issues characterize the news development
that day: First, that the Syrian PM has ignored repeated telephone calls by the
Lebanese counterpart; secondly, the safety precautions taken by UN
establishments and their employees in Lebanon; and thirdly, the question of
disarming Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
The lead news report was the meeting between Saad Hariri, the Lebanese
majority leader and son of the assassinated former Lebanese Premier, with the
Maronite Patriarch in Rome. The second news item reported the call by the
Lebanese president for freedom and strength of the judiciary system. This was
followed by a report about the return of the Lebanese Speaker of the Parliament
from an official visit to an Arab country. The activities of the Lebanese Prime
Minister were then hurriedly reported. In fact, the entire news report on Tele
Liban was rather hurried and brief.
Future Television, organ of the family of the assassinated former Prime
Minister Hariri, began with the usual short editorial after announcing that the day
was the 240th after the assassination of Hariri. The anchorwoman, in her blue
ribbon and Hariri pin, then announced that “all eyes are on Mehlis’ report.” The
second item in the editorial was that Syrian newspapers have criticized the report
and have dedicated several pages to attacking MP Saad Hariri and the Lebanese
Prime Minister. The Syrian Prime Minister’s refusal to answer three calls from
the Lebanese PM was played up as well as Syrian official statement declaring
that “France and the U.S. now run Lebanon” and that “Red hell will open on
Lebanon if they pursue this path.”
6
Report of the International Independent Investigation Commission Established Pursuant to
Security Council Resolution 1595 (2005), article 16, Beirut, 19 October 2005.
57
Another five minutes were then spent on MP Hariri’s 45 minute retreat
with Lebanese Maronite Patriarch, after which MP Hariri issued a statement
acknowledging the Patriarch’s importance in seizing what he called “Lebanon’s
golden opportunity.” Hariri also emphasized the importance of Mehlis’ report in
bringing justice to his father’s assassination, and gave details about his plans for
the next few days. The blue-ribbonned anchorwoman subsequently reported the
visit of a high US official and the US ambassador to a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese
minister.
The anti-Syrian organ of the Maronite Lebanese forces, LBC, began with
the tense relationship between Syria and the impending Mehlis report. Over 5
minutes of air time were dedicated to Syrian newspapers’ condemnation of Saad
Hariri and the Lebanese Premier, as well as the Syrian denunciation of the report
and of the US. This last statement was repeated twice (by the anchorwoman
whose pin paid tribute to a smiling May Chidiac, another LBC anchorwoman
who was the victim of a terrorist attack). The visit of a high US official to
Lebanon was the second item. The return of the Speaker of the Parliament from
an official visit to an Arab country was reported, with emphasis on the fact that
he denounced US claims of Syrian interference in Lebanon. LBC reported (in far
from positive tones) the Speaker’s claim that Syria in fact supports Lebanon, and
that the responsibility for the Hariri assassination falls on an “unknown third
party.”
NBN, the organ of the Speaker of the Parliament, lead with a report about
the latter’s return, and read the statement he issued regarding the Mehlis mission.
Following that was the President’s call for the independence of the judiciary
system. The third item was a brief account of progress made by the Mehlis
report, and right after that the threat of the bird flu. NBN then covered
Condoleeza Rice’s announcement that Syria was en route to isolating itself
diplomatically.
New TV, a station opposing Hariri and supporting the President, began the
news with an unmistakably skeptical statement: as the Lebanese await the results
of Mehlis’ report, Mehlis himself has relocated to the port city of Larnaka,
Cyprus, citing security reasons. The arrival of a high US official and Lebanese
Minister of Justice’s approval of Mehlis’ work ensued. New TV was the only
station to report a congratulatory letter sent by the President to the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency for winning the 2005 Nobel Prize for
peace. This was followed by a report on Speaker of Parliament’s return and
statements. Only then was MP Hariri’s visit to Rome mentioned.
58
Al Manar TV, organ of Hezbollah, began with a critical account of
Hariri’s whereabouts and views. They then reported about Israeli planes violating
the air space in Southern Lebanese territories. Al Manar TV cited a Syrian
newspaper as saying that “it is clear that Lebanon and Syria are the targets of a
grand plot and that the UN probe is led astray by false testimony.” The next
items were those of the president, the US high official’s visit, and the return of
the speaker of the parliament. Al Manar was the only station that night to report
that the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay had ordered the release of an
Egyptian man crippled by torture.
Lebanese television today is encountering a multi-faceted crisis that is
perhaps more serious than any crisis faced by other Lebanese institutions.
Lebanon does enjoy relatively more freedom from government institutions than
many of the third world countries. However, this freedom has thus far not been
transformed into a correct democratic practice and effective accountability is not
possible. In the absence of a properly functioning central government the tribal
sectarian authorities dominate in the management of the country’s affairs
including the operation of the media and consequently, Lebanon does not have a
free press.
Additionally, the imposition of entertainment values on the journalism
profession by television’s mercantile management has prompted this medium to
focus on scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the overall
tabloidization of mainstream news. Wealth, power and sectarianism are
intimately intertwined in the Lebanese media, and knowledge plays no mediating
role. As a result, Lebanon faces a media muddle that allowed foreign elements to
meddle with its media. The people are ignorant of how their political affairs are
handled. Because of their ignorance they are powerless. Consequently, we are
today witnessing in Lebanon a media situation that in fact contributes to the refeudalization of the public sphere.
The Lebanese situation is characterized by a lack of balance in the way
Lebanese television handles the three basic forces that operate on this sector and
interact with/in it. These forces are the interest of the public sector, the interest of
the tribal/sectarian institutions of the state, and the interest of the private sector.
While we observe that state institutions and many private sector institutions
influence and operate on television to serve their interests, we note the absence of
the public interest in television content. What we find today in Lebanese
television is a distinct imbalance between public interest and the interest of the
political, financial and economic forces in the country. While the free-flow of
59
accurate knowledge is essential for a well-informed people, we find that the
public sphere has been grossly distorted and “restructured” by today’s television.
This lack of balance, together with the inability of the state to implement
or even draft communication plans and policies that are founded on public
interest, has allowed Lebanese television institutions to advocate conflicting
values and identities that further divide the population politically as well as
socially. Unrestrained television channels are crowded with political leaks, void
of professional ethics, and pay little attention to cover basic public concern
events, while political dogma and cheap entertainment is overflowing in their
content. And while people are indeed agitated by television news, they
nevertheless no longer trust the news media as it has become clear that this
medium is a resource controlled by a select few and that there is virtually no
genuine exchange of ideas at all in television’s sphere.
Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the
Lebanese people or serve the public interest. One need only to examine what is
not on television news: the corruption cases, the enormous financial public debt,
and a long list of other serious public issues that require urgent discussion and
resolution by the Lebanese people.
The Lebanese mass media generally do not take into consideration their
accountability to the people; and while television falls under the jurisdiction of a
relatively reasonable audiovisual law it operates independent of and beyond the
authority of government, as its different stations are guaranteed protection by
powerful tribal/sectarian authorities. Television thus operates with relative
freedom from the authority of the government, but on the other hand is bonded
and managed by the tribal/sectarian authorities. Television’s news divisions
advance the larger agenda of the tribal/sectarian authorities of which they are a
small part. They have less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence
by their sponsors, and more dependence on sectarian sources and groups similar
to them. Consequently, hate-promoters fill the Lebanese airwaves and
journalistic public interest standards are doomed.
What is lacking is not only the communication of information but also the
ability of the Lebanese media, and particularly television, to contribute
information directly into the flow of socially and politically constructive ideas.
What we see in Lebanon is a social system that gives opportunities and
advantages to people on the basis of their wealth and seniority within a tribal
sectarian system. The concentration of control over this powerful one-way
60
medium by a select few who are driven by tribal/sectarian interests carries with it
the potential for damaging the operations of democracy.
Little attention is paid to the development of an environment of genuine
dialogue between the ruler and the public on the one hand, and among the people
themselves on the other. The Lebanese media sector is dominated by a market
mentality culture that gives little thought to social responsibility. As a
consequence there is confusion between the freedom of the media to inform the
people and their freedom to propagate tribal/sectarian dogma and seek material
profit.
The problematic nature of television and other mass media in Lebanon lies
in a wrong visualization of the meaning of freedom. It does not lie in the issue of
censorship or lack of a free media environment. This wrong visualization of
freedom leads to private interests that both override and overwhelm social
responsibility. Censorship is no longer the right perspective to discuss the subject
of freedom of expression. The right perspective is the subject of human rights,
particularly the right of the individual to communicate in order to improve the
quality of her/his life and to practice true democracy.
True democracy requires the active participation of citizens in public
debate as well as involvement in decisions that concern public affairs. Freedom
of expression by the media does not bring about democracy except when access
to all media channels is made possible to all Lebanese groups. True democracy
cannot be achieved when the media serve as advocates, limiting access to some
factions and denying this access to others.
The claim that the media merely reflect reality and that the responsibility
for any negative political atmosphere in the country falls on politicians is
incorrect. While it is true that the media derive their content from the people and
government, it is also true that they play an active role in selecting and shaping
the content of their messages. The media set the agenda of events and
consequently they determine what issues are to be debated by the public.
The problem of the media today rests in the aversion of media gatekeepers
to releasing information that disagrees with either their views or those of their
backers. This practice can and does divide Lebanon into polarized and fanatic
groups, as was the case during the past civil war. It can result in producing closed
enclaves or “ghettos,” where members will only accept content that agrees with
their views.
61
The danger today is in television spending more time attempting to avoid
information that disagrees with its gatekeepers than in seeking objective facts
about issues of general public concern.
The concept of “freedom of expression” is exploited to give the media a
special status that places it above social regulations and above institutions.
Perhaps the term “freedom of information” is the most misused in Arabic. The
human rights covenant and all other democratic conventions require the media to
find ways to serve the public, and not the reverse. The citizen today is the target
of persuasion by television at a time when her/his interests should be, ethically
and in principle, the basic significant factor in the selection of media content.
The Lebanese television stations are mainly advocacy channels for both
national political groups and regional and international authorities. Each station
clearly sets a different agenda for the discussion of news developments by its
viewers. And since each station is patronized and/or managed by feudal sectarian
authorities, it attracts audiences that are mainly of the same religious sect.
The citizen must be the focus of attention, and not the media or the
journalist. Media protection does not automatically imply the protection of the
individual or society. There need to be checks that will guarantee access to the
media by those who have no media outlets. Freedom of the press thus becomes a
legal right only inasmuch as it guarantees the right of the citizen to receive
truthful information about public issues. The media cannot ask for freedom to
practice their role if this practice violates public interest and transgresses the
right of the individual to obtain accurate information, information that permits
her/him to play an active role in building a correct and enlightened civil society.
Public interest should be placed ahead of the private rights of journalists and the
media. The state needs to legislate and facilitate setting up public media channels
that can serve as a model to the private media.
Television organizations have betrayed their viewers by failing to provide
the truth about issues that concern them, echoing instead the voices of corrupt
and dishonest politicians, as well as concentrating on amplifying and propagating
the lies of politicians that patronize them. Lebanese television organizations are
establishment managers; the establishment being the tribal/sectarian authorities
that patronize the different national as well as foreign organizations, and not the
government.
Television in Lebanon has failed to contribute to national development. A
basic starting point for fruitful and effective involvement of the media in social
development is to establish a balance between public, private and government
62
interests. None of the Lebanese television stations speak for all of Lebanon;
instead they have braced and encouraged division in society with each station
serving as a voice for a religious or a sectarian faction.
The problem of television in Lebanon stems from the inability of the state
to introduce clear plans and policies that bind the different social institutions,
including media institutions, with the overall goals of society. The basic
responsibility of the state is to involve the citizens in the affairs of their country
and unite them therein. In the absence of this governmental role, the principal
problem facing the Lebanese television lies in the issue of the freedom of the
citizen and in television’s failure to prepare it audiences for democratic
participation in society.
Television has also contributed to the weakening of the society by creating
political confusion and spreading moral disorder at a time when Lebanon was in
serious need for national unity to repair the destruction of the civil war.
The problem with television in Lebanon is that it is still in the juvenile
stage and that most of the stations grew and developed as pirate media. These
media succeeded in destruction but failed to build. They have contributed to
mobilizing the public to take negative action more than they contributed to
bringing about positive action. Television does not work for a unified Lebanon
but rather acts as forums representing the different political, ethnic and religious
minorities thus encouraging and promoting division within the country.
The emergence of diverse Lebanese television stations with contradicting
premises and outlooks has contributed to evident contradictions among the
Lebanese people. The media have managed to create a false consciousness of
Lebanese realities and to an incongruent public participation.
Lebanese television stations do not pay serious attention to the real needs
of the public; rather, they behave like any other business or industry that aims at
financial profit or the service of its investors. The content of television
contributes to the alienation of the Lebanese individual instead of facilitating
her/his participation in the affairs of society. This sense of alienation is a result of
providing the citizen with media content that has no relation with her/his society.
What is presented to the Lebanese citizen on television channels is beyond
her/his scope, for these channels do not deal with matters that are of interest to
the citizen but to the political or business power groups behind these channels.
Should this citizen accept the content presented, she/he will feel a stranger to
social values, and even to her/himself.
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Lebanese television also plays a major role in diverting the citizen from
her/his genuine problems by directing attention to secondary issues that are
imported and have no relation to the existing social and political problems of
Lebanon. This has resulted in the disorientation of the public and in an
inadequate vision of its norms and values. Lebanese television, thus, is
contributing to divergence in social consciousness among the different Lebanese
groups, even to discrepancy in the general outlook on social values and possible
solutions to the problems facing Lebanese society.
To be truly democratic, the media must come closer to its citizens. There
is an immediate need to develop a mutual relationship of influence between the
media and the citizen. It is far from helpful to the cause of democracy to have the
media in the hands of influential politicians and/or business people, while the
average citizen is exclusively delegated the role of the consumer or spectator.
Lebanese television have chosen to focus on displaying the incompatible
views of different political, ethnic and sectarian currents, but have failed to serve
as a responsible forum for debate among these currents. Television failed to
bridge the gaps among citizens and failed in achieving a national consensus,
which is basic for any true national development.
Television institutions cannot guarantee their freedom unless they agree to
be held accountable for their role in defending the rights of citizens. Their ethical
right for freedom of expression must be indelibly tied to their acceptance of this
accountability. Their legal right for this freedom may not be denied as long as
they continue to fulfill their ethical role towards society. The moral right of
television to freedom of expression has to be linked to its accountability.
64
Bibliography:
IMonthly, issue 29, November 2004, p. 7.
Report of the International Independent Investigation Commission Established
Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1595 (2005), article 16, Beirut, 19
October 2005.
65
The Rhetoric of bioterrorism in media and fiction:
implications for U.S. counter-terrorism
By Lars Erslev Andersen, University of Southern Denmark
What if terrorists exploded a homemade nuclear bomb at the Empire State
Building in New York City? A one-kiloton nuclear device – tiny by superpower
standards – would ignite a fireball 300 feet in diameter that would demolish the
Empire State Building and the 20,000 people who work there, leaving in their
place a crater 120 feet wide. The intense heat would vaporize much of the
building, and everyone in it. A shock wave would spread out from the blast site,
exposing everything in its path to pressure as high as thousands of pounds per
square inch. Components of the Empire State Building that had not vaporized
would create a storm of concrete, glass, and steel missiles, which would be
propelled thousands of feet by strong horizontal winds.
This is how the American terrorism-researcher at Harvard University
Jessica Stern begins her book: The Ultimate Terrorist from 1999. Over the next
couple of pages she continues her speculations on the colossal consequences, in
short as well as long term, if even a small nuclear device was brought to
detonation. Later on in the text biological weapons are considered, for example
anthrax. As she writes in the introduction: ”Biological weapons have the
potential to be as deadly as nuclear bombs. For example, 100 kilogram[s] of
anthrax, less than the amount Iraq has produced, could kill up to 3 million people
if dispersed under optimal conditions” (Stern 1999, p.3f). It is curious that
anthrax is always given as illustration when researchers point out examples of
biological weapons one could imagine terrorists would use. Who cannot
remember the images of the prior American Secretary of Defence William Cohen
with a pound of sugar raised in one arm explaining to journalists from ABC
News that if this sugar had been anthrax, and had it been spread over Washington
DC, half the population would die. Moreover, anthrax surfaces as the first
example in Anthony Lake’s book: 6 Nightmares from 2000. Lake was president
Bill Clintons first National Security Adviser, and the first of six nightmares that
could strike the USA was biological terrorism in the form of anthrax: ”What are
your chances of surviving such a tiny dose of inhaled, weapons-grade anthrax?
Maybe 50 %. That’s why the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment
concluded in a 1993 study that a single airplane delivering only 100 kilograms of
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anthrax – a mere .2562 cubic yards – over Washington, D.C., after dusk on a
calm night could kill many hundreds of thousands people” (Lake 2000, p. 13f).
The horror does not stop here: “Even worse could be product of “black biology”,
such as a genetically engineered, antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax, as
reportedly developed by Russian scientists at the Soviet bioweapons
conglomerate Biopreparat” (Lake 2000, p. 14). With no morbidity intended one
could say that it has, since 1997, been fashionable for research to focus upon the
so-called new terrorism and this resulted in a conspicuous amount of attention
being placed on anthrax. In 1999, in the US, 104 cases were registered which
were thought to be related, to chemical or biological terrorism. After closer
investigation, however, all cases were shown to be hoaxes. Of these, 81 instances
involved people, in one circumstance or another, threatening to use anthrax. This
indicates that, as corollary to the interest of politicians and researchers, anthrax
has become a favoured subject among criminals and the unhinged who want to
make an impression on their surroundings. Thus, also the media, which quoted
the legislators, the experts and the madmen contributed to the common interest in
the lethal substance.
One wonders why anthrax became the preferred example for, even though
it was fashionable to discuss among certain people, there was only one case in
the whole of world history where it was known to be used by a terror
organization: the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo’s failed attempt to spread bacteria
from an apartment in Tokyo in the summer of 1993. The quotes from Stern and
Lake indicate two possible reasons: Iraq and Russia. When Stern casually uses
Iraq as a basis for comparison it is hardly a coincidence: since the Gulf War in
1991 where The Coalition of the Willing forced Iraq to cease its productions of
weapons of mass destruction and destroy its stocks, Saddam Hussein’s regime
has had, as a state which produced, among other things, anthrax, the doubtful
honour of being Rouge state par excellence. At the end of the 1990ies the
unnerving atmosphere increased exponentially after the former chief of chemical
and biological weapons-research for the Soviet Union and Russia, Ken Alibek,
told ABC’s Prime Time Live in February of 1998 that the former super power
had produced “hundreds of tons of anthrax bacteria and scores of tons of
smallpox and plague viruses”. Thus, anthrax was out there somewhere in a world
where the end of the cold war and globalisation had resulted in porous
boundaries. Either way, the know-how was available with the many scientists
who had been tinkering with the stuff in Iraq and the Soviet Union. One could
think they would use the mobility which globalisation and porous boundaries
67
allows by seeking new pastures, for example with the global terror-networks.
When anthrax appears again and again in research maybe it is because this was
the substance which the American military experimented with until president
Richard Nixon stopped the program in 1969 – the numbers Stern mentions
indicates that she is referring to the old experiments from then.
The purpose of this exposition is mainly to indicate that a new discourse
has developed during the late 1990ies, which has had an increasingly important
position within the American politics of security. The ingredients for this have
been, as suggested, weapons of mass destruction, illegal weapon-programs, rogue
states and a new form of terrorism that is under suspicion of wanting to use
biological weapons (anthrax). If one reviews the literature published at the end of
the 1990ies, especially from the policy-oriented milieus around the think-tanks,
that very much address themselves to the decision-makers in Washington, D.C. –
this could explain why this city is the preferred scene for the horror stories about
biological weapons – it is clear that the threats of this world stem from invisible,
non-territorial, suddenly appearing enemies, who with simple means in an
asymmetrical conflict wreak catastrophic damage. Catastrophic terrorism was
exactly the name the erstwhile Secretary of Defence William J. Perry gave the
new threat in a book from 1999: Preventive Defence. A New Strategy for
America, which he published with his colleague Mr. Ashton B. Carter. Others
named the phenomena post-modern terrorism, super terrorism or simply new
terrorism.
The world knew only of a limited amount of cases in which terrorism was
performed with weapons of mass destruction - actually there was only one
known death as a result of biological terrorism until the anthrax-affair in the
autumn of 2001 in the US added five new cases to the list (Tucker 1999) - in
spite of this it was increasingly the main subject when Americans discussed
security politics. This had nothing to do with concrete experiences or empirical
knowledge, but theoretical threat-narratives based on worst-case assumptions:
apocalyptic scenarios produced in the cinema, novels, role-playing and on desks
in many Washington think-tanks.
The Threat-assessment is made
After the Cold War there was no longer any state which could match the USA
militarily. In the beginning of the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union an
idea was thus developed that the US should always be able to fight two regional
wars at any one time. In the first Gulf War there were half a million American
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soldiers in the Persian Gulf, wherefore it was plausible to assume that victory
would be certain in any regional war if 750000 soldiers were available.
According to this, the standing army should therefore count at least 1.5 million
soldiers which was 500000 less than in the Cold War (Klare 1995, p. 28ff).
Already in connection with these discussions that involved Colin Powel who was
then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for Defence and Richard Cheney who
was Secretary of Defence, the legislators in Congress were critical of the
arguments. They pointed out that the Pentagon had not established a connection
between the threat on one side and the concept of defence to match those threats
on the other. “Where are the threats?” as Senator Sam Nunn asked (Nunn 1990,
p. 5f).
Several years would go before he got his answer. As a matter of fact a new
threat assessment was first developed by the end of the ‘90ies. Its design was
finished, however, before the NATO 50-year jubilee in April of 1999 in
Washington. This was held simultaneously with the defence-alliance fighting its
first war in Kosovo. Already then it was becoming a pressing question for many
what the point of NATO was, now that the Soviet Union had fallen and the
Warszawa-pact had dissolved? In principle NATO had outlived itself. However,
the US had a new threat assessment ready. Clinton’s Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright toured the governments of European NATO countries to
convince them that this should define the new role for the alliance.
In this assessment terrorism or rather the new terrorism played a
considerable role since it, along with weapons of mass destruction and the socalled rogue states, were ingredients in the new threat after the Cold War.
Terrorism, Rogue states and weapons of mass destruction constitute what was
called the asymmetrical threat, where for example Iraq supplied al-Qaida with
weapons of mass destruction such as ricin.
It was exactly this cocktail the American Secretary of State Colin Powel
indicated when he, in February 2003, wanted to convince the United Nations
Security Council that Iraq was a threat that demanded a response from the world
community, possibly even in the shape of a war. Also, this combination of
elements was used to explain why a so-called “pre-emptive strike”-strategy, that
is removing the threat before it could do any damage, was materialising in the
defence concept already during the Clinton administration. These considerations
are the origin of the metaphor of “a smoking gun”, where Great Britain’s Prime
minister Tony Blair and president George W. Bush, prior to the second Iraq War,
pointed out that the damage would be done if we ever saw a smoking gun: 9-11
69
should have been prevented before the planes hit the buildings in Washington
and New York. This could happen through better intelligence fieldwork or by
bombing training camps used by terrorists before they can complete their
objectives. This was the lesson learned by the al-Qaida attack in 2001.
After 9-11
It was the idea of a “pre-emptive strike” which the Americans suggested should
be an integral part of the NATO strategic concept and which the European
countries, with France as a very vocal element, prevented. The US standpoint
was of course that if it should be possible for a terror network to detonate a
nuclear device in an American city or spread smallpox the catastrophic
consequences were a necessary result. 9-11 showed that there were terrorists for
whom mass destruction and death was a goal. Also, the anthrax attack in October
of 2001 clearly showed that even a small attack with biological weapons on
civilians could result in chaos. New terrorism, which had been a vague concept
for the European countries in the 1990ies, and where serious researchers had
dismissed the idea as an illusion among hysterical American politicians, had thus
become a reality.
According to American theories the actions of new terrorism are
characterised by including: 1) WMD, 2) it aims at inflicting maximal damage
with as many casualties as possible, 3) its ideological and political goals are not
well defined, and 4) it is network-based with a global orientation. As with many
concepts, weapons of mass destruction are not clearly defined. These could be:
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. It is, however, not given that the use of,
for example, biological weapons results in a large number of dead or massive
destruction. Also, the term does not always include a fourth kind of weapon
known as radiological weapons. Here one uses radioactive materials that are
extremely dangerous. In a dirty bomb these can be detonated and thereby spread.
Dirty bombs have become the object of greater scrutiny after examination of alQaida cave-networks in Afghanistan revealed blueprints of such a device.
That new terrorism seeks massive destruction is closely linked with its
vague goals. One could see classical terrorism as a sought of information strategy
which uses violence to advance demands while it simultaneously functions as a
position for further negotiation. One could mention the Palestinians, where the
goal is to get the surrounding society to accept the creation of a Palestinian state.
Here it is the message that is important, not the body count. The best example is
Black Septembers operation at the Munich-Olympics where the Israeli delegation
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was kidnapped. This happened while the world press core was collected in
Munich. So, because of all the cameras, the Palestinian problem, which was
otherwise quite unknown, became headline material. Two years later the
chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, PLO, held his famous
speech at the UN general assembly.
Classical terrorism has since then been defined as theatre by the American
terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, since its goal was to get a large audience with few
deaths. In extension of this there are examples of groups like Bader-Mainhof
apologising if its operations had cost the lives of innocent civilians. These
classical examples of terrorism were usually accompanied by a press release to
some news agency where the terror organisation took responsibility, argued its
case and made a demand. In relation to this it is conspicuous that the terror
operations performed by groups like al-Qaida, in the ‘90ies and the first years of
the new millennium, were not followed by press releases explaining who was
responsible and what demands were made. By studying their MO, there is rather
a pattern of warnings being issued first, maybe days or weeks ahead of the
operation, as was the case with the Bali-bombing in the autumn of 2002. Here alQaida’s second-in-command announced violent attacks on a tape sent to aljazeera. No basis for negotiation or demands was made.
One does not get the impression that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict would fulfil al-Qaida’s mission whereby it would dissolve itself. The
goals involved seem to be more general and intertwined with religion of an
almost apocalyptic kind. Thus, al-Qaida’s criteria for success must be seen as
very obscure indeed. What is not left unclear, however, is that al-Qaida, like
Aum Shinrikyo, perceive their battle as being a holy one. Their victims are
conceived as belonging to the infidels, and because of this loose their humanity –
their life only has worth as sacrifices in the cause of the holy mission. This
eschatological perspective and the contempt for the life of the infidel means,
according to theory, that such groups seek to inflict the greatest possible damage
and chaos. The more one knows about groups such as al-Qaida it becomes clear
that they are not groups in any traditional sense, rather they are a network of
individuals organised around nodes without any fixed geographical position.
Experience has shown that such networks can be organised from many places
and that the only demand on locality is that they can function relatively
unbothered by authorities. Financing, organisation, communication, acquiring
weapons and other such things are left to the network itself, but it does need
hideouts and the relative protection of states that are viewed as sovereign by the
71
UN, whereby they cannot be attacked by, for example, the US. This
organisational structure makes it possible for the network to spread out on a
global level.
In many ways growth conditions for new terrorism have been optimal after
the Cold War, and especially increased globalisation, which has created what
some call the global village, has been important. Nation-states have been under
pressure, not least in the former Soviet Union, which means it has been
increasingly difficult to prevent the illegal spreading of people and hardware
across borders, also, a range of conflicts have arisen with ethnic, cultural and
religious components. Thus, there is a much greater risk for the spreading of
weapons, including weapons of mass destruction. On can mention that the
Americans, already in the beginning of the 1990ies, were worried about the
proliferation of nuclear weapons in connection with the scrapping of warheads.
In 1992 Boris Jeltsin disclosed facts about a vast production of biological and
chemical weapons in the Soviet Union. It was feared these could fall into the
hands of terror-networks or rogue states or that the scientists working with the
substances would seek employment in for example Iraq, Iran or al-Qaida.
In this way the Americans could found their claim, that the threat from
terrorism with weapons of mass destruction was very real: firstly, there was a big
risk for the spread of weapons of mass destruction due to globalisation and
secondly, there are terror-networks that actually wish to inflict a catastrophic
attack. Thirdly, the Gulf War of 1991 showed with horrible clarity that a rogue
state, that is Iraq, actually had an extensive production of chemical and biological
weapons, and last but not least, had done its best to develop nuclear weapons.
When Aum Shinrikyos’ attack with sarin in the Tokyo Metro was investigated in
the spring of 1995 large stocks of components for the production of chemical and
biological weapons were found. Also, it was found that the cult had acquired
Russian battle-helicopters that could disperse the substance from air, and that
Russian weapons experts had actually been employed (Tucker 2000, p. 213ff).
This case thus strengthened the argument for those who saw catastrophic
terrorism as the main threat of the post-Cold War era.
From 1996, when the USA revised its terror-legislation, especially to
counter the threat from biological terrorism, the fight against new terrorism
attained top priority and was conceived as a primary threat, which the armed
forces should be organised to combat. It was also this threat the US wished
NATO to recognize and deal with in 1999. This, however, only resulted in the
establishment of a information center for weapons of mass destruction in the
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headquarters at Brussels. The idea that NATO should be ready to function
‘beyond territory’, was abandoned but only to be revitalised in 2002.
Worst Case
Obviously there was no consensus on how new terrorism and its use of WMD
should be conceptualised and fought. The main divergence is represented by the
existence of two schools of thought. We could name the first the “Vulnerabilityschool” while we can refer to the other, less elegantly, as the “Threat-assessmentschool”. In the first line of thought the starting point is the worst-case scenario,
for example the consequences of a plague attack or the detonation of a nuclear
device in a major city. Of course the conclusions are devastating and show that
the USA – or any other country for that sake – would be extremely vulnerable to
such an attack. Also, the preparedness for dealing with the consequences is quite
insufficient. In extension of this, they argue for developing a more
comprehensive preparedness, which attained high priority at the end of the
1990ies. The other school of thought is much more concerned with the threat
itself and argues that one should investigate who would have the capacity to see
through such a terror attack with weapons of mass destruction. Here it is pointed
out that there actually are very few known examples of such terrorism and that it
is a very formidable task to even handle these weapons. The assessment thus
becomes that the threat is low and that the proper strategy to follow would be
goal oriented data-collection by the intelligence services as the primary defence.
A natural corollary to these lines of thought is a critical stance toward the federal
spending of huge amounts of money on national preparedness in the case of
terrorist attacks.
9-11 did change the situation however. On the one hand this attack was not
accomplished with the use of weapons of mass destruction rather, like earlier
attacks by al-Qaida, conventional weapons were used. This confirms the idea that
terror-networks would choose to go for biggest effect with the simplest means.
This, of course, reduces the chance of seeing weapons of mass destruction in
terror-attacks. Alternately, only about a month after 9-11, the world witnessed
four letters with anthrax being circulated in the congress mail-system resulting in
five people being contaminated and dying. Also, the congress, and a whole series
of other Washington buildings, had to be evacuated and decontaminated. In a
matter of weeks billions of dollars were spent analysing all sorts of powder all
over the world. The nature of the anthrax found in the letter showed that it could
only have come from the USA, the former Iraq or Russia, and that it required
73
advanced laboratories. Thus, there must have been a dispersion of the substance
from one of these places, which indicated that the threat was real. On the other
hand, it was more likely that it was related to rightwing lunatics, from USA’s
own backyard, rather than global terror-networks.
Additionally, after the American attacks in Afghanistan it was proven that
al-Qaida had experimented with the use of chemical weapons. Furthermore, the
poison ricin, which is developed from beans, was found in the unravelling of an
al-Qaida cell in Rome and during the search of another cell in Manchester plans
for the use of weapons of mass destruction was found. The case in Manchester
also involved ricin and was connected to an al-Qaida group in northern Iraq, the
link, however, could not be verified later on.
Experts point out that the fast development in biological industries very
well could result in negative profits, since biological material, which is more
easily handled by the terror-networks, can be used for actual attacks. Known
biological weapons are actually very difficult to handle because of the high
contagion risk in addition to the fact that they are only really effective if the
weapon is dispersed over large areas with dusters on a plane. With developments
in the bio-industry one could fear that substances are developed which could be
used with much grater ease by terror-networks.
In spite of the very few actual cases, other experts non-the-less argue that
there have been no certain examples of terror-networks actually having used
weapons of mass destruction. Thus, one must assume that conventional weapons
will be preferred in the future since, all else being equal, they are easier to handle
and at the same time inflict all the damage one could hope for. These experts also
point out that the focus on terrorism with weapons of mass destruction is the real
source of weakness, since it diverts resources to a threat, which is relatively
small, from one, which is known to be large, that is conventional terrorism. An
examination of why the American authorities did not prevent the 9-11 attacks
would place consideration on whether or not there was too much focus upon
spectacular uses of weapons of mass destruction and not conventional forms of
terrorism, which actually levelled the Twin Towers.
Apocalyptic passion or cool analysis?
”Austen told the group that the Cobra virus appears to trigger a kind of LeschNyhan disease in humans, in both men and women. Lesch-Nyhan had become a
contagious disease. Cobra probably had the ability to knock out the gene for
enzyme HPRT, and that somehow led to self-injury and auto-cannibalism.
74
Natural Lesch-Nyhan disease was a progressive disorder that came on slowly as
the child developed, “No one understands the exact kind of brain damage that
causes Lesch-Nyhan children to engage in self-injury,” she said to the group.
“Cobra apparently causes the same general type of brain damage but very
rapidly” (Preston 1997, p. 295). This passage is from Richard Preston’s book The
Cobra Event, which is about a new type of biological weapon in the shape of a
recombined virus. The result of an infection is a horrendous death after hours of
auto-cannibalism. Cobra is the name of this fiendish virus, which in the book is
as contagious as smallpox – and no antidote exists. It is, in other words an attack
weapon to which there is no defence. If this substance were spread in a city – in
the book the final scenes are placed in the New York subway – would result in a
doomsday like situation as the Black Death of the Middle Ages did.
At the meting of a study group in December of 1997 president Bill Clinton
asked the leader of the Institute for Genomic Research, Dr. J. Craig Venter, if it
was possible to develop a weapon to which there is no defence (Benjamin 2002,
p. 252f; Miller 2001, p. 235ff). Venter explained that this was possible by using
certain genetically engineered, recombined types of virus, which had already
been depicted in a very realistic novel: The Cobra Event. Venter’s answer made a
deep impression on Clinton. He immediately read Preston’s book and, in
addition, made it mandatory reading for the staff in the Pentagon. Already in
April of 1998 he held a secret seminar on the bio-terrorist threat, which resulted
in the purchase of large quantities of vaccines and other medicine. As his top
adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, writes in the book The Clinton Wars, Clinton
became: ”virtually obsessed with the dangers of bioterrorism”: ”At Clinton’s
instigation, federal programs virtually unknown before – to protect the nation’s
”critical infrastructure and to curb weapons of mass destruction – received US
dollars 3.6 billion over the next four years, and traditional counterterrorism
funding was increased by 43 %. Clinton insisted on spending whatever Clarke
and the other intelligence agencies believed was necessary” Blumenthal 2003, p.
656). According to the New York Times journalist Judith Miller, in the book
Germs. Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War from 2001, Clinton
maintained his interest for worst case scenarios, his apocalyptic passion, by
reading other books on the subject; ”Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, a thriller about
a counter-terrorist team’s efforts to prevent Armageddon, made a big impression.
Another favourite was a Patricia Cornwell novel that focused on a female
medical examiner’s battle against a shadowy figure intent on using mutant
smallpox for mass murder” (Miller 2001, p. 225).
75
What should one do if it actually became possible for a terrorist or an
organisation to develop a biological weapon such as a Cobra virus and thereafter
dispersed it in a major city? Since there is virtually no real experience in this
field of research it has been necessary to invent it. This has happened through
large and thoroughly prepared war games staged by experts from for example
Johns Hopkins University’s respected Center for Biodefence in cooperation with
the federal health authorities and other relevant institutions. The results from
these games peg out the framework for the policy on the issues. All this was set
into movement years before 9-11. After 9-11 the funding for programs and
games have increased exponentially. Just like the detonation of a small nuclear
device in a city would have catastrophic consequences so would the dispersion of
Cobra virus. Therefore something must be done to prevent it. The problem is that
the new network-terrorism, post-modern terrorism, is everywhere and nowhere
and therefore impossible to unravel completely. As a metaphor for the pitched
battle between Good and Evil in the last ages the dark forces have taken hold of
our imaginations rather than being located in trivial political reality. As a
metaphor it has invaded our everyday life as a fear of evil that suddenly
manifests itself as a letter with invisible powder, a bomb in a discothèque at the
holiday resort or the transformation of an aircraft to an effective missile. It is this
rhetoric of fear and vulnerability that convinces Danes to choose local holiday
resorts placed in insect infested orchards instead of the warm beaches in the
south. But more disturbingly it also results in entrenchment, as when the British
Parliament envelops itself in a concrete shroud of fear that terrorists should drive
a van loaded with explosives into the heart of legislation. It is such irrational
alloys of fear and security that have sparked the French sociologist Jean
Baudrillars’s airy essay on The Spirit of Terrorism, which concludes that
september 11th , more than anything, was the dominant and arrogant
superpower’s own suicide: ” It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If
one does not takethat into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to
become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few
fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this
is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is
there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity,
the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists
know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable
complicity. This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power
from the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of
76
global order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this
order's) benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is
happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied
perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order. No
need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects.
It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: "rise to power of power")
exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction”
Congenially with the American politicians’ and terrorism experts’ apocalyptic
passion for biological catastrophes and global, network-based evil, the highpriest of postmodernism Baudrillard compares terrorism with a virus:
”Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like the
shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a double
agent” (Baudrillard 2001, p.1f)
The problem with Baudrillard’s analysis, which will probably be
welcomed by all that adhere to a reflex-like jubilation over any critique of the
USA, simply because it is a critique of the USA, is that it remains within the
confusion of simulacra. Just like the most persistent supporters of the American
terrorism-discourse loose themselves in their own metaphors on the worst-case
scenarios instead of asking who would have the capacity to detonate a nuclear
device in New York? Rather than making terrorism a pitched battle between the
light and dark forces and placing it in a homespun metaphysical discourse on the
last ages, terrorism can be analysed as a political and historical phenomena rather
than a self-fulfilling prophecy on the arrogance of power. This would make it
possible to deal with the background for terrorism and its manifestation as an
idea. This would not, of course, remove terrorism once and for all, but it would
de-demonise it, which, after all, is the most important thing to do when the
rhetoric of fear and vulnerability is to be deconstructed.
Thanks to Thomas Derek Robinson for diligent work and help with the
translation
77
Bibliography:
Jean Baudrillard (2001): The spirit of terrorism, translated from French original
(“L’Esprit du Terrorisme”, Le Monde November 2, by Rachel Bloul and
distributed by Cyber-Society-Live (CSL): www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cybersociety-live.html November 15, 2001.
Daniel Benjamin & Steven Simon (2002): The Age of Sacred Terror (New York:
Random House)
Sidney Blumenthal (2003): The Clinton Wars. An Insider’s Account of the White
House Years (New York: Penguin Books)
Ashton B. Carter & William J. Perry (1999): Preventive Defense. A new security
strategy for America (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press)
Michael Klare (1995): Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws. America’s search for
a new foreign policy (New York: Hill and Wang)
Anthony Lake (2000): 6 Nightmares. Real threats in a dangerous world and how
America can meet them (Boston: Little, Brown and Company)
Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad (2001): Germs. Biological
Weapons and America’s Secret War (New York: Simon & Schuster)
Sam Nunn (1990): Nunn 1990: A New Military Strategy (Washington D.C.: The
Center for Strategic and International Studies)
Richard Preston (1997): The Cobra Event (London: Orion)
Jessica Stern (1999): The Ultimate Terrorists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harward
University Press)
Jonathan B. Tucker & Amy Sands (1999): “An unlikely threat”, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, July/ August 1, Vol. 55, No. 4
78
Jonathan B. Tucker (ed.) (2000): Toxic Terror. Assessing Terrorist Use of
Chemical and Biological Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT): David E. Kaplan:
“Aum Shinrikyo (1995)”.
79
Violence, National Identity and Israeli Media
By Jakob Feldt, University of Southern Denmark
Abstract
In this paper I will address the role of Israeli commemorative history as it
appears in historical documentaries and other types of ‘reality TV’ in making
sense of violence and conflict. The Israeli digital media revolution of the 1990es
should according to mainstream media theory have brought about a plurality of
perspectives and a democratization of public conversation. Violence, conflict and
terror are for obvious reasons key issues for Israeli ‘reality TV’. Through
analysis of selected TV shows dealing with collective Israeli ‘we-identity’, we
will discuss commemorative history aspects of these shows and its moral lessons
and education for public conversation regarding violence and conflict.
In the course of this investigation, I will draw critical attention to the
democratization perspective of the digital media revolution inspired by critical
theory and Fredric Jameson’s consideration of the aesthetics of the culture of
late capitalism. Israeli ‘reality TV’ appears highly commercialized and
pluralized and in this way a democratic ideal for the Middle Eastern media but
nevertheless its education for public conversation in the Israeli social domain on
violence, terror and ‘we-identity’ seems to be highly normalizing and strongly
committed to a historical determinism of suffering, defence and liberation. It
seems reasonable to question whether modern, and post-modern popular media
actually contribute to pluralism and democratic public conversation.
Introduction
Israeli media is in most respects an ideal to Middle Eastern Media in general.
Journalism in Israel is considered a significant balancing mechanism securing
Israelis from illegitimate government, corruption and power abuse to the degree
that such things are possible to avoid. Journalism is an identity among its
practitioners in Israel placed somewhere in between critical citizenship and the
responsibilities of official information. Reality TV such as news broadcasts,
political debate shows and documentaries are independent of official state
influence apart from a military censorship which by and large regulates itself
through self-disciplinary measures among journalists and editors. Matters of
national security are highly consensual and very few journalists question military
80
dictates as to when something is a matter of national security or not. This aspect
of Israeli journalism has been criticised often but I find it to be rather
insignificant to a general understanding of Israeli media and its role in making
sense of violence and conflict.
In this presentation, I will discuss aspects of Israeli media that have to do
with education in the meaning of representations produced by TV that educate
Israelis to engage in meaningful public conservation about themselves and their
Middle Eastern surroundings. According to conventional media theory this is the
prime task of free media; to enable relatively free, unrestrained, democratic
public conversation. The existence of such a ‘civil conversation’ is generally
considered a parameter of political freedom, democracy and central to the
possibility of peaceful solutions to conflicts. This idealistic understanding is
basically why we in academia and politics are so interested in Arab satellite
television such as Al-Jazeera. To place the hopes of the future in TV, I find too
optimistic despite the qualities of Al-Jazeera and others after all.
I suggest that we scrutinize Middle Eastern media by the same standards
as media all over the globe. It is not enough to be happy that there is an
alternative educator on the Middle Eastern market such as Al-Jazeera, nor should
we a priori consider Israeli media better for achieving peace and democracy in
the Middle East because Israeli media is a free media in principle. Free or not
media serves interests of different kinds, be it political, economic, cultural or
most likely a combination. Quite a few critical media theorists even consider
popular mass media a democratic problem. As interesting as media development
in the Middle East might be, it is way too soon to consider it a sign of
democratization or a reflection of the type of public conversation that we are
accustomed to in the Western media landscape.
In the following, I will attempt to ground a general criticism of popular
media and its role in democratic public conversation in my studies of Israeli
commemorative TV. In these studies I have focused on the representation of
Israeli-Jewish history as part of a Middle Eastern historical context. The
historical narrative that situates Israelis in the Middle East teaches us how the
Israeli state’s memory production contributes to an education which significantly
influences Israeli perceptions of justice, legitimate violence, terrorism, and not
the least a collective ideology of ‘us’ versus ‘the others’. This ideology presents
itself both in the myths of creation of the Israeli ‘we’ but also in its representation
of the Palestinian struggle against Israel. It is crucial to recognize that this
historical narrative portrayed on TV is cast in a realist style.
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***
Public history is a history that is produced by or for the state either as part of
educational programmes, institutions such as museums and commemorations and
increasingly through mass media. Surely, public history is not only narratives
nominally identified as historical but also the very communicative community
created by mass media where a vision of a common reality of media users is laid
out in discourses that also define what is new, controversial and debatable, on the
one hand, and what is historical and commonsensical on the other. Mass media is
a radically contextualized producer of history in as much as its prime concern is
the direct acceptance of its discourse of history by the consumers. In a sense,
mass media seek to represent the reality of its consumers so direct and fast that it
is a reality which is only recognized by the consumers as real on TV in this
respect mass media is a shaper of the optics through which the totality of the real
is perceived. Occasionally, as I will discuss in relation to the Israeli TV series
Tekumah, public history in the mass media is overtaken by other, stronger,
experiences of reality. TV can also be produced in a utopian moment that is itself
history when the programme is eventually broadcasted. Then public history has
the potential of escaping its role as producer of self-evidence for a moment until
re-normalized by public interests. The Tekumah series was indeed such a public
history which can be viewed and analyzed from several perspectives. Aired in
1998 as the highpoint of mass media commemoration of Israel’s 50th anniversary
with the aim of unifying and celebrating the nation, it instead came to be viewed
as intellectualistic, post-Zionist propaganda. I will in the following discuss a
number of contexts through which we can read the history presented in Tekumah
as the history of 1990s Israeli liberalism. 7
The Tekumah series has been discussed a number of times in relation to
the so-called post-Zionism debates and the debate over the new historians. The
series has often been represented as evidence for post-Zionist influence on the
media and academia though this has been denied by the producers of the series. 8
I will try to transcend these politically local and contextual debates about the
7
The liberalism and optimism of peacemaking, globalization and economic growth as also
discussed in the anthology Peacemaking and Liberalization by Shafir and Peled (2000).
8
Pappé 1998, Green 1998.
82
series and view it from both the angle of critical theory as the ruling system’s
reproduction of itself and from a contextualized perspective of creating a history
of the present in the Israeli public. At the conception of the series right after the
signing of the declaration of principles in 1993, this present was a utopian
moment where huge openings of possibilities appeared between Israelis and
Palestinians and this moment heavily influenced the entire historical perspective
of the series. Thus, there seems to be two interwoven lines open for interpretation
in the series namely the degree of reproduction of the hitherto hegemonic
historical discourses of Zionism and the specific historical moment which indeed
did present the possibility of creating a history that was at the same time a break
with Zionist history and completely legitimate as public history.
***
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev tells us that the Israeli and the Palestinian collective are
determined to aim for the destruction of the other collective. 9 Israelis and
Palestinians are as collectives created by normalizing educational systems which
actually have a twofold purpose that are the destruction of the other’s collective
identity/memory and the negation of the individual human being. The other’s
collective memory is conceived as being the negation of the legitimacy of the
claims of one’s own history and identity which in the most explicit manner is the
case for the Israeli and Palestinian collectives. 10 The aim of destroying the
collective memory of the other is a community building strategy that is basically
a general negation of otherness which separates the real and genuine from the
false and ideologically constructed. It creates the common knowledge of the
authenticity of the “we” and de-centres the otherness of the other to a permanent
outside the realm of common sense. To the logic of collectivism the negation of
9
Gur-Ze’ev 2003, 51.
The fear of the righteousness of the claims of the other to the real natural and historical
relationship to the land is itself a producer of violence. Traces of the other’s history in the land
are systematically being erased or re-described in a way that does not challenge the nationalist
claim to the land. Part of this effort is the description of the Jews as being solely a religious
community which Zionism transferred into a colonialist movement and another aspect is the
radical hebraization of Palestine after the 1948 war. The Palestinian geography was both
physically and culturally erased or re-described and the Palestinians themselves driven out of
the land or placed under military administration until 1966 when Zionist hegemony was
thoroughly established. Still, a ghost of the former cultural identity of the land haunted Israeli
culture from particularly the 1960s onwards most clearly reflected by A.B. Yehoshua’s short
story Facing the Forests (Yehoshua 1968) and the debates over Yizhar’s Hirbet Hiza and The
Prisoner (1949) in several rounds. See Benvenisti 2000 and Shapira 2000.
10
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the individual is central. To genuinely identify the individual with the collective
and for the individual to conceive of her own identity as identical with the
collective representation of it, individual difference or otherness must be erased.
Sameness and collectivism rules when histories, ideologies and literatures can
legitimately or uncontested create discourses which claim to represent or claim to
be an icon of the real history or experience of a proper name. Thus, the concern
for this normalizing education project is not the individual’s self-creation in a
dialogue with others and the system but the reproduction of the system as a
guardian of a collective history and identity. In this way, Israeli history, Israeli
institutions and Israeli media are reproducers and guardians of the history and
identity of a proper name, not the individuals inhabiting the geography of Israel
and Palestine. Israel as a system becomes through the official narratives of the
state the guardian of the memory of Jewish suffering, the guardian of the
memory of the Holocaust and the guardian of the tale of liberation in 1948. These
are the narratological cornerstones of Israeli history and identity.11 The above
basically draws on the insights of the school of critical theory and its concern for
the individual in opposition to instrumental rationality, collective reasoning and
mechanical reproduction. In this perspective, the mechanical reproduction of
culture, history and identity via the modern state and the capitalist system are
violences against the individual human being and the possibility of
transcendence, art, spirit, creativity and other humanistic attributes to human
nature. 12 In general, critical theory is highly critical towards mass
communication media such as TV even though the theorists very early had a
clear understanding of the importance of TV and films for the culture of late
11
This guardianship prevail, it must be noted, in negation of the way of life and traditions of the
Diaspora. The memory is safeguarded not to remember the Diaspora but to negate it with the
moral lesson that Zionism and Israel is the only way to preserve the Jewish name. Of course, the
same logic dominates all other national educational systems.
12
Experts on critical theory can surely identify substantial differences between Horkheimer,
Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse and several phases in their thought. To the purposes of this
present essay, it suffices to note the general occupation with man’s freedom and the critique of
enlightenment, positivism and science. Actually, Marcuse saw the welfare state and the warfare
state as an interplay of systems operating in the advanced societies. The welfare state takes
man’s freedom by taking possession of his time and the warfare state makes him think about the
enemy instead of his own society. Mass media communication creates a togetherness and
abolishes the distinction between private and public; the state, the corporations and the workers
are gradually united and society moves towards a state of administration which is a totalitarian
society just without terror. If we replace the Cold War with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel
could be such a welfare-warfare state. Marcuse 1964: 19. Already in 1944, Adorno and
Horkheimer envisioned that TV would amount to a total experience that will make it irrelevant
to even hide that its products are all the same. Adorno and Horkheimer 1944: 179-180.
84
capitalism. The position towards mass media such as TV of Horkheimer and
Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man
might seem outdated today in the light of the rapid developments of such media
and the theories thereof. Nevertheless, their understanding of mass media as a
producer of the Same and togetherness seems right to the point or at least one of
the points of mass media. Mass media’s bottom line is still money making as it
was when Horkheimer and Adorno published Dialectic of Enlightenment in
1944; things on top of this are just an ideology to justify the uniformity of mass
media products. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s phrasing, it is a circle of
manipulation and retroactive need, which reinforces the strength of the system. 13
From a critical point of view, the question becomes whether this perspective can
cover the role of mass media in an era of globalization when mass media
communication can be said to be at the same time a producer of global
togetherness and uniformity and a key element of the erosion of the cultural
particularity of the nation state. Mass media indeed reinforces a system through
production of the same but it also undermines other systems such as a national
media culture. In this way, the development of Israeli media is not different from
that of other advanced societies. Israeli media of the 1990s was highly globalized
in its cultural aesthetics and in its variety of products and the TV-series Tekumah
attempted to be, at once, globalized in its expression and discourse and to frame a
particular national experience. The Tekumah series creates, as we will see, a
particular positive optimism as national history anchored on the one side of the
striving forces of the historical moment of the first half of the 1990s. Yet, it
reproduced a historical plot of the reproduction of the Israeli system that only
aspired to newness due to the fragility of the moment.
There are diverse theories of the role played by mass media in the
production, distribution and reception of history and the ways this role influence
or has changed patterns of collective memory in a society. 14 TV-series, both
drama and documentary, are widely held to be the most important source of
historical knowledge for the average citizen of advanced societies. The
perspective on this development is most often critical from a positivist historical
position where the concern is the precision of the information provided by TV
and the shallowness of the inevitable focus on biography and iconic events. 15 TV
focuses primarily on narrative and biography, which serve perfectly TV’s
13
Horkheimer and Adorno 1944.
See Landy 2001 and Edgerton & Rollins 2001.
15
Edgerton 2001: 1-16.
14
85
personalization of presented public events. Histories without a clear narrative
line, clear-cut heroes or villains are not TV material or are re-described to meet
the requirements of good TV entertainment. At the same time, immediacy is of
paramount importance to TV-history. Histories on TV have to be immediately
recognizible to the average consumer. The consequence of this TV parameter is
that relevance of the history presented on TV for contemporary public discourses
is very direct and commonsensical. Great national TV histories such as the
Tekumah (Israel 1998), Roots (USA 1977), Holocaust (USA 1978), Heimat
(Germany 1984), though three of the mentioned are dramas, represent important
themes in contemporary cultural and political discourses in a highly personalized
manner and have a high re-creative potential on both knowledge and public
awareness of the actuality of certain historical events. 16 Surely, there are
differences between history as documentary and history as drama but
documentaries such as the Tekumah employ the individual narratives in an
equally important manner. History is personalized as experiences of Israeli men
and women, soldiers, farmers, mothers and fathers who are interviewed in a way
for the viewers to feel the emotions of the time and most importantly the
commonality between the interviewees and “us”. The footage that accompanies
the interviews place the interviewees in the dramas of the past as people caught
in the storm of history as both agents and victims at the same time. The
documentary base of series such as the Tekumah is plotted and narrated as drama
in itself.
The concern for the quality of the history presented on TV and the critique
of TV as an instrument of state, market and capital to normalize individuals into
collectives such as consumers, Israelis, Danes or Americans are not the same.
The concern for the quality of the history product on TV with regard to the facts
of the past is largely irrelevant to our purposes here. The media of collective
memory is TV and a focus on what actually happened in the past in a critique of
16
The same can be said about historical films. The important debate after Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List over how to represent the Holocaust shows us some of the dilemmas of history
on TV or film. Claude Lanzmann, who directed the film Shoah, was very critical towards
Spielberg’s dramatized and personalized Holocaust commemoration. Lanzmann argued that the
Holocaust could not be replayed as a narrative of survival when it is both unrepresentable and a
narrative of death. Lanzmann’s and others’ concern was that the history of the Holocaust as both
plot and moral lesson after Schindler’s List had been altered in a way that challenged the core of
Holocaust memory. See Miriam Bratu Hansen’s analysis of both the debate and Schindler’s
List. Hansen 2001.
86
this development basically misses the point. 17 Instead, a focus on what kind of
history is presented on TV is relevant. The relevant questions in this present
essay are questions that address history on TV from the perspective of critical
theory and investigate possible discursive openings in the Israeli context that
could alter the position of TV history as mere official history. Such a
contextualization of the Tekumah will point to tendencies of change in the
historical discourse of Israeli public conversation in the 1990s.
Commemorative History
History, memory and their prime media TV are sites of discursive struggles even
under the perspective of critical theory. History, collective memory and TV are
official histories in the sense that they are in general controlled and distributed
top-down through culture, institutions and mechanisms for controlling their
allegiance to the conventions of historical discourse in a society. From a critical
perspective they are in principle non-oppositional. Still, within hegemony there
are generally accepted margins for social, political and historical dissent and in
this respect alternative histories of minorities can operate the field of memory
and become a challenge to hegemony. Michel Foucault stated that: “Since
memory is actually a very important factor in struggle, if one controls people’s
memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience,
their knowledge of previous struggles.” 18 In Foucault’s perspective, memory
control becomes gradually more and more effective with the development of TV
and films and it hinders a presumed previous flow of collective memory; flows
that are “reprogrammed” by these mass communication apparatuses. 19 Like
Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, Foucault seems to believe that control has
increased in modern (and postmodern) societies and that the, in Foucault’s term,
reprogramming of memory represented by modern mass communication media is
a hindrance to creativity and freedom. 20 Despite these reservations and criticisms
17
Netta Ha-Ilan’s interesting study shows how the Israeli news shows on TV are the most
important producer and distributor of collective memory. In these shows, daily events are
framed in historical plots that are very important to creating a togetherness and collective
memory between the viewers. Ha-Ilan 2001.
18
Foucault cited from Anderson 2001: 22.
19
Ibid. 22.
20
Others like Michael Curtin argue that TV does not reprogram memories as a control
mechanism but it organizes and re-organizes difference within the global economic order. In his
perspective, TV does not homogenize identities but it organizes them on the global arena in a
hierarchy of values and attitudes that are designated to certain places. Curtin 2001:338. I do not
find the two perspectives incompatible. When TV functions as a producer and distributor of a
global hierarchy of values and attitudes and fixes these values to places through the creation of
87
of the possibility of counter-history in a world of global mass communication,
marked and open social and political conflicts within a society such as the Israeli
can create a context in which TV history and other commemorative histories can
both represent state interests and function partially, not as counter-history, but as
alternative, critical history.21
The Israeli state, institutions and culture produce and reproduce
commemorative history in school books, museums, political discourse, the arts
and the media. 22 The icons and myths of commemorative history are not
eternally fixed but are re-described or re-placed over time in response to sociocultural development and changed public reception.23 These changes are not
changes that question the legitimacy of the commemorative history itself but part
of its reproduction. The most important aspects of Israel’s commemorative
history are focussed on Holocaust memory and the establishment of the state in
1948. These two historical events are intertwined as a metahistorical function of
each other. Palestinian history is conceived as a denial of both the Holocaust and
the historical justice of the rebirth of the Israeli nation which is why the IsraeliPalestinian conflict is the generator of the sanctity of particularly these aspects of
Israeli commemorative history.24 The critical engagement in both Holocaust
memory and 1948 by academics and intellectuals since the late 1980s has not
changed commemorative practice or the broad public acceptance of this practice
which in line with Gur-Ze’ev’s argument is due to the perpetuation of the
icons representing the values of certain places as in nature documentaries, adventure
programmes, ethnographies and political reports, power and control is the precondition for the
ability to create a hierarchy. The power to organize and re-organize to a large extent equals
control. Yet, Curtin’s argument is important for reminding us that TV distributes a synthetic
organization of cultural difference and that TV does not make Asians into Americans but
actually contributes to a fixation of such identities.
21
Counter-history in the Foucaultian sense can not be part of the hegemonic system. Foucault
following Nietzsche argued for a counter-history in three steps: 1. Against realism – official
history or monumental history. 2. Against identity – history that conceals the heterogeneous
systems that make the self. 3. Against truth – history that conceals that knowledge rests upon
injustice. Foucault 1977: 163. The Tekumah is in no way that critical but it attempts to include
or domesticate a Palestinian narrative which in itself is not a counter-history to Israeli history
but a mirror-history. Counter-history is per definition equally critical towards both Israeli and
Palestinian history.
22
Zerubavel 1995, Ha-Ilan 2001.
23
Zerubavel 1995 shows how central Zionist myths have a history of uses and receptions since
their invention. She tracks the working of myths such as Masada and Josef Trumpeldor from the
1920s until our time.
24
Gur-Ze’ev 2003: 25-50.
88
conflict. 25 Israeli commemorative history thus upholds events that are highly
important to the collective self-identity of Jewish Israelis but this history is at the
same time an active partner in concealing the injustices this knowledge is based
on and the conflicts it is engaged in. It represents not the individual Israeli but the
ideology of the collective. 26 In this perspective, the promises of peace made in
the early 1990s opened for the possibility of a different commemorative history
of which the Tekumah was the first large and prestigious product.
The Tekumah-series
In his 1998 review of Tekumah, Ilan Pappé wrote that the series was almost postZionist in its presentation of Israeli history. Pappé’s review appeared in Journal
of Palestine Studies after he earlier in three consecutive articles in the same
journal had explored the key word of Israeli cultural debates of the 1990s,
namely post-Zionism:
“But while the history is still told as a Zionist story,
there are indications that there is a counterstory as
well. The fact that the other side’s story does not
receive as much coverage as the Zionist one creates an
imbalance that might dictate to the viewer whose story
is more truthful. Still, the programme on several
occasions provides verification by Israeli participants
of Palestinian claims. Indeed, at times even the
narrator himself presents the Palestinian view as just,
and in so doing leaves an ambiguous and probably
confused impression with the viewers” 27
Pappé’s prism is that of the specific coining of the term post-Zionism that he
himself has been one of the most important shapers of. Pappé judges the series
25
Among the critical works are Segev 1986, 1993, Zertal 1998, Morris 1987, Pappé 1992,
Shlaim 1988.
26
Of which Etgar Keret’s short story Siren is an example. Keret 1996.
27
Pappé 1998: 99. Pappé’s articles on post-Zionism were the first to attempt a coherent analysis
of the buzz-word of the 1990s. I find Pappé’s attempt rather unsuccessful. Pappé does not
differentiate clearly between political, ideological and social developments and attributes to
post-Zionism as mixture of philosophical insights and political ideologies which primarily serve
to legitimize post-Zionism as the position of a re-organized radical Left to which Pappé himself
belongs. Pappé fails in bringing the term post-Zionism to mean something beyond a certain
political opinion on Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Pappé 1997a, 1997b, 1997c.
89
solely from a commonsensical perspective of the level of truth and justice
attributed to the Palestinian historical narrative. The episode that Pappé refers to
in the citation is about the 1948 war in which several Israeli participants, now old
men, gives testimony to the fact that they witnessed and even participated in
creating the Palestinian exodus. These sequences are indeed among the most
important in the series but the testimony of the elderly men is not in principle the
same as deeming the Palestinian historical narrative just and the Zionist unjust.
Pappé’s review shows some of the ideological and identity-political stakes of a
series such as Tekumah. It seems as if Pappé wants that the series should devote
as much time to the Palestinians as to the Israelis in what is an Israeli history.
This is surely part of internal Israeli anti-Zionist struggle which basically aims at
replacing Israeli history with Palestinian. This approach does not solve the
problem of totalizing histories or has any counter-historical perspective because
Palestinian history is not counter-history it is mirror-history, as previously
mentioned. Other critics of the series such as government ministers Ariel Sharon
and Limor Livnat also focus on the presence of a Palestinian historical
perspective and they also think that its presence cast shadows over Zionist
achievements but from the opposite point of view. They think that the Palestinian
narrative does not belong at all in an Israeli history. 28 Both examples point to the
Palestinian historical narrative as opposition to and even negation of Zionism but
from opposite poles that show us the spectrum of the Israeli struggle over
memory. The optics of both Pappé and Sharon-Livnat are oppositional to the
ideological legacy of Tekumah which can be characterized as Oslo-optimism. 29
These critics do not engage in the question of commemorative history’s
normalizing project in a principled manner but advocate its replacement with
another normalizing project. Thus, their perspectives are not against history,
identity and truth or the culture industry only these concepts’ particular
representations in Tekumah. In the following, I will attempt to analyze whether
Tekumah itself contains counter-historical perspectives.
***
The Tekumah series consists of 22 episodes of one hour duration each. Each
episode treats a period or a theme of Israeli history which is conventionally
regarded as important to the history of the nation. The first three episodes deal
28
29
Green 1998.
I will return to this theme after presenting aspects of Tekumah.
90
with the Jewish settlement in Palestine, the period after World War II and the
1948 war and these episodes serve as an introduction to and the central plot of
the entire series. In the three inaugural episodes, the meta-narrative of Zionist
history is presented through historical events that are of great importance to
collective memory in Israel; Zionism, the Holocaust and the 1948 war. Other
significant episodes of Tekumah deal with the integration of Arab Jews in Israel,
the Palestinian minority within Israel, the Palestinian struggle against Israel and
the mutual recognition of Israelis and Palestinians in 1993.30 I have singled out a
number of sequences from some of these episodes to consider as both aesthetic,
historical and moral statements within the context of mass media communication
and the production of culture.
Tekumah was conceived as a unifying narrative to commemorate
th
Israel’s 50 anniversary in 1998. It was produced by the IBA (Israel
Broadcasting Authority) which since the beginning of public TV broadcasting in
the 1960s has been the official institution for the production, distribution and
organization of Israeli TV. 31 Therefore, it can be considered official and
commemorative history. The 22 episodes of Tekumah ran on Israeli TV in the
spring of 1998. The individual episodes were introduced by Israeli singer and
cultural icon Yehoram Gaon and narrated by Yigal Naor. The choices of Gaon
and Naor as presenters of the series represent the integrative agenda behind the
series. Gaon is a Mizrahi Jew who has made it to the centre of Israeli culture and
Naor is a former Palmach commander who incarnates the Israeli Man with his
military elite background and pure Ashkenazi accent. Anyway, during the
production of the series Gaon quitted his job as presenter due to the public debate
it aroused and in particular due to the episode about the Palestinian struggle
against Israel. 32 Executive producer and chief editor of Tekumah was Gideon
Drori who took the initiative of the series and conceptualized it. The series itself
30
The question of significance is of course subjective. In my version, the episodes that deal with
the contested history between Israelis and Palestinians and between Israelis are significant for
the critical perspective of counter-history and for an evaluation of level of conformity with
hegemony that the series presents.
31
IBA has since 1965 been the authorized institution for Israeli TV broadcasting. It is directed
by a board appointed by the political parties according to their parliamentary representation.
Only in 1993 monopoly was broken and private news and history programmes could be
broadcasted as Israeli TV. The public and representative control of the IBA reflects a concern
for public service, education and collective memory but also a political struggle for the control
of the same. See Ha-Ilan: 208.
32
It is not entirely clear whether Gaon quitted or was made to quit. It is clear though that the
reason was the public debate the series aroused. The issue was debated broadly in Israeli media
at the time. See e.g. Green 1998.
91
was directed by 19 different Israeli directors. According to Drori, facing
criticism, the series was not intended to be post-Zionist or outright proPalestinian, as some critics claimed, but indeed Zionist only of a dynamic 1990s
type. 33 To my mind, Drori’s statements in the face of criticism capture the
dynamism of this particular historical moment. The Tekumah, produced by the
IBA, was surely intended to be commemorative and ceremonial 34 which its entire
picture-sound impression testifies to, but it furthermore intended to be
progressive in line with the cultural debates of the early 1990s and reflect the
potential of the Declaration of Principles and the economic boom of the time.
These developments were met with a large sceptical opposition in Israel who
were sceptical not only to the peace negotiations with the Palestinians but also
towards globalization in particular its cultural dimension. 35 At the same time, the
entire regional as well as global contexts that should ensure the success of the
Oslo-negotiations were highly volatile which made the total investment in liberal
discourse of the series quite premature. Therefore, the Tekumah came to reflect
memory struggles in Israeli society between sides battling for hegemony.36 Gaon,
Naor and Drori are as characters aspects of this struggle and worked to
universalize the historical memory presented in Tekumah as the history of all
Israel. This is probably what Ilan Pappé saw as an ambiguity in the series which
might translate into confusion for the viewers.
The visual side of Tekumah is characterized by classic Zionist
themes. Each episode has as its introduction a sweeping aerial perspective that
moves between images of past and present underscored by a dramatic and
emotional sound image. The pictures show the flourishing fields of Israel and its
labouring inhabitants. The image presented of the land is clearly dynamic with a
focus on progress and the achieved prosperity intertwined with classic romantic
themes of the beauty and innocence of the Homeland. To be sure, the visual and
audio introduction to the episodes is a remnant of the modernistic, Zionist and
progressive epic with its emphasis on the working of the land, conquering it from
33
ibid.
The preferred term of Netta Ha-Ilan. Ceremonial history is a history that affects people
emotionally and creates bonds between them. It is part of a society’s social knowledge that
assists the creation of the experience of “us”. It is an emotionally based knowledge, not
necessarily cognitive or ideological. I find that Ha-Ilan’s concept of ceremonial history is not
entirely the same as commemorative history. Ha-Ilan’s focus is on knowledge while my use of
the term commemorative emphasizes differences between histories in a typological manner.
Thus, the terms are not meant to be interchangeable. Ha-Ilan 2001: 227.
35
Ram 1999, Shafir and Peled 2002.
36
Here, it is important to recall Foucault’s argument that the one that controls memory controls
both action and experience.
34
92
the wilderness and integrating it into civilized nature. 37 We should not
underestimate the affect of headlines and introductions in the reception of a
historical narrative or news story for that matter. The headline and the subsequent
framing of the narrative are both a plot and a trope for the historical discourse
and as such it has already established a meta-historical context and the type of
discourse. In the first episode, we are introduced to the so-called “Generation in
the Land” which refers to the nativized Jews in Palestine who build the Jewish
pre-state community. The episode deals with the period from 1936 to 1946.
Accordingly, the focus is on the Arab-Palestinian uprising from 1936 to 1939,
the influx of refugees from Europe but also on the culture of the pioneergeneration. The pioneers are Zionist icons who established settlements, drained
swamps, worked the land and defended themselves if necessary. In Tekumah’s
first episode they are presented with some nostalgia and several times with the
adjective “very ideological”. This reference is in the episode made to the
pioneering youth movements and some former pioneers are interviewed about
the movements and life in general in the times of the Yishuv. 38 Several times in
the first episode the issue of the Palestinian presence in the land is touched upon.
An elderly woman says: “We didn’t know that it was somebody else’s land”. In
the interview with this woman and other veterans of the days of pre-state
settlement retrospective comments on the right to the land and justice in the
Jewish settlement enterprise are numerous which reflects the contemporary
concern on this issue and the legitimacy of such debates in the 1990s. The
Palestinian uprising and resistance against Jewish immigration are not portrayed
as terrorist activity but as a sort of misunderstanding of Zionist intent and lack of
recognition of the catastrophe facing European Jewry from the 1930s onwards.
The conflict between Jews and Palestinians before the 1948 war is articulated
within the liberal Zionist discourse which measures the situation as a tragedy
where the major evil (anti-Semitism) leads to a lesser evil (Palestinian uprooting
and eventually expulsion). 39 The tragic portrait of the situation is in concordance
with the rather sinister and low-key description of the historical events that are
cornerstones of Zionist memory. These event are clearly viewed with a historical
distance that transforms the representation of the events from a rejoicing and
celebratory mode to a more bitter-sweet, nostalgic memory with a clear
37
Tekumah can be purchased in its entirety as video. I refer to the series of videos published by
IBA in 1998.
38
Yishuv means settlement in Hebrew and is the most common term for the Jewish pre-state
community particularly in Zionist and pro-Zionist literature.
39
Tekumah episode 1.
93
awareness of the pain and suffering involved for the people who lived that
historical moment. This historical distance is not purely chronological. It is the
result of changing social configurations, cultural and historical re-descriptions
that surely grant legitimacy to the ideologies and actions of the period but at the
same time construct a reflexive distance. Among these changes, the peace
process of the early 1990s and the debate about the new historians were the most
important. In the liberal Zionist discourse of Tekumah, the history of the
Generation in the Land is not a call for action or a model of imitation. The
relation between the historical events and the present is not linear and
determinative. It is an emotional and cultural relation like a heritage that does not
prevent the present and ultimately the future from being all together different. 40
The episode about the generation in the land is followed by an
episode entitled A State in the Making. The focus in this episode is on the first
years after WWII up to the UN resolution that decided to partition Palestine
between Jews and Palestinians in November 1947. As a piece of TV production
it is almost completely similar to the first episode. The line of narration is
continued and many of the same people are interviewed to account for the history
of this period. Among the new interviewees are Meir Davidson, a veteran of the
Givati brigade, and Yacoba Cohen who served in an intelligence unit. Davidson
and Cohen add considerable ambivalence to the narrative as they emphasize the
horrors and injustices that are flipsides of the heroism which the Jewish-Israeli
actions usually are plotted within. Cohen was an undercover agent posing as a
Palestinian in Haifa’s Palestinian neighbourhoods. He is very moved by this
memory and the fact that he personally knew the people who were uprooted. He
eventually met personal friends of his as refugees in Lebanon and recalls this
event as horrible. The interview with Cohen is very emotionally charged and
appears central to the episode due to the affect of his display of feelings for the
enemy and representation of the events as tragic. The personalized history of
Tekumah works effectively as a bonding between these veterans and the new
historical moment of the 1990s in which their sorrows, pains and regrets can be
integrated with their strong sense of national pride. The perspective that
emanates from the interviews with Davidson and Cohen perfectly fits producer
Drori’s idea of a modern, dynamic Zionism capable of looking the past into the
40
This un-linear representation of the past and its bitter-sweet nostalgia are signs of the
atmosphere of liberal optimism of series. The present of the production of the series is clearly
understood as “better” than the described past.
94
eye, recognize the tragedies of history and still be proud of the achievements of
this history.
In A State in the Making we find another interesting sequence. Golda
Meir was one of the leaders of the Zionist organisation. She spearheaded
negations with King Abdallah of Jordan regarding the status of Palestine after the
withdrawal of British forces and eventually became prime minister of Israel from
1969-74. 41 Meir was furthermore known for her hardliner position on the conflict
with the Palestinians. In the episode a section from Meir’s report to the Jewish
Agency is read aloud. Meir describes how she felt when she came to Haifa under
the Palestinian flight from the city. 42 She pays particular attention to the empty
houses which were left in a hurry with coffee still standing on the tables and
rooms full of furniture and things as if their inhabitant were just out shortly. Meir
comments that it must have looked like this in many cities in Europe just a few
years ago. This chilling comment casts light on the magnitude of the Palestinian
disaster in an imagery very central to Israeli collective history and it further
revises the common impression of Meir as intransigent and unsympathetic to the
Palestinians. From the perspective of Israeli commemorative history the
sequence with Meir’s visit to Haifa is highly revisionist as she was one of icons
of the denial of the Palestinians’ rights to Palestine and placed in middle of the
spectrum of Israeli politics as a historical leader and heiress of Ben-Gurion’s
Zionism.
The third episode of Tekumah is entitled The Silver Platter after a
poem by Nathan Alterman. It refers to the birth of the state in May 1948 and the
1948 war which began in earnest after the declaration of independence on the
14th of May. Alterman’s poem celebrates the birth of the new Jewish nation with
lines like these: “Heartsick, but still living, a people stand by/ to greet the
uniqueness/ of the miracle// Readied, they wait beneath the moon,/ wrapped in
awesome joy, before the light./ Then, soon,/ a boy and a girl step forward/ and
slowly walk before the waiting nation. 43 Alterman’s poem is about the rebirth of
the Jewish nation out of 2000 years of suppression. It has the qualities of the epic
drama that presents a vision of the totality of history from one beginning to the
41
In Shlaim 2001 Meir’s work in the period is treated extensively.
Haifa was the first city from which the Palestinians fled from the beginning of December
1947 until April 1948. Morris 1987:41-45.
43
Alterman 1973: 154. Regarding the translation, I follow the selected and translated reading
material for Remembrance Day and Independence Day in Israel published on the Israeli Foreign
Ministry’s
web
site:
www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/History/Modern%20History/Israel%20at%2050/Selected%20Readings%
20for%20Remembrance%20Day 30.09.2004. Translator unknown.
42
95
next. Out of the chaos and terror of history steps the collective subject, afraid but
willing to take action. History is collectivized to the ultimate extent in a few
lines, which incarnate a cosmology of Zionism where the emotions of the Jewish
“we” are articulated. On the surface, the title The Silver Platter could seem
ambiguous considering the hardships endured by the Zionists and the refugees
from Europe under the 1948 war when the outcome was unclear to the
participants. But, if we consider the particular place for youth and youth
movements in the Zionist ideology of renewal and the following lines of
Alterman, we find a tribute to the young Israeli soldier:
In work garb and heavy shod
They climb
In stillness
Wearing yet the dress of battle, the grime
Of aching day and fire-filled night
Unwashed, weary unto death, not knowing
Rest
But wearing youth like dew drops in their hair
Silently the two approach
And stand
Are they of the quick or of the dead?
Through wondering tears, the people stare
“who are you, the silent two?
And they reply: “we are the silver platter”
Upon which the Jewish state was served to
You. 44
The Silver Platter thus refers to the young people who created the Jewish state on
the battlefields on the 1948 war and served it to the Jews. As the title of one of
the key episodes of Tekumah, it serves to capture the tragedy, the glory and the
dept to the veterans who made the historical vision of the Zionists real. The
reference to Alterman’s poem makes this episode a particularly powerful trope
for the historical discourse of the series.
44
Alterman 1973: 154-155.
96
The Silver Platter also makes use of Givati veteran Meir Davidson
as a character who personifies the Zionist youth who made the vision of Jewish
independence real. This episode in particular goes into detail with the horror of
the fighting and it does not spare the viewers of the injustices committed by the
Zionist side. The ideology of Zionist heroism has conventionally presented the
violence committed by Zionism and Israel as defence and as conducted by an
ethic of so-called purity of arms. Zionist and Israeli weapons were simply not
applied as a way of creating horror and bloodshed but as a reluctant and as pure
as possible way to defend the higher goals of Jewish freedom. Meir Davidson’s
testimony in Tekumah thoroughly revises this ideology as an unconscious mirror
of Benny Morris’ book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 19471949. Davidson comments both on the expulsion of the inhabitants of LyddaRamle region in centre of the country and on what actually happened in the
course of fighting. He recalls that: “The villages burned like bonfires” and replies
to a question about the so-called purity of arms that: “Who speaks about purity of
arms? There is no such thing as pure arms.” Davidson states this as a
commonsensical refutation of a more or less ridiculous ideological claim and
therefore he strikes at the heart of the romance of the 1948 war. Along the same
vein, the narrator and Davidson speak about the expulsions of the inhabitants of
the region Lydda-Ramle and both clearly give the impression that the orders to
expel these Palestinians came directly from the top and were executed by
Yitzhak Rabin.45 These sequences of The Silver Platter are almost a perfect
reflection of the description of the same events in Morris’ The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem and as such enter directly in the polemic over the
new historians but as a univocal statement from a participant. 46
In The Silver Platter, there is also a reference to one of Ben-Gurion’s
grander designs for a Middle East re-worked by the 1948 war. A passage from
Ben-Gurion’s diary is referred to in which he contemplates on the possible
scenario if the war was to fall out in most hopeful way in a Zionist
45
In Hebrew the word for expulsion is ”girush” which is used directly by the narrator without
any circumventions.
46
In fact, Benny Morris was consultant on this particular episode and he can only be satisfied
with the result as it is almost a remake of his book just as a TV documentary. The Lydda-Ramle
expulsions were the largest direct expulsions of Palestinians during the 1948 war. 40.00050.000 thousand people were expelled by direct order from Ben-Gurion who with the military
leadership considered the expulsion a strategic move. The towns had surrendered but the Zionist
leadership wished to flood the roads towards Jordan with refugees to prevent an attack from the
Arab Legion and to burden the economy of the Legion as much as possible. Lydda and Ramle
were re-populated with Jewish refugees from Europe. Morris 1987: 207-212.
97
understanding. This particular passage shows that the Zionists did not indorse
UN resolution 181 on the partition of Palestine to more than a practical extent.
The passage reads as follows:
“We should establish a Christian state in Lebanon whose
southern border would be the Litani. We shall conclude
an alliance with it. When we have broken the force of the
Arab Legion we shall annihilate Transjordan, and then
Syria would fall. And if the Egyptians dare continue
fighting, we shall bombard Port Said, Alexandria and
Cairo.” 47
Ben-Gurion’s wishful thinking of the above clearly reflects that the Zionists had
ambitions for the Palestinian region and did not consider visions such as BenGurion’s out of place. The making of a new order for the Palestinian region was,
it seems, among the Zionist perspectives for engaging in the war of 1948. This
was a perspective that was obviously not only concerned with the defence of the
Jewish settlements but it was concerned with creating facts on the ground that
would radically alter the partition resolution approved in the UN through
expansion of the Israeli territory, destruction of the prospected Palestinian state
and political changes in the surrounding Arab states. 48 The insertion of this
passage from Ben-Gurion’s diary in The Silver Platter shows that the producer of
the series considered it a part of his dynamic Zionism that the Zionists of the
1948 war not only defended the establishment of the Jewish state but also
actively worked for the expansion of its territory and for its Judaization. Such a
perspective would be quite unthinkable in relation to the logic of the purity of
arms and David against Goliath representations that are at the centre of Israeli
collective memory. This does not mean, though, that veterans such as Davidson
appear to be non-Zionist or especially critical because they do indeed underline
the difficulties facing the Zionist forces and the heroism and entrepreneurship the
situation demanded of them. The veterans interviewed in Tekumah simply appear
to be realistic in their assessment of what happens during wars such as the 1948
war where aspects of ethnic, civil and conventional war intermingled. Meir
47
These lines are also quoted in Pappe 1992: 141.
The vision of Ben-Gurion has been a permanent perspective in Israeli politics with disastrous
effects such as the Lebanon war 1982-2000 where the objectives of Begin and Sharon were very
similar to Ben-Gurion’s grand design of 1948.
48
98
Davidson, Yacuba Cohen and the others are in the historical narrative of
Tekumah the silver platter on which the Jewish state was served to the people.
The Zionist youth achieved this in an ugly, bloody and tragic war during which
many unjust deeds were committed but out of chaos the Jewish state arose. The
core of the Zionist historical narrative remains intact but its tarnish of purity and
innocence is stained. The producer of Tekumah, Drori, and others involved in the
production of the series refer to this openness as a sign of maturity. 49 We should
however consider the fact that the possibility of looking at the past as something
other, but related culturally and emotionally to the present, stems from discursive
and structural conditions of the present in which the series is written. Maturity
becomes a euphemism for stating that the present is better, things have been
learned and other stages have been reached. Tekumah’s historical presentation of
the 1948 war reflects the producers’ historical discourse and its conditions.
As the last of my presentations of sequences from the Tekumah I will
shortly discuss the episode entitled Ingathering of the Exiles which is number
four out of the 22. The four episodes singled out here deal with the historical
situation around the establishment of the state and that is why they are central for
an analysis of the history presented in the series in general. They simply lay out
the discourse that was intended to articulate the norm for the Israeli
understanding of the birth of their state. Ingathering of the Exiles is of course
also a Zionist ideological slogan that derives from the vision surrounding the idea
of a Jewish state from the 1880s onwards but it was articulated directly in the
Israeli Declaration of Independence as one of the most important goals of Israel
and a work that immediately needed to be put in action. 50 In the episode, a
sequence shows Ben-Gurion declaring that the ingathering of the exiles is one of
Israel’s most important tasks and he furthermore comments on the historical
importance of gathering in Israel of the Jews. To Ben-Gurion, the Jewish
collective “aliyah” 51 was a necessary step to save the Jews from persecution and
discrimination. He included the Jews of the Arab countries as having the same
need though is was primarily the displaced persons in Cyprus, Germany and
elsewhere that needed rescuing in the immediate after-war period. To integrate
the Arab Jews in a Zionist ideology based on European Jewish experiences and
49
Green 1998.
In different variations the slogan of ”ingathering of the exiles” appears in Zionist writings
from its earliest beginnings. It surely reflects not only a Zionist ideological dictum but also a
much older messianic hope within Jewish religious tradition.
51
”Aliyah” means ascent in Hebrew and is in a Zionist connection used for the immigration to
Israel.
50
99
the European Jewish Holocaust was of high importance to the Zionist leaders.
The primary reason for the importance of the Arab Jews was ideological, namely
that Zionism claimed to be speaking on behalf of all Jews. Nationalist ideologies
such as Zionism are based on historical and organic arguments that ascribe a
natural and historico-cultural sense of togetherness to all Jews. When the nation
is conceived as an extended family all Jewish populations become a target for
integration into the family. A secondary reason for the importance of the Arab
Jews was demographical. Control, development and expansion of the territory
would be insured with a massive influx of immigrants. 52 The 1948 war obviously
made the massive immigration of Arab Jews to Israel possible due to the
engagement in it of virtually all the Arab countries.
The Arab Jews were largely un-acculturated to Zionism and the dominant
European Jewish culture, which set the ideological and cultural agenda of Israel.
At the same time, Zionism was thoroughly integrated in European colonialist and
orientalist discourses that at once romanticized the Arab Jews and considered
them inferior and basically uncivilized. Arab Jews were placed in satellite cities,
transit camps and systematically stripped of as much of their Arab identity as
possible in the process of re-educating them to Zionism. Ingathering of the Exiles
emphasizes the really striking differences between e.g. Yemenite Jews and the
completely modern, European ways of life in Israel. The episode shows much
original footage from the transit camps and several veteran immigrants from the
big waves of immigration are interviewed. These interviews often stress the
social divisions of Israel and the cultural difference of Arab Jews even after 50
years of living in Israel. 53 In his review article of the Tekumah, Ilan Pappé also
notes the chilling meeting between a former Ashkenazi volunteer to the transit
camps and one Arab Jewish woman who met each other then. The Arab Jewish
52
Conditions for the Arab Jews did indeed deteriorate during the 1930s and 1940s over most of
the Middle East but this was primarily caused by the political upheavals in the wake of
colonialism, nationalism and the gradually increased awareness of Zionism as a threat to the
rule over Palestine. The Zionists also conducted campaigns in the Arab countries to push Jews
to immigrate to Israel. The gradually more difficult conditions for the Arab Jews was not caused
by a transformation of historical anti-Semitism coupled with fascism as was the case in Europe
from the 1880s onwards. See e.g. Stillman 1991.
53
The journal Theory and Criticism has a number of times addressed the issue of racism and the
suppression of Arab Jewish culture. Research in the history and culture of the so-called Mizrahi
(Eastern) Jew has increased from the 1990s and researchers such as Hannan Hever, Amnon
Raz-Krakotzkin, Yehuda Shenhav, Gabriel Piterberg and Ella Shohat have published significant
books and articles about the subject. The episode of Tekumah about the integration of the Arab
Jews does not involve the level of criticism applied by these authors but it nevertheless
illustrates some of the points made by them. See e.g. Hever 2002, Shenhav 2002.
100
woman asks the former volunteer if she helped them because she was a Zionist or
for human reasons. 54 This question illustrates the process of integration from the
side of the ones to be integrated; the objects of a social, ideological experiment
and a normalizing project. In general, this episode follows the line of
presentation carried out by the other episodes in mention but it touches upon the
sensitive issue of internal others. People who are Jews but still Arab pose a
dilemma to the European nationalist and colonialist heritage of Zionism because
among the central tenets of Zionism was exactly the normalization of Jews into a
European nation with the same cultural and territorial dimensions. The Arab
Jews also became an object of colonisation, which has resulted in major social,
cultural and political divisions in Israel between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis since
the 1950s. Despite its Ashkenazi and hegemonic perspective, this episode
exhibits many of the basic divisions of Israeli society through original footage
and interviews. The conflicts and cleavages of the integration project at the
centre of the political goals of the young Israeli state are not presented as critical,
subversive revelations against Zionism but as common sense.
Final Remarks
The Tekumah series presents us with the historical ideology of liberal Israel. The
Israel that engaged in the peace process of the 1990s and it attempts to integrate
Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle in this ideology in ways which makes
sense to Israeli TV consumers. Nevertheless, its presentation of Israeli history
does not significantly alter the premises of the ideology of togetherness in Israel.
Israel is still a moral community, now a benevolent one, superior in its inner
qualities and equally committed to the destruction of Palestinian otherness. The
education for public conversation that comes from commemorative history such
as Tekumah is no less uniform and single-mindedly focused on the moral
character of the ‘we’ than had it been produced under un-democratic
circumstances. TV does not in itself reflect ideals of public conversation but it is
a shaper of conditions for public conversation. These conditions and media in
general reflect influences of historical circumstances, of which media is not a
generator but a reproducer. Critical and counter-historical perspectives that
educate TV consumers to independent, individual decision making in the
meaning of educating to the ability to view critically the self-representations in
54
Pappé 1998: 104.
101
the media is not generally part of Israeli popular media despite its central place in
a democratic society. The violence of the Israeli state remains just and defensive
while the struggle of the Palestinians remains terror. Despite its free and
democratic character, Israeli media, as we have seen it with the case of the
Tekumah series contribute to the collectivism of mutual denial between Israelis
and Palestinians. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson, the pluralism of digital media
might only be the aesthetics of late capitalism, not a social revolution or a change
of control patterns.
102
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104
Reimagining Religious Identities in Children’s Programs on
Arabic Satellite-TV. Intentions and Values
By Ehab Galal, University of Copenhagen
Introduction
In July 2005 you could in a Danish newspaper read about a legal case concerning
child custody in a Saudi courtroom. According to the newspaper the wife won
the case despite her guilt of leaving the house of the family without permission of
her husband, because she argued that the husband had satellite-television in his
home. Even though the father claimed that he only had access to Arab channels,
the court judged the satellite-television as damaging and morally degenerative for
the children, and therefore in the mother was given the custody of the children. 55
I am not going to judge if this story was correctly summed up in the Danish
paper, but in spite of all, it tells us that television and especially satellitetelevision might be a contested media. As such it is a new media with new
possibilities for reaching people with news, messages, ideology and moral
values, while communicating potential belongings to a specific community.
When I was a child, my grandmother believed that all kinds of evil was
ascribed to television both because it took up a lot of time and for its moral
depravity. For her, television was much more dangerous than the cinema, while
her parents regarded the cinema as the big evil. She was telling us, how crazy it
was to occupy a whole room for evil at home. Television on the other hand was
for my parents an instrument to keep me at home. They thought they had control
of me. For them the really bad influence came from playing with other children
on the street. Today about 40 years later I read and hear stories involving the
same moral issues as in the Saudi case, where parents and other people worry
about the damage television in general and satellite- television in particular can
do to all of us, adults as well as children.
Some Arabic satellite-channels try to respond to some of these worries by
transmitting religiously based children’s programs. Many satellite-channels do
transmit children’s programs as part of their daily transmissions and one will find
a mixture of foreign and local produced programs, educational and entertainment
programs, secular and religious programs. A few Arab satellite companies have
55
Jerichow (2005).
105
launched what they themselves define as a religious Muslim channel, such as
Iqraa TV, al-Majd TV, al-Fajr TV and at-Tanwìr TV. 56 Also Arab Christian
channels have been launched, such as Sat7, Mu’giza TV, Tele Lumiere, Noursat,
Ashùr TV, al-Hayat TV and finally TBN Arabic. Also an Egyptian Coptic
Orthodox channel is launched recently. The number of Christian channels might
in the perspective of minority studies be explained by the Christian’s position as
a minority in the Arab world and therefore absent in the national media. Lebanon
is an exception. The religious channels, Christians and Muslims alike, are
presented as having specific intentions and values, and the focus of this paper is
how these are tried implemented in children’s programs.
While the parents worry about their children, the Western countries worry
about the impact of Islam on future ideologies and values of Muslim youth. This
is another reason to look deeper into the intentions and values behind the
religious children’s programmes. I find it relevant to consider if and how the
satellite-TV, as a new media, transforms the religious identity of the child or the
religious content as such. Of course I cannot answer this question fully not even
roughly in this paper and on this stage of my research. What I can do is to line up
some research perspectives and through an analysis of some chosen programs
come nearer an understanding of the religious identity positions offered to the
children by the Arab satellite channels. The religious perspective will allow us to
examine variations related to the politics of the channels in the adoption and
assimilation of foreign and local produced children’s programs. It will also allow
us to address the transnationalism of the media itself by asking questions about
the emergence of Arabism, Islamism or even global identities as satellitetelevision crosses national frontiers. The main focus of my paper today is
therefore not on media effects but on identity positions.
Before turning to an analysis of religious children’s programmes, I will
present my theoretical approach in relation to children’s programmes and to
identity studies in the media. Next I will give a short account of religious Arab
satellite channels and the children’s programmes at these channels. And finally I
will compare the children’s programmes at the religious channels Iqraa and AlMajd with the purpose of identifying different Muslim identities presented by the
channels.
Why a study of children as viewers in the Arab world?
56
A new Islamic channel is under construction called Khair Satellite TV channel. In a satellitemagazine you also find al-Anwar defined as a religious channel.
106
An obvious reason to work with children’s programmes is that children are the
future of the Arab world. Considering that a country like Egypt has a population
where about 34% of the population is children under 12 years and about 43% are
under 15 years. It tells us about the future influence of this generation. At the
same time it is possible to argue that television is a primary source of
communication and information for the Arab children. We do have to be aware
of inequalities regarding access and availability of media and information due to
unequal distribution of wealth both between the Arab countries and internally in
the countries, but still the statistics from the United Nations tell us that the Arab
countries do fulfil the minimum standards for distribution of television and radio,
while this it not the case for written media. 57 As such television is the most
widespread source of communication for Arab children besides primary
communication at face-to-face conversations in the family, kindergarten, school,
mosque, church, and between friends. The reasons why the television outdoes the
written sources are complex. They could for instance be families with less
economic resources and the lack of cultural tradition for varied reading habits of
the family, the huge amount of illiterates, the inefficient educational systems and
the lack of research in and development of other products targeted children; none
of which support the diffusion of written media.
From the early start of Arab national television the obligation of public
service was taken serious as a way to educate and civilize the viewer to become
loyal and confident national citizen through information, education and control. 58
This perspective has been challenged not only in the Arab world but in general
by the development of commercial television and lately with the explosive
development for transnational television. Even though the fact that transnational
Arab television in its early start was the direct outcome of national interests, for
instance the launching of Arabsat, we have lately witnessed a development,
where non-democratic Arab national states no longer are capable of controlling
the flow of pictures, messages and information due to the new media, among
these satellite television. This has not stopped the competition to win the
authority to define the national, political or religious identity. On the contrary we
have never before seen such a diversity of authorities and contested values in the
media as to day. A reality that might affect children’s programmes as well. At the
same time this diversification means that the media must address more
57
58
Rugh (1987).
Abu-Lughod (2005), Dabbous (1994).
107
fragmented or segmented audiences than the mass audience of the early days of
television.
How do we analyse the identities presented at Arab satellite television?
Most studies in children’s programmes have been occupied with the effect on the
child in line with the worries mentioned earlier. This is not my aim. My aim is
through a qualitative study of the programmes to analyse how the children’s
programmes position their audience as respectively a child, a Muslim, and an
Arab, and to a lesser degree the intersection of these positions with gender
identities. What kind of identity is offered the child, especially what religious
identity? Satellite television has as a mass media the potential to construct
symbolic communities as well as consumer communities. The first step in
examining the realization of the potential is an analysis of the relation between
the content of the programme and the audience. This relation can be studied
through the analysis of how the respective programmes position the viewer.
When I use the term ‘position’ I refer to the concept introduced by Stuart Hall,
who as early as in 1973 wrote the article ‘Encoding/decoding’. He argues that the
text (the programme) can be analysed as having a preferred meaning; it is so to
speak encoded with meaning. At the same time the viewer can choose to decode
this meaning differently. 59 It means that both the text and the viewer take part in
the construction of meaning. The text presents different possible positions from
which the viewer is able to choose to identify with one or more. In other words
through the positioning of the audience, the programme tries to establish a certain
relation to the viewer. 60 It is this relation that is the topic of this paper.
Some of the questions raised in the resent studies of mediated religion are
1) the question of the media’s potential to provide a strong sense of community;
2) how the media renews the religious traditions and beliefs and 3) how the
media changes the forms of religious communication and practices. Having these
questions in mind, I will now continue to present the Arab children’s
programmes before turning to my analysis.
Arabic satellite-TV and children’s programmes
Since the first Arab satellite channel was launched in 1991, more than 150 Arab
satellite channels have since been introduced. Quite a large part of these do
address themselves primary to a national audience at home or abroad, while
59
Hall (1992 (73)).
For the discussion on subject positions, see also Norman Fairclough’s work, for instance
Fairclough (1997).
60
108
others try to reach a wider transnational audience such as Arab speakers from
other Arab countries and Arabs living outside the Arab world. Obviously, as
Naomi Sakr has documented in her book Satellite Realms from 2001, oil money
plays an important role in the diffusion of these channels. 61
Most of the channels do include children’s programs, but also complete
children’s channels have lately been introduced. In this way al-Jazeera launched
a children’s channel September 10th 2005. When children’s channels are
introduced, it is typical part of a packet of channels belonging to one
broadcasting company introduced as one of more thematic channels. For instance
Egyptian Nile Thematic Channels introduced its children’s channel ‘Nile family
and kids’ in 1998, and also ART has different thematic channels including a
children’s channel. Other thematic channels are for instance sport channels, Arab
movie channels, foreign movie channels, news channels, music channels,
educational channels. In addition to the children’s channels, almost all channels
do broadcast children’s programs as part of their daily air time with the exception
of the thematic channels.
Even though the children’s programmes are broadcasted at Arab channels,
it is important to be aware that many of the programs are imported from nonArab countries. A study from 2002 about children’s viewing patterns for local
and Arab television channels shows that the imported programs are the most
popular. The analysis of a sample of 240 children from the United Arab Emirates
tells that the children made their own decisions about what to see largely for
themselves without family intervention. The most watched Arab TV channels
included the channels from the Emirates (Bahrain, Sharjah, and Dubai) which
were popular because of their technical and action-based features. According to
the study most of the children’s programmes broadcasted at these channels are
imported, and the locally produced programmes fail to provide adequate
competition. The children found local programmes generally dull and visually
unattractive. 62
The question of this paper is how the religious children’s programmes
take up the challenge from the foreign produced programmes? Generally the
religious channels do see it as a purpose to produce and broadcast programmes in
line with local and religious values and the channels see these values as a
protection against evil foreign influence. Two of these religious defined Arab
channels are Iqraa and al-Majd.
61
62
Sakr (2001).
Ayesh, Mostafa and Awad (2002).
109
Iqraa was launched by ART (Arab Radio and Television) on October 21st
1998. The main owner of ART is the Saudi Salih Kamel. The focus of the
programs is, according to Salih Kamel, Islamic values. ART have also as
mentioned a channel for only children’s programmes, but the programmes
broadcasted are mostly imported programs. Iqraa was launched with the specific
goals 1) to support the values of the Arab-Islamic Nation stressing the Islamic
moderate identity, 2) to stress the fundament of al-Quran and al-Sunna (the
example of the prophet Muhammad), 3) to protect the Arab-Islamic Nation
against imported non-Islamic culture, 4) to support the relations between the
various Arabic countries, and 5) to produce quality entertainment programmes to
the Arab family. 63
Iqraa broadcasts one hour of children’s programmes every day including
cartoons, Quran-teaching, storytelling and so on. Iqraa broadcasts its children’s
programme at nine o’clock in the morning, Danish time, for one hour all year and
it is repeated in the afternoon except during Ramadan. All ART channels use
respectively Mecca and Greenwich Time scales.
Al-Majd channel was launched May 2nd 2003 and was later expanding to
a package of more channels under the name al-Majd. The owner of al-Majd is
Sheikh Fahd al-Shanimeri. Al-Majd is part of a conglomerate that also operates
the Meridien Mecca Hotel and provides airport services. The channel is
broadcasted from the free media city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
According to the channel itself, it has been introduced to fulfil the huge demand
of the Arab audience for a diversified television product reflecting the ArabIslamic values. And the channel stresses its growing success in attracting
advertisers in a very short period of time. The goal of the company is to establish
a full packet of different and varied channels both with thematic and diversified
channels. Until now it has launched four thematic channels: 1) al-Majd children’s
channel, 2) Quran channel, 3) al-Majd academy and 4) al-Majd documentary.
Besides these four television channels they launched a children’s satellite-radio
channel, which they claim is the first Arab children’s channel as satellite-radio.
Many of their programmes, except for the children’s programmes, are available
at the internet both as text and as soundtrack.
The children’s television channel was launched January 23rd 2004 and was
transmitted through Arabsat 2b and Nilesat. According to al-Majd, the children’s
channel was established for the sake of all Arab and Muslim children. The
programmes are characterized by some being direct transmissions, others
63
See http://www.iqraatv.com
110
indirect. They broadcast a mixture of cartoons, hymns, quiz, quran-stories and so
on. They produce children’s programmes in al-Majd centres in Egypt, Oman,
Riyad, Dubai and other countries. Al-Majd has a wide horizon including
programmes aimed at specific methods of upbringing; entertainment and
education. Some of the programs do have children as producers and hosts of the
programme. The children are trained at al-Majd training and introduction centres.
The children’s channel is broadcasted from six in the morning until eleven
thirty in the evening; that means 17½ hours every day. A large part of each day
programme is reruns from the previous days. A main type of programme at the
channel is cartoons. They take up around half of the day’s transmission. 64 They
are, according to the channel itself, carefully chosen for their educational value.
The cartoons are foreign, Arabic and Islamic produced, as well as the channel’s
own production. When the channel translates the foreign productions, they adapt
it to the principles and goal of the channel. Al-Majd tries seriously to produce
cartoons with Arab and Islamic figures containing a message and entertainment
at the same time. But it has not been possible to find exact percentages of
respectively foreign, Arab and own productions, but compared to Iqraa, they
have a larger part of Arab and Islamic produced programmes at al-Majd. Besides
cartoons they broadcast programmes with religious hymns, regional presentations
and educational and play programmes.
Al-Majd documentary broadcasts one hour of children’s programmes
every day and two hours during Ramadan. It starts 8.45 Danish time, a quarter
before Iqraa’s children’s programme. It is not repeated during the day.
If we compare the children’s programmes of the two channels
To come closer to an understanding of Islamic identities introduced in Arab
children’s programmes, I have chosen to compare two programmes at al-Majd
and Iqraa respectively as a case study. They are as mentioned broadcasted at
almost the same time, they present themselves as religious, protecting the ArabIslamic values and they are both private owned by Saudi financiers. They are to
be considered as competitors. The one or two hours of broadcasting consist of
more elements put together as a puzzle, but in general both channels do have
some of the same type of content typical for children’s programs, for instance
cartoons and quiz-programs, they both bring Quran teaching and different kinds
of music items.
64
According to the homepage of the channel 8½ hours out of 17½ hours of transmission are
cartoons.
111
I have chosen to compare two programmes broadcasted in Ramadan this
year. During Ramadan Arab television traditionally highlights religious items
and this is also the case with the children’s programmes of these two channels.
Both children’s programmes primarily broadcast, what I will call explicit
religious messages in comparison with more implicit religiousness. The stories
told in cartoons, hymns, fairytales and doll film are with explicit and continuous
reference to God, Islam and true Islamic behaviour. The items without the
explicit Islamic reference, e.g. as a Chinese cartoon at Iqraa, raise topics of moral
or ethical importance in accordance with Muslim tradition.
Let me first give some examples from al-Majd. 65 The two hours of
broadcasting are introduced by the same hymn every day; a little girl singing a
song in Arabic about her wishes to go to Paradise. Behind her the viewer can see
blue sky slightly cloudy but very beautiful. The song is followed by a cartoon
about an Arab family consisting of father, mother, 2 sons and one daughter.
Smaller sequences of typical ten minutes with the cartoon-family are part of the
program several times during the two hours, each time with a new story and a
new moral point. The first story about the family every day during Ramadan is
about the children, two boys and one girl, and how they learn a new chapter of
the Quran. This day it is the chapter al-Kauthar. The story is introduced when the
children notice a sheep in the garden of their house and they go to their father to
ask how it comes? He tells them that they are going to slaughter the sheep as a
sacrifice to God and give most of the meat to the poor. Then the children go to
the sheikh, who teaches them the chapter al-Kauthar about generosity. They are
taught how to recite it correctly and in between the sheikh explains the meaning.
Returning back to their home the children have a chat with their father about the
chapter and he tells them a story with reference to the chapter. The sheep has in
the meantime been slaughtered and the girl is told not to be sad, because the
sheep has been a sacrifice to God and a gift for the poor. At the same time she is
promised that they will get a new sheep at the big feast (al-aid). This Quranteaching story in shape of a cartoon takes around ten minutes.
The next sequence is a doll film, where a boy is going to take his exam the
following day. He is very worried and his sister tells him to put all things in
God’s hands. A repeated figure, a hen, asks the sister, whether she can just can
go to bed and leave everything in God’s hands without doing anything. The
sister replies; “of course not”, and that you will need to work hard as well, but if
you put thrust in God, he will do the best for you. Next we see the boy returning
65
The program analyzed is from 11th October 2005.
112
back from school rushing in without greeting his mother, shouting that he passed
his exam. His mother congratulates him and reminds him of how to put thrust in
God and then she continues to blame him for not having greeted her first. The
scene is followed by how to greet in a correct Muslim manner through the
appearance of the sister and the hen. They greet with the right Muslim greeting
‘as-salam alaykum wa rahmatu allah wa barakatu’, which means “peace be on
you and the mercy and blessing of God on you”. The doll film takes also around
10 minutes. Then there is a short scene, again a cartoon, where a boy is going on
his bike, and a voice is saying; “ what do we say before we go biking”? We say
‘bismillah al-hamdulilallah subhan al-lathi sakhara lana hatha wa makunna
lahu mokrinyyn wa inna illa rabinna li mon qalybun’, which means in short, that
we thank God for these things created by God to be at our service and control.
The sentence is presented by the boy as well as written on the screen. This short
scene takes no more than a minute.
The next sequence is another story of a cartoon family. This time the
moral is how to treat your neighbour, teaching the little boy of the family not to
hit the neighbour’s son. The father explains why it is wrong by telling a Hadith.
The sequence ends with a question to the audience to find and remember another
Hadith about the same topic. Next sequence is a quiz. In the studio a little girl
acts as host sitting in a couch, while her co-host is a male doll behind something
which looks like a kitchen desk. It is a call-in programme and quiz, where
children call in to get a question by the doll. At first the girl greets the callers
with the formal Islamic greetings and she ends all conversations with the viewers
the same way. The questions asked are not specific religious, but covers different
kinds of common knowledge. The two hours go on like this with different but
relatively short sequences, and with cartoons as a returning item.
Most of the sequences present the viewer to an explicit and obvious
Islamic environment in content and in picture. In the cartoon and in the doll film
the name of Allah is the only decoration on the walls of the house, the grown up
female figures wear a veil, the male-figures wear clothes typical to the region of
the Gulf countries. In all programmes the Islamic greetings are repeated
continuously and the language of all programmes is modern standard Arabic. The
explicit Islamic content is overall referring to two aspects; one, the dogma of
Islam in relation to Quran and Hadith and two, the right Islamic behaviour.
Let us now turn to the children’s programmes at Iqraa. 66 The broadcasting
of one hour of children’s programme contains different parts or sequences like in
66
The program analyzed is from 16th October 2005.
113
al-Majd. The programme is introduced by a 12 seconds sequence with a picture
of al-Ka`ba during which a deep voice is saying that you have to listen to the
Quran while it is recited to obtain the mercy of God. After that we see a child
reciting a chapter or part of a chapter while sitting on the floor with the Quran
lying open on a stool in front of him and with oriental mosaic behind him. A
child from a different country appears on the screen every day; this day it is a
Somali boy. The Quran reciting takes around 4 minutes followed by a sequence
of Quran teaching for around 25 minutes. The pupils are three boys and three
girls and by way of introduction we see them playing ball in the garden and
thereafter sitting with a teacher in the garden; the teacher in the middle, the girls
to the left and the boys to the right. Behind the teacher we see a blackboard on
which the chapter in question is written. The children are taught how to recite the
chapter, repeating after the teacher and corrected by him. At times the teacher
explains the chapter. To learn how to recite in a melodic way, a plate with 6
different coloured lights behind the teacher shows how many tones there are in
each word by highlighting the relevant number of lights while reciting.
The next sequence is a story from the Islamic tradition. This day it is the
story of King Salomon. We listen to the voice telling the story while it is
illustrated by changing drawings. It is not a cartoon but drawings. The moral
point is that we have to continue to have our faith even though we have
everything we could ever wish for.
The last sequence during the one-hour broadcasting is a cartoon with the
moral that there is nothing wrong in asking questions, if there are matters,
sayings or stories you do not understand. The cartoon is Chinese produced,
which is visible due to the Chinese characters and the Asian look of the figures.
Chinese produced cartoons are quite common in Arab children’s programmes.
The cartoon is of course dubbed and sometimes it is possible to find expressions
like insha’allah and references to God as the one who is telling us how to
behave, but beside that there are no obvious Islamic symbols, language or
environment.
In general Iqraa is more international oriented than al-Majd. An example
is a song repeated several times during Ramadan, not only in relation to the
children’s programmes but in between programs. The song is sung by children in
different languages while we see a changing background presented as drawings
symbolizing the capital cities Paris and London, an Arab city and an Arab
village. While the scenery is continuously changing we see different children
singing in Lebanese Arabic, in modern standard Arabic, in English, and in
114
French, and we listen to different rhythms including Spanish. They sing about
Ramadan and how Ramadan has changed all their habits; in one scene they are
riding on bicycles, in another a girl is painting, in the third the boys are praying.
This positioning of Muslim children in an international context is also seen in the
practice of using English subtitles for instance during the story of King Salomon.
In addition to this difference, Iqraa and al-Majd do agree about some basic
elements that are important to introduce to children during Ramadan; first of all
to teach them Quran in a relative traditional way. Al-Majd might be more
pedagogically oriented by placing the teaching of the Quran close to daily life
and matters trying to make it relevant for the child. Probably al-Majd directs
itself to a younger audience. Also the teaching of correct behaviour seems a part
of both channels’ goals, but while al-Majd does place this in an explicit and
exclusively Muslim environment, Iqraa positions the child in a more
international, global and multicultural environment. The presentation of Muslim
behaviour does not seem to differ substantial between the two channels. At Iqraa
the women do wear the veil as in al-Majd and the importance of knowing the
tradition stands as a central issue.
The question is then which Muslim identity does the channels offer the
audience and which Islam is presented?
The relations of the Muslim child
According to the children’s programmes just described, Muslim identity is about
relations and is about values and behaviour. Both channels highlight through
their introductions the relation to God as the most important relation to the
Muslim child. In addition al-Majd does give the relation to the family an
important place. The cartoon and the doll film are both placed in the scene of a
family home; a nuclear family and a very religious conscious and practicing
Muslim family. At Iqraa the family does not have the same dominant position,
again it can be connected to the potential target group of the audience in relation
to age, but it seems more to be a question of priority. If we take the two cases as
they stand, Iqraa presents a Muslim child as more autonomous except in the
relation to God.
How do the channels present potential relations to other kinds of
communities, like national, political or religious? As already mentioned Iqraa
does place the Muslim child in different global environments, but that does not
change the fact that the relations presented are between Muslims. You could say
that the channel presents a global Muslim community which goes beyond
115
geographical and national borders; it is a transnational Muslim community.
Dogmatic or sectarian differences that obviously exist in reality between
Muslims all over the world are not presented or commented. What the channel
does is through the international focus to tell the viewer that a Muslim can live
all over the world, speak different languages and look very different in regard to
colour of the skin, eyes and hair.
Al-Majd doesn’t present or consider the presence of other national or
ethnic communities. The language is modern standard Arabic and no national
symbols or statements are presented. They present a single homogeneous Muslim
community ignoring all kind of differences. In this way both channels present a
universal Islam. In the case of al-Majd this is an ahistorical and non-national
universal Islam; in the case of Iqraa it is a historical related and transnational
universal Islam. As to political relations – in addition to the politics of Muslim
identity - this is not a question in neither of the programs. Call to mind the
tradition for national and patriotic educational television in the Arab countries
related to the monopole of national TV, it is worth reflecting on the meaning of
satellite-TV for the construction of an imagined universal Islam. When the
channels want to address a transnational audience, it seems that differences in
interpretations of Islam due to national, ethnic or political differences are
downplayed. Back stands an imagined universal Muslim identity which the
Muslim child shares either with other Muslim children all over the world or with
Muslim children in an ahistorical Islamic environment.
The behaviour of the Muslim child
The programmes position the Muslim child as a child with a religious based and
defined behaviour. While presenting the children partly in natural environments
of children of today, using a computer as in the cartoon of al-Majd, playing ball
in the garden, going to exams at school and being part of a family, these elements
are played down in favour of a Muslim defined ethic and symbolic behaviour. As
the programmes are not representing all parts of the child’s life equally, the result
is the construction of a Muslim identity defined by its Islamic behaviour as
something which should govern the behaviour in all contexts. Ethical questions,
such as how to behave in relation to your neighbour and symbolic behaviour,
such as how to greet people you mee,t are presented as a question of Muslim
identity. The Islamic behaviour is extracted from the Quran and Hadith or just as
a matter of being authentic Islamic. It is possible to see these programs,
especially at al-Majd, as one long initiation into Islam. How to greet and how to
116
mention the name of God when you take your bike seems at al-Majd to be a way
to become Muslim in the same way as to read the Quran.
The educational process of both channels is a question of knowing the
Quran, Hadith and the rules of Muslim behaviour. The way to know the Quran is
at both channels a matter of learning by heart and to get an explanation of the
Quranic chapter by experts or more knowledgeable grown-ups. It might be worth
noticing that the Quran and Hadith in the cartoons of al-Majd are presented and
explained by males, at al-Majd a traditional dressed sheikh, at Iqraa a western
dressed teacher; while the Islamic behaviour – like greetings – is taught by the
mother or by the sister and sometimes by the father as well.
Muslim identity as presented by new media
One of the questions raised by media researchers is how religion and religious
identity change with the introduction of new media? Do the analysed children’s
programs give us any answer to that question? First of all it might seem as
though the transnational character of the satellite-TV supports a development of a
kind of universal Islam defined as a Quranic and a behavioural Islam. In regard
to the teaching of the Quran differences in interpretation are ignored, and Islam
seems to become what all Muslims can agree about; what one could call the
smallest common denominator. In this way the presented Islam becomes
inclusive and in principle all Muslims can identify with the presentation. The
simplification of the interpretation due to the level of understanding of the target
group, the children, could have an influence on this presentation. On the other
side there is no simplification of the Muslim greetings promoted, on the contrary.
They are complicated greetings in standard Arabic, far from the daily language of
many colloquial speaking Arab children. They might not understand the sentence
at all. The greetings as a kind of symbolic islamisation - even though it is
presented as universal and a-historical - might therefore appear exclusive.
Possibly not all Muslim children might identify that easily with the presented
Islamic behaviour.
The media create through the attempt to present a universal Islam a
Muslim public where non-Muslims are non-existent. It is not questioned that you
could be anything else than Muslim. The only example from the two channels’
programmes is when the father tells the children that it is a good thing to sacrifice
the sheep arguing by reciting the Prophet Muhammad for saying that Muslims
should slaughter the sheep in the name of God. The little girl asks her father if
anyone would do otherwise, and he answers that before Islam the pagans would
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sacrifice an animal in the name of their idols. Non-Muslims exist only as pagans
before Islam.
What seems to be lost in this creation of a Muslim public at transnational
TV, if we look at the two channels analysed? It seems that the religious ritual is
downplayed as nothing else but ethical behaviour. The ritual as a joint practice
and an initiation into Islam does not have the same weight as the Quran or the
Islamic behaviour. Even the prayer does not get much room except in the song of
Iqraa. It might not tell us how the producers value the rituals as part of Islam, but
the consequence is that the positions offered the child is a reduction of the
importance of the ritual. Could it be that the media replace the role of traditional
ritual in the initiation of the child into Islam? It would be relevant to look further
at different TV programmes to see if this is a common trend. It is relevant to
discuss if it is the media itself which does not mediate the ritual as ritual as
convincingly as it mediate the stories of the Islamic traditions, the Islamic
principles in ethical and moral terms and the Islamic greetings and expressions.
These are all connected to words, meanings and narratives which the media is an
expert in transmitting, and in this way the ritual itself might chance character.
Relations and thereby identities are in the new media created through narratives
and religious language rather than through rituals which fundament is face-toface interactions.
Conclusive remarks
I have argued that the children’s programmes at al-Majd and Iqraa offer the
viewer a position as Muslim. Where al-Majd presents an imagined Muslim
community in the narrow world of a nuclear family living in the Golf States,
Iqraa does present a more pluralistic identity of the global Muslim. Political and
national identities are absent in any other form than the identity of the Muslim
nation. On the other hand the gendered identity presented seems to be both
traditional and negotiable. While the man presents the Quranic teaching, the
woman plays the traditional role as cultural custodian, but at the same time both
sexes take part in religious training and religious discussions.
Rituals seem not to be as important as words in the shape of the Quran,
stories from the Muslim tradition, greetings and moral teachings which all
definitely lead to Muslim behaviour. The programs do not really offer any
alternative identity to the children. We cannot know how the viewer decodes the
programmes, but as I have argued, the programmes offer a Muslim identity with
both inclusive and exclusive aspects. I will claim that in generally, but most
118
obviously in al-Majd, the programmes are constructed or encoded as relatively
‘closed’ in contrast with texts more ‘open’ to interpretation. This perspective
might be relevant to have in mind, when we think about Muslim children living
in an environment together with non-Muslims. It seems that the programmes
offer the child some instruments and possibilities of identification with the aim to
develop a strong Muslim identity. The Muslim identity becomes the basis for
meeting the world around you, but the programmes do not give any specific
advises or instruments in regard to dealing with non-Muslims or living in a nonMuslim society, nor do they give any guidelines for acting as Muslim in a
political context.
119
The Middle East Media and the West. Arab Media between
Pluralism and Ideology
By Mirjam Gläser, MEMRI, Berlin
Introduction
The days in which state television in Arab countries focused on the life of the
state's president or ruler have become a thing of the past. Although the Arab
media have been and still are in large segments under state control, subject to
regimes which are to a large extent undemocratic and repressive of the free
expression of opinion, a certain diversity is increasingly being seen in the sector.
This new dimension of pluralism is so pronounced that attitudes, opinions and
thinking patterns found among the majority of people from the so-called ‘Arab
street’, as well as those of various political and non-political organizations and
institutions, are now being reflected by the mass media in the Arab world, which
in some cases are even giving voice to minority and marginal opinions. This
boost is due only in part to the development of new media, such as the Internet
and satellite television: the pluralist press in Lebanon, the papers published by
opposition parties in countries such as Egypt and, above all, the ‘London press’
are also contributing to this development. 67 The role of the London press,
together with the satellite channel Al-Jazeera, can be subsumed under the term
‘outsourcing democracy’, because they allow critical reporting about anything
except the financiers in Saudi Arabia or Qatar. 68
This new pluralism is particularly evident in the wide spectrum of subjects
that are covered, ranging from criticism of human rights violations, corruption or
ballot rigging to questions of equality, reform or democratization, not to mention
67
The three pan-Arab newspapers Al-Hayat, Al-Quds Al-Arabi and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat are
published in London but distributed throughout the whole Arab world.
For general literature on Arab Mass Media and Arab satellite television see: Al-Zubaidi, Layla
(ed.), Walking a Tightrope – News media & Freedom of Expression in the Arab Middle East,
Heinrich Boell Foundation, http://www.boell-meo.org/en/web/234.htm ; Hafez, Kai (ed.), Mass
Media, Politics and Society in the Middle East, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001; Sakr,
Naomi, Satellite Realms. Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East,
London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001.
68
For more information on the potentials and limits of Arab satellite TV see Sakr, Naomi,
Optical
Illusions:
Television
and
Censorship
in
the
Arab
World,
http://www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Fall00/sakr1.htm, TBS, No. 5, Fall/Winter 2000.
120
the impassioned discussion about the Iraq war, the Palestinian conflict or the
question of how to deal with Islamist movements.
Some would argue, however, that this new pluralism can go too far. There
is ambivalence, for example, over the political and cultural impact of the Internet.
On the one hand, several websites have emerged that are completely independent
of state-controlled media (such as elaph, metransparent or beirut.indymedia). On
the other hand, the Internet provides space for people with radical views to
spread their sometimes strikingly overt hate propaganda.
This phenomenon is not unique to the Internet. Everyone is familiar with
the debate about Al-Jazeera providing a platform to bin Laden and other Islamist
terrorists by showing their taped video messages or even depictions of graphic
violence – although they may, in fact, no longer be doing so. Khaled Hroub from
Al-Jazeera stated in a recently published interview with the German newspaper
taz, that in the future Al-Jazeera will only air very short video-clips representing
radical positions, if at all. 69
This pluralism also extends to the images of the West that are portrayed by
Arab media. There are journalists represented who maintain a rather pro-Western
or pro-American position. Their commentaries often tend to illustrate American
or Western policy and the problems of Western society without being very
critical about, for example, the economic and strategic motivations of Western
governments in the region. Overall, views of this kind are in the minority; within
the Arab media, as well as the public sphere, the journalists who ascribe to them
are sometimes perceived as Western or Zionist agents or as simply fouling their
own nest.
In the following, I will outline a discourse that persists in spite of those
increasingly pluralistic debates, one that is, as far as I can tell, seldom discussed
within the sphere of research about Arab media. This discourse is subject to a
collective ideology that has shaped Arab societies since the 1930’s. I am
referring to Arab nationalism and the concept of a national identity following
patterns already familiar not only in Europe, but in most Asian and many African
societies as well. 70 Confrontation with an external power – European colonialism
– was the main impetus for the creation of such an Arab collective identity along
69
taz, 10/24/2005, p. 17, http://www.taz.de/pt/2005/10/24/a0132.1/text
Cp. Tibi, Bassam, Vom Gottesreich zum Nationalstaat. Islam und panarabischer
Nationalismus (Frankfurt, 1991); James Jankowski/Israel Gershoni, Rethinking Nationalism in
the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997).
70
121
with the related perception of oneself as a victim of colonial rule and imperialist
exploitation.
After delineating this discourse, I will provide examples of Arab intellectuals
who have not only described and criticized those tendencies but who have also
emphasized the dangerous impact of this ideology.
A Community of Victims
Among the central elements of Arab nationalist ideology is the wish to constitute
a strong community of Arabs and Muslims. Underlying this desire is a self-image
of Arabs and Muslims as a community of victims of the historical and ongoing
policies of colonialism, imperialism and Zionism. 71
The Syrian-born German academic Bassam Tibi described this attitude as
“a culture of defensiveness.” 72 The Tunisian intellectual Afif Al-Akhdar spoke of
“a violated collective consciousness.” 73 All of these are different labels for what
is more or less the same ideological phenomenon, or “Weltanschauung”, one
which often prevails in the Arab world when discussion turns to the West. This
weltanschauung creates a kind of collective inferiority complex in relation to the
West – the West being seen as the symbol of modernity, technology, progress
and strength – which produces both the uncritical tendency to copy the West as
well as resentment and feelings of hatred.
This phenomen is by far not limited to the Arab world, already Frantz
Fanon referred to these problems on his famous book ‘Wretched of the Earth’, in
which he describes the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of
colonization. Alongside his harsh criticim mainly of the colonial powers and his
analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the colonized psyche, he also
cautioned against an unreflected and superficial adaption of Western values by
the post-colonial elites, that takes only lip service to its humanist contents like
the idea of the inalienability of human rights for each individual:
“By having seized power in the name of a narrow-minded nationalism or of the
race, the bourgeoisie furnishes proof, that it, despite of its formally nice, but
completely meaningless declarations […] derived from European treatises on
71
Cp.Kassir, Samir, About the Arab Calamity, Lettre International, No. 71.
http://www.lettre.de/aktuell/71_Kassir.html; Diner, Dan, Versiegelte Zeit. Über den Stillstand in
der islamischen Welt, (Berlin, 2005).
72
Tibi, Bassam, Arab Nationalism. Between Islam and the Nation State, (New York, 1997).
73
MEMRI
Special
Dispatch
–
No.
576,
September
2003,
http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sd&ID=SP57603.
122
morality and political philosophy, is completely incapable to inaugurate at least a
minimal humanist catechism.” 74
This uncritical adaption can according to Fanon easely be transmute into
feelings of resentment or even more hateful postures of defense. Thus, the
colonial bourgeoisie is periled to develope a nationalistic tendency in the scope
of decolonization, that doesn’t correspond with Fanons terms of a national idea
based on universal values. Even more, it is tainted by an ongoing inferiority
complex, that breeds new resentments:
‘The racism of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defense, it is based
on fear’75
Indeed Fanon argues for a political concept of a nation state, but at the same time
he criticized the ethnical or religious construction of nationalism. He warns
consistently about a nationalistic recollection of the pre-colonial ‘cultural
trasures’.
According to Fanon, the claim of nationalism, to free the colonized from
the colonial power by playing the own pre-colonial culure against the European
culture must fail, the rehabilitation can only occur ostensible, ‘because you can
not mortify/embarrass colonialism by offering unrecognized cultural treasures.
The colonized intellectual doesn’t make himself aware, that exactly in the
moment, when he tries to create a culture, he uses techniques and a language,
which are borrowed/mimiced by the occupier.’ 76
Obviously, European colonial history and contemporary European and
US-American foreign policy offer reasons enough for severe criticism and
opposition. However, not only is the form this criticism frequently takes
ineffective, it represents, in my opinion, an important obstacle towards progress
and development in the region as it threatens to distract attention from other
problems of today’s Arab and Muslim societies.
To find these concepts of “victimization” one often has to “read between
the lines” – to seek out the subtext in order to find examples of this way of
thinking. As an ideology perceived by many to be “natural” or self-evident, it is
74
Fanon, Frantz, Die Verdammtem dieser Erde, (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), p. 139 (translated
from the German edition by the authors).
75
Ibid., p. 140.
76
Ibid., p. 189.
123
very hard to pin down, but let me try to do so using a couple of examples taken
from Arab media.
I will begin with two pictures that demonstrate the whole range of the
views or “Weltanschauung” that I mentioned previously. The first example is
taken from the cover of the Egyptian magazine Al-Ahram al-Arabi issue
published during the last Olympic Games in Athens. On it, you can see smiling
Arab medalists; the headline reads: ‘Sometimes the Arabs are happy too’. But the
implication behind this is that ‘usually we (the Arabs) are the losers’. This cover
is an example of the negative imagery that can be found in Arab media when
Arab society is compared or confronted with the West. The subtext is clear: the
Arabs are the “eternal losers.” 77
The second example represents a different characteristic of Arab
nationalist ideology, one that is not nearly as harmless as the previous one. The
cartoon was published in the national-liberal Egyptian opposition paper Al-Wafd
and depicts Sharon as a murdering, bloodstained devil. You see Sharon’s head on
a hairy body with hooves, at the end of his tail is a swastika. Holding a knife in
his hand, he stands in a puddle of blood; in the background you see the Star of
David. 78 The often radical hostility against Israel is another major motif within
these constructions of collective identity.
The Impact of Arab Nationalism
Omnipresent within the Arab public and its media are ideas characteristic to the
ideology of Arab Nationalism, namely, to think in categories such as community,
dignity, collective pride and humiliation, honor and shame, superiority and
victimhood. The historical and common feeling of powerlessness sometimes
expresses itself in extreme forms of anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism. AntiZionism, which has been at the core of Arab nationalist ideology since the early
phases of political Zionism, is often intermingled with antisemitic agitation –
increasingly in contexts unrelated to any existing conflict between Arabs and
Jews. In this context, the perception of being a victim of a superior and nearly
unchallengeable enemy leads to the most abstruse of conspiracy theories, which
have always been at the core of antisemitic thinking: the idea that the CIA or
Mossad were behind 9/11, or the notorious ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’,
77
Al-Ahram al-Arabi, No. 389, 09/04/2004.
Al-Wafd, 05/11/2001. Although this cartoon was published on the height of the second
Intifada, its explicity was not due to the - even for Israeli-Palestinian conditions - exceptionally
tense situation in Palestine. In fact, similar cartoons are published regularily in Arab, among
them Egyptian, newspapers.
78
124
which have been used again and again as ‘evidence’ for the eternal Jewish hatred
of Arabs and Muslims and a Zionist plot to rule the world. 79
The importance of anti-Jewish stereotypes within the context of
ideological interpretations of society can best be illustrated by looking at debates
refering to the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. There are two recent television
series, which used the Protocols as a ‘historical’ template. The first, ‘Knight
without a Horse’ was aired in Egypt during Ramadan 2002, which aroused in the
Egyptian and Arab press a heated debate, while some supported the airing of the
series, whereas others critized its anit-semitic direction of impact. 80 The second
‘Al Shatat’, a Syrian produced series, which was aired during Ramadan in 2003,
didn’t only play with the alleged desire of the Jewish or Zionist plot to rule the
world, but also used another common anti-semitic stereotype - the blood-libel. 81
Conspiracy theories not only reflect stereotypes, but mirror a specific
approach to society. Interpretations of social developments and political conflicts
in terms of plots and hidden hands allow to analyze in which way anti-Jewish
sentiments are integrated into dominant patterns of thought in an Arab public
discourses.
It is not so much the actual book and its promotion, which is relevant here,
but the implied broad public acceptance of conspiratorial approaches to society which in most cases are articulated in anti-Jewish terms. It is thus not surprising
that the producer of the series ‘Knight without a Horse’ dismissed doubts about
the historical origins of the Protocols by claiming, it is not important who
actually wrote the story, but to acknowledge, that during the last century the
Zionists managed to implement it. In an editorial to the Egyptian daily newspaper
Al-Akhbar, this argument became even more concrete: “The most important
question is not,” the author writes, if Zionism is behind the publication of the
book, but „if Zionism did not really aim - especially in our generation – to
conquer the world, by money, murder, sex and other disgusting means.” 82
79
For discussion of the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in the Arab world cp. Hamzawy,
Amr, Vom Primat der Verschwörung: Zeitgenössische arabische Debatten, in:
ORIENT/Jg.43/2002/Heft3, p.345 ff.; Tibi, Bassam, Die Verschwörung. Das Trauma
arabischer Politik, (Hamburg 2002).
Cp. also MEMRI Special Report, A New Antisemitic Myth in the Middle East: The September
11
Attacks
were
Perpetrated
by
the
Jews,
http://www.memri.org/book/AntisemiticMythBook.pdf
80
Cp. http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA10902 and also
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA10902
81
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=antisemitism&ID=SP62703
82
Al-Akhbar, November 12, 2002.
125
The quote with its reference to “money, murder, sex and other disgusting means
to conquer the world” summarizes many interpretations of contemporary social
and political conflicts in the Arab world. The disintegration of social structures,
changes in patterns of identity, be it national or religious and the transformation
of values and norms are general developments, with which most parts of the
Arab world have been confronted since the decline and the fall of the Ottoman
Empire. What has been described within European history as an ideological
attempt to explain the misunderstood ambivalences of modernity and
modernisation is thus mirrored in contemporary Arab public discourses.
An example, how a seemingly self-critical attitude mingles with
arguments of conspiracy can be found in the speech of the Prime Minister of
Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad to the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference in
October 2003. The speech, in which Mahathir appealed to the potential power of
Muslim countries, was not only discussed in the Western media, but was also
widely covered by the Arab media, in which it didn’t meet with a lot of
criticism 83 :
“There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people.
[…] The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and
the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak. […] Is it true that 1.3
billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and
oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash
back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to
blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own
people?
It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by
a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop
to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then
to counter attack. […] We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be
simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But
today the Jews rule this world by proxy. […] We must build up our strength in
every field, not just in armed might. Our countries must be stable and well
83
One exception, for example, was an article by Bassam Darwish, which critized the speech of
Mahathir impetuously,
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP61803
126
administered, must be economically and financially strong, industrially
competent and technologically advanced.” 84
Again, this doesn’t imply that harsh criticism of Israel or its occupation policies
since 1967 can be equated with anti-Semitism. However, “anti-Zionist” criticism
of Israel’s policies is often mixed with old elements of antisemitic ideology. Such
“anti-Zionist” criticism, particularly in the recent past, tends to lump all Jews
together and in many cases it is hardly limited to Zionist ideology or Israeli
policies as such. It reproduces traditional, religious, classical and modern
antisemitic stereotypes imported from the European context that have been
integrated into the modern ideology of Arab Nationalism. 85
But I am not only referring to the “Protocols” – there are many more
subtle, although equally relevant images of the West or the “Western Other” that,
in essence, reflect a similar construction of “us” in opposition to “them”.
Examples can be found in the context of the Iraq war.
In an article about the Palestine conflict, the Jordanian journalist Arafat
Hijazi commented in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Doustor:
“Bush destroyed the foundations of a land full of tradition and its glorious people
while the only crime the Iraqis committed was to love their nation and
democracy […] Without the anger of the Americans, Iraq would have remained a
flickering beacon of knowledge and civilization as it has been throughout its
history![…] Now the land of the two rivers and the legacy of Abbadian
civilization together with the empire of Harun Al Rashid [Caliph of the Abbasids
786-809] is being torn to pieces and one of the most meaningful pillars of the
Arabs and Muslims is being destroyed!”86
The torture carried out by US-military personnel in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
was criticized by an article in the Egyptian Al-Wafd. While sharp criticism and
outrage about the torture is clearly appropriate, the author claimed to see the
“true nature” of the US-invasion in the prison scandal and a further example of
84
Cit.: http://www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/malaysian.asp
Cp. Holz, Klaus, Nationaler Antisemitismus (Hamburg, 2001); as well as Holz, Die
Gegenwart des Antisemitismus, (Hamburg, 2005); Rabinovici, Doron (ed.) Neuer
Antisemitismus? Eine globale Debatte, (Frankfurt am Main, 2004).
86
Al-Dustour, 8/12/2003.
85
127
the long history of Arab and Muslim humiliation. That is why the title describes
the torture of Iraqi soldiers as ‘A black mark on the forehead of all Arabs’. 87
The same feeling was expressed by in an article in Al-Wafd concerning the
invasion in Iraq. In its conclusion, it demanded:
“Who is not overwhelmed by pain when it comes to the occupation of Iraq? Who
does not feel sorrow, that the city of Abu-l-Ja´far al-Mansur [Baghdad in times of
Al Mansur, 754-775, Caliph of the Abbasids] is occupied and befouled by the
marines? Who won’t cry bitter tears if hundreds of girls in Iraq are raped by the
barbarians of our times–they scream and run for shelter but nobody protects
them. ” 88
Another example of this tendency comes from Nawal as-Sa´adawi, one of the
most prominent women’s and human rights activists in the Arab world, who is
strictly opposed to the Mubarak-regime in Egypt. In an interview with Elaph she
stated:
“I believe that Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. are much more cruel and bloodthirsty than
Saddam Hussein. […] Sadat sold out the Arabic cause and sacrificed the Arab
League. The Arabic despots had always executed the orders of the British and
later of the American and Israeli colonialists. Two events destroyed the Arab
world: Sadat’s Camp David and the Gulf War. The outcome of these two events
made us suffer an enormous setback and we had to face [our] governments as
they were literally begging for America to intervene. Could there be anything
more humiliating for our people?” 89
Similar approaches can be seen on Arab television in many cases. As my first
example, I would like to present a short excerpt from a speech broadcast on
Syrian television by British MP George Galloway, who was also interviewed by
Al-Jazeera and ANB. In the same speech Galloway also spoke about the Iraq
War and its implications for the Arab world. This passage demonstrates the fact
that the idea of the Arab world as a victim of the Western world or of USimperialism is one shared by people outside of the Arab world – a fact that
87
Al-Wafd, 5/6/2004.
Al-Wafd, 8/8/2003
89
www.elaph.com, 9/20/2003.
88
128
highlights the importance of the underlying constructive themes of collective
identity.
“Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and
Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters
are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are
collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because
they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. So this is what SykesPicot will do to the Arabs. Are you ready to have another hundred years like the
hundred years you just had?” 90
While Galloway appeals in this quote to the mere resentment, which was earlier
described by Fanon, the popular Egyptian Television preacher ‘Amr Khaled is
more self-critical. But his self-criticism is also an impression of the described
self-conception of inferiority above. In a talk about the situation of education in
the Arab and Muslim world broadcasted by the Saudi religious channel Iqra TV
he states hautingly: 91
“We Muslims have a problem. What is our problem? Our problem is that we
don't think, don't want to think, are too lazy to think, or we avoid thinking. We
suffer from a disease, and I mean all of us. People have a sort of shyness.
Actually, it is not shyness but revulsion and laziness. […] Oh Muslims, not one
thing came from our brains and contributed to humanity. Where are the Muslim
inventions in the last 200 years? The important and brilliant inventions did not
come from us. Where are the Nobel prizes in medicine and engineering? Don't
tell me it is a conspiracy against us. It is not. [...]“
All of these are examples of very different aspects of one ideology, or more
precisely of one Weltanschauung that circles around the idea that the Arab and
Muslim community is being hindered from taking up an equitable role in the
modern world and relegated to an inferior status. In this context, one can also
find a large amount of conspiracy theories in the Arab media.
On the other hand, both the feeling of inferiority and the tendency towards
conspiracy theories in the region are increasingly being criticized in the Arab
90
Syrian TV, July 28 and 31, 2005, also on Al-Jazeera
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP94805.
91
Iqra TV, June 2, 2004, http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=91.
and
ANB-TV,
129
media by certain Arab intellectuals and authors. Hazem Saghiyeh, for example,
published an article in the London based Arab daily Al-Hayat in which he wrote:
“Whoever follows the news from Egypt – and the positions of most of Egypt's
intellectuals, journalists, and politicians – begins to think that the world wakes up
every morning, rubs its eyes, and exclaims: 'Oh my Goodness, it's seven, I'm late,
I have to immediately start conspiring against Egypt.'” 92
In this context, it is important to note that most of these alleged conspiracies are
based on an underlying concept of an existing community of Arab and Muslims
and the perception that it is under constant threat from Zionist and Western
influences. On the phenomenon of conspiracies, Ghada Al-Karmi states in alHayat that these theories have existed since the 1950’s in centers of the Muslim
diaspora as well as in the Arab world. The theories insist that Arabs and Muslims
are the target of evil ‘Western’ policies directed against them and that they are
only pawns in a big power-game. There is a conviction that modern Arab history
was shaped by foreign powers – first by France and Great Britain and later by the
US in agreement with Israel. According to Al-Karmi, those theories about
conspiracies against Islam grow in parallel to America and Israel tightening their
grip on the region‚ and it would thus be a mistake to submit to them: “Instead it
would be better to understand those theories in the context of the defeat and
incompetence of the Arabs. [...] Those theories are not only wrong but also
dangerous, because they prevent analytical thinking and conceal the real reasons
for the defeat of the Arabs.‘ 93
The Tunisian intellectual Al-Afif-al Akhdar argues even more harshly:
“The hopeless greed for revenge of the following defeats – starting with the one
of the Mamluks against Napoleon at the end of the 18th century up to the defeat
of Arafat and Hamas against Sharon in the 21st century – is rooted deeply in the
collective consciousness. The glorification of weapons and violence tries to
succeed in rehabilitating the harmed collective narcissism and by this means to
sweep away the shame of their defeats.” 94
92
Al-Hayat (London), July 29, 2001.
Al-Hayat (London), November 4, 2003.
94
Elaph.com,
May
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=reform&ID=SP49903
93
2003,
130
There is no doubt that colonial rule, which for some countries ended only few
decades ago, was traumatic for what might be called an ‘Arab collective
consciousness’, especially as colonial and postcolonial history conflict sharply
with the historical idea of the Arab and Muslim world as a relevant political
world power. The contradiction inherent in the combination of the claim to be an
important international power and the perceived experience of political
victimization leads to resentment of a real or imagined ‘domination’ by an
imagined “Other”. In the Arab context it is above all the US and Israel which
stand for the relationship between foreign domination and the powerlessness of
the Arab-Islamic world. Such concepts, which always include a distortion of
reality and – most importantly – always lead to turning a blind eye to one’s own
responsibility and subjectivity, seldom lead to self criticism - which does exist,
though very rarely - but instead lead to discourses that serve to distract from
home-grown problems in the societies themselves.
Palestine First
The “Palestine-first-position” is a typical example of this tendency, one which is
also used by Arab regimes to distract attention from their own inadequacies, to
redirect anger and to reinforce their rule. This strategy works because the
Palestinian conflict and the Israeli occupation are a major constituent element in
the concepts of identity and community in the Arab world. In their conflict with
Israel, the Palestinians represent what might be the last symbol of an imagined
Arab collective. “Everyday,” as the Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim wrote, “the
Egyptians and all other Arabs are slapped in the face” when they read in the
newspapers about how the Palestinians in Ramallah or Jenin are treated by
Israel. 95 However, this ‘Palestine-first-mentality’ is also harshly criticized by
others:
“Why,” asks Dr. Abdel Monem Said of the Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies in Al-Ahram al-Arabi, “should any Arab individual be deprived
of his or her human rights just because another Arab country is under
occupation?” In other words: Why should reform and human rights in other Arab
states be dependent on the situation in Palestine? Another example of the
tendency to “blame the other” can be found in the debates in the Arab media
concerning reform and democracy in the Middle East. Initially, discussion
95
Zitat nach Viola Shafik, Druck
http://www.taz.de/pt/2001/09/18/a0108.1/text
nach
unten,
taz,
September
9,
2001,
131
focused less on the fight for democracy and reform in the region but was
dominated instead by the perception that such developments would only serve
Western interests and are thus encouraged by outside forces. Examples of this
perception can be found in the debates concerning the Greater Middle East
Initiative. The imposed and undifferentiated concept for the region, according to
the criticism, only reflected political and economical goals formulated by the
‘West’. Therefore it is – according to the editor of the Al-Ahram weekly, Ibrahim
Nafie, in his condemnation of US-President George Bush’s speech to the
National Endowment for Democracy - very clear who is responsible for the lack
of democracy in the region:
“Glaring for its absence in Bush's speech is the fact that some essential
preconditions for democratic development in the Middle East are obviated,
directly or indirectly, by US policy in this region. It is significant that the US
president made no mention whatsoever of the brutal Israeli occupation of
Palestine or of the US's own occupation of an independent nation and member of
the UN.” 96
In conclusion, it should again be stressed that there is nothing wrong with
criticism of the US and European policy in the region or of the policies of Israel’s
occupation of Palestine. My argument against statements that are not leveled at
concrete policies, but serve instead to mobilize the masses against an outside
enemy, is that such statements distract attention from internal challenges and
provide an outlet for tangible frustrations and humiliation, thereby blocking
necessary debates concerning internal reform in the Arab world. In my view, the
construction of an antagonism between an imagined ‘us’ and an imagined ‘other’
is often present in Arab media when about the West is the subject. On the one
hand this construction is based upon a concept of inferiority, humiliation and
national dignity, while on the other it serves as an essential cognitive element
within contemporary collective identity, which thus obstructs the path towards
social transformation and political conflicts.
96
Al-Ahram weekly, November 13-19, 2003, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/664/op1.htm
132
McArabism. Instant Nationalism and Satellite Media in the
Arab World
By Khalil Rinnawi, College of Management, Tel Aviv
1. Introduction
On April 9, 2003 U.S.-led coalition forces took control of Baghdad, thus ending
the regime of Saddam Hussein. While Western and Arab news outlets
broadcasted images of Iraqi citizens happily welcoming the “liberators” into their
capital, the reaction throughout the Arab world outside Iraq was marked by a
sense of sadness, for this city rich in Arab history and symbolic of shared Arab
values and interests had fallen to the West. With this event, the divide between
the pan-Arabic and specific localized Arab agendas became apparent.
This paradox is a result of the transnational media broadcasting content
prior to and during the war that created a shared sense of Arab nationalism which
I call McArabism. Named after the McDonald’s food chain, McArabism refers to
a situation in which citizens throughout the Arab world receive identical
nationalist pan-Arab content via transnational media, just as one can get the same
Big Mac at any McDonald’s outlet. But when the television is turned off, Arab
citizens return to their respective local lives and specific realities, where their
interests likely differ from those portrayed in the transnational media.
2. Tribal Media: Traditional Arab Media
The Arab media environment, long dominated by state-sponsored or state-run
terrestrial and local television stations, aimed at contemporary nation-state
building, has essentially been a state-sponsored monolouge addressed to citizens
affirming and reaffirming the legitimacy of the state-regime. There are three
kinds of media in the Arab World: A) Mobilization Press controlled totally and
mobilized by the regime. Like the cases of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yeman. B)
Loyalist Press: media controlled by privet hands but it is totally loyalist to the
regime and supports the formal policy of the state leadership. Like the cases of
Saudia Arabia. United Arab Emarets and Tonnis. And C) Diverse Press: it’s a
diverse media normally it is by privet hands they are more critical to the regime.
Like the cases of Lebanon, Kuwait, and Morrocco.
The main characteristics of this media are: It was not developed as a
natural act of the Arab society rather it was adopted from outside for the interests
133
of the regimes. Therefore it is not reflected democratic relationship in the Arab
state rather one way media. The main role of this media in general is to keep
status quo of the allocation of the power in the state and control over the
population. Furthermore, it lead to strengthen the individual nation state.
Therefore, it can be considered as a kind of tribal media.
Tribal media refers to the mass media system that developed in the vast majority
of Arab states over a 60 year period: from the 1920s to the late 1980s. It
consisted of written, electronic and other medias, operating within a defined
geopolitical unit (state or other sociopolitical entities), with closed borders. This
arrangement put limitations on the infiltration of external mass media content,
including logistical obstacles, such as a limited broadcast range of terrestrial
television stations, as well as limitations created by political regimes, such as
various regulations and censorship, in order to prevent local communities being
exposed to external media. This included preventing the importation of
newspapers, magazines, books and videocassettes or jamming external electronic
broadcasts.
Programming content within these state-delineated media units was directed
according to a rigid media policy set by political elites and regimes, intended to
control information flows and to do so in a way that would also ensure its control
over the masses. Not only did this not leave any space for external media, as was
already mentioned above, but neither was there any possibility for any
alternative, independent, domestic, non-state produced programming.
This was achieved through a variety of mechanisms: First, was the use of
rigid internal media regulations, which actively discouraged the establishment of
private or non-state mass media organizations. Second, state censorship was
heavily used, both directly and indirectly, to control media content of both state
and private media. This included economic, political and administrative pressure,
as well as various sanctions, including shutting down media outlets and even
violence against journalists and others working in the media. But the most
effective means was the development of a culture of self-censorship, which
became one of the rules of media survival. In addition to these constraints,
modern Arab nations also made use of moral structural norms to enforce their
media regulatory policies during this 60 year period.
Consequently, the use of these means of media control shows that state
media (in what ever form) not only survives but is also hermetically sealed from
external messages. State regimes and professionals produce a media that is
continuously manipulated, preserving balances of power and dominant
134
perceptions of reality. With television, this was achieved mainly by producing
programs—carefully selected by station managers and other media
professionals—with a political orientation suiting state leadership (Kraidy 1998).
Importantly, developments in the Arab world over the past 40 years seem
to have put political news on top of media agendas. One implication of this trend
has been the production of elitist news programs that show little concern with
developments related to grassroots organizations or groups that fall outside
existing political arrangements at local and regional levels in the Arab world.
Furthermore, nightly newscasts were not only the major component of television
journalism but were themselves dull and monolithic in their format, content and
delivery. Television news gatekeepers selected their topics with a view guided
mainly by existing political, social and cultural arrangements. Political news
dealing with speeches by political leaders, official visits and protocol activities
always topped the news agenda in the Arab world. During the 1970s and 1980s, a
single channel environment provided viewers with limited exposure to regional
and international television content from neighboring countries or around the
world
This tribal media arrangement was set up by political elites not only to
preserve political regimes, but also to maintain the socio-cultural order and
cultural religious values that provide the foundation for the existing political
order’s legitimacy. The reinforcement of the traditional patriarchal society, which
is part of this media policy, also aims to sustain the existing media model. This is
reflected in the large and consistently positive media coverage of political elites,
ruling families and leadership by all media outlets without allowing any kind of
criticism or even indirectly negative representations.
In the tribal media framework, television has played the main role, mainly
over the last 30 years, when it displaced radio from the prominent position it held
from 1920-1960. Until the emergence of television, radio and print were the main
players in the creation of tribal media in the Arab world. Traditional state run
media has accompanied the establishment of the Arab state, has assisted in the
nation building process and in shaping the (assumed) ethno-national collective
identity in each state while prepping Arab communities to different new states
and solidifying (local) national identities (Alterman 1998).
This can be seen in the Lebanonization of the Lebanese population, the
Jordanization of communities on the eastern side of the Jordan River, etc. Until
the end of the 1980s, the tribal media and television in particular, in the Arab
135
world, functioned according to a government monopoly model of broadcasting.
This model draws upon the notion of broadcasting as a tool for national
development placed under government control.
For several reasons, television replaced print and radio as the main
medium of the tribal media. First, the range of terrestrial television is very
limited and its reach cannot extend far beyond the geopolitical borders of each
state. This means that access to terrestrial television channels for each state is
generally limited to the population that lives there. Second, it is difficult to
extend its broadcasting to areas outside this state, except for populations of
neighboring countries located near the borders of that state. Third, it is relatively
very easy for ruling elites to control television through its ownership of particular
channels, which require a large amount of capital investment and operation costs
that are difficult for most private interests to obtain. In addition, a very firm
package of laws and regulations were imposed by regimes to prevent private
ownership of television stations; a media considered to be very effective among
traditional populations with high illiteracy rates, as is the case in the Arab world.
Over time, especially after television sets became easier for Arab citizens
to purchase or access, a televisual environment developed in Arab societies that
strengthened by the end of the 1980s. This televisual environment, developed
within the framework of the tribal media, constitutes its cornerstone, as a result
of the increased importance of television as a medium, compared with print and
radio in the 1980s.
3. Changes in Arab media environment
Over the last decade, Arab skies have become crowded with satellites beaming
an array of content from governmental, semi-governmental and commercial
television stations. While early global and regional channels such as CNN, Star
TV and the BBC might have been perceived as instruments of Western media
imperialism, they have been followed by channels partially created within and
targeted at Arab markets in the region. Other channels have emerged, such as the
Lebanese Broadcasting Company (LBC) based in Beirut and the Middle Eastern
Broadcasting Company (MBC), Al-Jazeera and other targeting Arab
communities all over the world.
Three major trends have contributed to these recent developments: First,
the emergence of new media technologies in reinvigorating regional imagined
communities, in a communicative environment where borders and the state’s
ability to exert control over media content have become obsolete.
136
Second, dramatic changes, that became part of the reality in the Arab
media environment. This is notable for several reasons.
1) The pan-Arab media market has the characteristics of a market. Based on
forces of supply and demand, programming is not tailored to simply meet the
needs of government broadcasters. Rather it actively seeks viewers by offering a
variety of news and entertainment options. The result is enormous empowerment
of the audience and dramatic increase in viewers’ satisfaction with programming
content.
2) Viewers of commercial regional broadcasting are perceived as “free
consumers.” This means each viewer has the freedom to choose from a large
variety of television stations according to their preferences. This is in contrast to
the pre-satellite period during which viewers were considered part of a passive
audience that had no alternative but to view the one state-run television station
available to them.
3) Regional markets are indeed regional. To a great degree, identical
programming can be seen throughout the Arab world.
4) Some regional broadcasting players are not subject to the censorship apparatus
of the Arab state. As a result, they have been able to bring into Arab living rooms
content and forms that were absent in the past. Arab viewers have thus been
introduced to debate and argument over current events by politicians,
intellectuals and other personalities, many of whom have not had access to
television in the past because they were identified with opposition groups stateregimes wished to silence.
And third, the appearance of a unique kind of regionalization process which
reflected on revival of a regional Arab Identity and new-nationalism, new Pan
Arabism in the Arab world, which I call McArabism.
4. McArabism: Localization, Globalization
The appearance of new media technologies in the Arab World – and the
transnational media in particular – creates tension between the forces of localism
and tribalism, which Barber calls “Jihad” - and between globalization, which
Barber calls “McWorld.” I suggest this clash has produced McArabism. A kind
137
of regionalism quite different from the pan-Arabism(s) formulated during the
1950’s and 1960’s in the Arab world. In terms of formation, it is a product of
interaction between new media technologies and local trends and powers.
Without a clear ideology, spokesperson or political representation, it is open to
external influences. Moreover, new media technologies allow it to bypass central
or Statist political, social or cultural agencies. McArabism is evident in political,
socio-cultural and religious spheres.
The was based on the creation of “Virtual Reality” by the transnational
and satellite mass media
McArabism as an “imagined community”
A regionalization effect produced by the emergence of the transnational media in
the Arab world can be traced to the concept of the “imagined community” as
suggested by Benedict Anderson (1983, 1998). This suggests that a new
nationalism, such as McArabism is a kind of imagined community that mainly
includes Arabs inside the Arab world but also applies to Arabs in Diaspora, or
living outside of it.
According to Anderson, the emergence of new nationalisms results from a
process of “re-imagination” conditioned by drastic transformations in the
conscience and media within a modern framework (ibid). In the case of the Arab
world, the entrance of the Arab transnational media is a strong factor impacting
upon the process of re-imagination, built upon the histories put forward
essentially by the new Arab historians and intellectuals from the period of alNahda.
The creation of an Arab nationalism such as McArabism requires the
development of new ‘space thinking’ and ‘time understanding’ among Arabs.
Anderson argues that for this to occur, in the first stage huge groups and
collectives of human beings must be able to perceive themselves as societies
living in parallel to other large groups with whom they share the same language,
religion, customs and heritage, even if there is no interaction or contact between
them. The Arab transnational media had the same process in Arab societies in
Arab state-regimes and also among Arab communities in Diaspora.
The conditions Anderson describes above are relevant to the Arab world
(and Arabs in Diaspora) at the beginning of the third millennium, particularly in
the facilitation by the transnational media of an Arab “imagined community.”
According to Anderson the novel and the newspaper were the two basic
“imagined forms of activities” which contribute to creation of the imagined
138
community of European nations in the 18th century (ibid). In this regard, the
mass media plays a central role in the process of creating imagined communities,
mediating between members of the same community who enjoy no real
interaction. Continuing this approach in our case, it can be argued that the Qur’an
initially formed the first unifying text for an imagined community – the new
converts to Islam and the non-Muslim (often large) minorities under Islamic rule,
and later the large body of Arab and Islamic literature shared between the Islamic
world, with one (and later two and three) unifying languages, Arabic, Persian and
Turkish.
Elsewhere in his book, Anderson uses the term “re-imagination” which
can be applied to understand the Arab world in particular, for it helps to
understand a situation where Arab past/history is being rehabilitated to be
positively perceived by Arabs today, recontextualized for relevancy and
reintegrated into a system of percieving the past, present and future. Arab
heritage and Islam are two basic elements in the rehabilitation and reintegration
processes.
“Re-imagination” is particularly facilitated, or spontaneously drawn upon
through an Arab history of cultural hegemony (as opposed to cultural monopoly)
from Andalusian Spain to Iraq. Notions of the Arab-Islamic world as
participating in a shared culture, language, religions, and even economy draw
upon ayyam al-‘Arab, the pinacle of Arab intellectual and cultural achievement
(Hourani 1984)
As important, Islamism (itself contemporary re-imaginings of Islam) is an
important factor in strengthening McArabism as an “imagined community” in the
Arab world.
With the contemporary formation of the Arab world with relatively stable
borders, I suggest that transnational media in the Arab world is the means by
which all Arabs are exposed to the same socio-cultural media content. The daily
consumption of the media in modern communities in fact resembles the Islamic
five prayers a day. In both cases, the ritual – prayers or exposure to media
content – is performed daily by members who participate in similar socio-cultural
rituals, are aware that others are also participating in the same ritual, providing a
sense of belonging to the same community even without personally knowing its
members (ibid).
Unlike the print media that developed in Arab countries, which worked
towards individual state-regime building, Arab transnational broadcasting media
weakens the nation-state orientation and strengthens Mc-Arabism.
139
In this context, new media technologies have presented important
elements of a televisual environment and new collective space in the Arab world.
This mass media language - the “television medium” – constructs the basis of a
new conscience in the Arab world, building a unified or common “field of
communication” through images and voices broadcast on television.
The use of Arabic, a language understandable to all Arab audiences
regardless of geographic location, conveying transnational (shared) media
content creates a participatory importance to Arabs. The growth of new media
technologies and the capitalist drive to expand its reach into more markets
maintain the expansion of the televisual environment. Consequently, the
combination of capitalism and the technology of the press has lead to new forms
of imagined communities that lays the groundwork for the appearance of new/old
collective identity such as that depicted by McArabism.
5. Implications of the McArabism
The emergence of McArabism is accomplished via six main processes, which
complete each other.
1) Intensification, using and broadcasting regional (pan-Arab) media content
expressed on several levels.
A. News: Intensification refers to the dramatic increase in frequency of
newscasts, which are broadcast several times daily on entertainment satellite
channels like MBC or LBCI and every hour on the all-news television stations
such as al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV. This is in contrast to terrestrial television
stations, which have only one or two news broadcasts each day, providing only
limited opportunity for people to tune in.
B. Shared concern: Intensification also refers to addressing issues on
transnational television of interest to a pan-Arab audience. These issues include
crises between Arab states and non-Arabs, problems facing the Arab world as
whole and political, social and cultural phenomena in Arab societies. This is
significant on two levels: Many of these issues were previously hidden from the
eyes of the Arab audiences, while a shared (new) pan-Arab engagement in these
issues have intensified the nature of their concern on a pan-Arab level.
140
C. Pan-Arab and Islamic programs: Through the regional broadcasting of
historical, educational and political programs aiming to educate (Arab) audiences
about the history, development or issues regarding the Arab and Islamic world.
Through virtually simultaneous broadcasting, it encourages audiences to engage
in symbolic events, developments and milestones of Arab-Islamic culture, to
draw their relevance to the viewer and to re-create or emphasize the viewer’s
worldview based upon their ethnic/religious identity.
D. Entertainment programs: Intensification is also expressed through
entertainment programs, such as movies and dramas that have traditionally been
popular on Arab television screens. Alongside the traditional fare of Egyptian
movies and Syrian soap operas, it has encouraged a new pan-Arab music market,
with regular music shows and a new emphasis upon video clips. In contrast to the
period of terrestrial television where music programming offered locally
produced songs in local dialects, difficult to understand beyond a geographic
area, or the traditional fare of Egyptian classics; transnational broadcasting offers
a pan-Arab selection of music, encouraging at once a new understanding and
appreciation of different Arabic dialects (although the majority of songs are in
Gulf, Lebanese or Egyptian dialects). More importantly, the creation of a new
entertainment market, specifically targeted for regional Arab audiences has
created a common framework of entertainment trends.
2) Shared stance on pan-Arab and Islamic issues or crises like the Palestinian
Intifada, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iraqi crisis with the U.S. or Usama Bin
Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Thus a regional pan-Arabist dialogue among
intellectuals has begun to emerge, not only in such regional Arab newspapers as
al-Hayat and al-Sharq al-Awsat, but more importantly and effectively through
satellite television stations like Abu Dhabi TV, al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiyah and AlIkhbariyah. This dialogue has expanded the bounds of debate in the Arab world,
representing the injection of both new views and back-and-forth discussion into
areas where such things had been relatively rare. But this dialogue has also
tended to merge into an ‘Arab consensus,’ which can become its own form of
restraint.
3) Emotive footage, also described as Sensationalism of the news through the use
of various kinds of rhetoric in reporting language as well as pictures, style of
presentations and other effects. Importantly, the process of allowing viewers to
141
see, often live, footage clearly intended to provoke an emotional effect allows
audiences to experience deeper forms of engagement. Beyond a rational level of
acknowledgement or sharing issues of concern, the use of emotional footage
posits the audience in an imagined community, or a participant/viewer of a part
of his/her community on screen.
4) Direct engagement: This refers to the use of modern styles of news and
broadcasting which allow the audience to understand the news with minimal state
intervention, including using different broadcasting effects and techniques such
as live broadcasts, figures and maps; having reporters stationed in both Arab and
non-Arab countries; providing in-depth reports on various issues and conducting
interviews with people, leaders and groups representing different points of views.
5) Language. Transnational television broadcasts news and serious programs in
Modern Standard Arabic. This is based upon classical Arabic, with a simplified
grammar system and the inclusion of contemporary terms in their Arabized form,
rather than in English or French, the two main colonial languages of the region.
Although there is no one dialect of Arabic, which can be understood among all
levels of Arabic society (plagued as it is by low levels of school attendance
among women, and illiteracy), Modern Standard is perhaps the most widely
understood, based in Qur’anic Arabic and taught through school systems all over
the Arab world.
This is in contrast to the period before transnational television, when many
terrestrial stations used local dialects.
6) Formation of an independent press corps. Transnational television tends to be
identical in terms of news coverage and delivery. Many of these news
organizations are based outside the region, or in states that the majority of staff
are not from – such as Qatar-based al-Jazeera, Abu Dhabi-based Abu Dhabi TV
and Dubai-based al-Arabiya, giving a degree of independence unprecedented in
many countries. One consequence of this is the emergence of a press corps that
both remains independent of the agendas of the most prominent Arab states and
seeks an audience that transcends national borders.
As suggested through this discussion, McArabism requires that Arab audiences
be exposed simultaneously to identical content, to enjoy opportunities for
142
interaction. Just as importantly, McArabism is achieved not only through media
content but also through the medium itself. The medium itself is a vital element
in this process, providing Arabs in different locations a greater opportunity to
engage with content. This helps create a collective discourse that raises issues
that have meaning to all Arabs. Transnational television channels play a central
role in the rising quality of television news, scientific and entertainment
programs, while also creating more harmonious Arab public opinion on crucial
regional and pan-Arab issues.
143
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