-Caveat Lector- NY TIMES April 4, 2003
Arab Media Portray War as Killing Field By SUSAN SACHS CAIRO, April 3 - It was a picture of Arab grief and rage. A teenage boy glared from the rubble of a bombed building as a veiled woman wept over the body of a relative. In fact, it was two pictures: one from the American-led war in Iraq and the other from the Palestinian territories, blended into one image this week on the Web site of the popular Saudi daily newspaper Al Watan. The meaning would be clear to any Arab reader: what is happening in Iraq is part of one continuous brutal assault by America and its allies on defenseless Arabs, wherever they are. As the Iraq war moved into its third week, the media in the region have increasingly fused images and enemies from this and other conflicts into a single bloodstained tableau. The Israeli flag is superimposed on the American flag. The Crusades and the 13th-century Mongul sack of Baghdad, recalled as barbarian attacks on Arab civilization, are used as synonyms for the American-led invasion of Iraq. Horrific vignettes of the helpless - armless children, crushed babies, stunned mothers - cascade into Arab living rooms from the front pages of newspapers and television screens. For Arab leaders and Arab moderates, supported by Washington, the war has become a political crisis of street protests, militant calls for holy war and bitter public criticism of their ties to the United States. They had hoped for a short war with a minimum of inflammatory pictures of Iraqi civilian casualties. Instead, the daily message to the public from much of the media is that American troops are callous killers, that only resistance to the United States can redeem Arab pride and that the Iraqis are fighting a pan-Arab battle for self-respect. "The media are playing a very dangerous game in this conflict," said Abdel Moneim Said, director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "When you see the vocabulary and the images used, it is actually bringing everybody to the worst nightmare - the clash of civilizations." Sensationalism has not gripped all media. Some mainline government-owned newspapers like the staid Al Ahram in Egypt and two of the privately owned international Arabic papers based in London, Al Hayat and Asharq Al Awsat, have reported the war in neutral language. They show bandaged victims in Iraqi hospitals but not the gory pictures of ripped bodies that fill the pages of their competitors. Government control of the media is not the issue in any case, since nearly all newspapers in the Arab world, including those with the most savage coverage of the American invasion, publish at the pleasure of the governments. In most countries, the government appoints all newspaper editors, including the so-called opposition press. Even a privately owned paper like Al Watan in Saudi Arabia must toe the government line in reporting on domestic politics and personalities. The biggest influence on much of the media coverage has come from the satellite news channel Al Jazeera, which started broadcasting from Qatar in 1996. It made its name with on-the-spot coverage of the Palestinian uprising that gave viewers an unblinking look at bloody and broken bodies. Many governments, aware that Al Jazeera is widely considered by Arab audiences to be credible, have allowed their own stations to run Jazeera footage of the war to demonstrate their own anti-war credentials. (On Wednesday, Al Jazeera announced that it was suspending its reporting from Iraq after the Iraqi government barred two of its correspondents in Baghdad.) The rage against the United States is fed by this steady diet of close-up color photographs and television footage of dead and wounded Iraqis, described as victims of American bombs. In recent days, more and more Arabic newspapers have run headlines bluntly accusing soldiers of deliberately killing civilians. Even for those accustomed to seeing such images from Arab coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the daily barrage of war coverage in newspapers and on hourly television reports has left many Arabs beside themselves with anger. "He is `Shaytan,' that Bush," shouted Ali Hammouda, a newsstand operator in Cairo, using the Arabic word for Satan and pointing to a color photograph in one of his newspapers. The image, published in many Arabic papers, showed the bodies of a stick-thin woman and a baby, said to be victims of American shelling in central Iraq. They were lying in an open wooden coffin, the baby's green pacifier still in its mouth. "Your Bush says he is coming to make them free, but look at this lady," Mr. Hammouda exclaimed. "Is she free? What did she do? What did her baby do?" Fahmi Howeidy, a prominent Islamist writer in Cairo, says the reactions are not necessarily pro-Saddam. "Of course we think Saddam Hussein will not continue in power, but if he resists for weeks, at least he will defend his image as a hero who could resist U.S. and British power," Mr. Howeidy said. "If this happens, we can expect chaos in the Arab world, because we don't know how the people who already criticize Arab regimes will express their anger after that," he added. "Maybe there would be an extremist group or a single person who would do something against the government. We don't know about the army, but maybe there are people who feel humiliated." Since the war began, much of the Arabic press and the private Arab satellite stations have displayed no squeamishness about what they show. War is carnage, the editors have said, so why mute the screams or hide the entrails of the wounded and dead? "Arabs, like anybody else, don't like the sight of blood or pictures of corpses, but it's a matter of principle that we have the right to know what's happening," said Gasa Mustafa Abaido, an assistant professor of communications at Ain Shams University in Cairo. "What we see in the media is an indirect way for the governments and the public to reject the war." The images, however, are not presented as fragmentary evidence of the evils of war but as illustrations of a definitive black-and-white view of the war and the United States. The way they are presented, and the language that accompanies them, amplifies their impact. President Bush, in one Egyptian weekly newspaper, is shown on each page of war coverage in a Nazi uniform. American and British forces are called "allies of the devil." Civilian casualties are frequently reported as "massacres" or, as another Egyptian paper said, an "American Holocaust." A popular Arabic Web site, one of many to display the most gruesome images of the war, showed a picture of a little girl bleeding from her eye, the same image that was used by many newspapers in the region. The caption reads: "My dead mother is liberated and so am I." Al Manar, a satellite channel run by the Muslim militant group Hezbollah, broadcasts pictures of wounded children in tandem with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's declaration that American weaponry is the most precise in the history of warfare. The Arab media's reporting of the war may also drown out the more moderate voices that avoid brutal imagery and metaphors of endless victimization. "In the longer run, these images can breed a certain type of people, not the ones who are looking to develop our societies but those who think how to sacrifice themselves," said Dr. Said, of the Al Ahram Center in Cairo. As an Arab moderate who calls for liberal reforms and "renaissance," he said, "I personally find great difficulty communicating that language to the public. People are infuriated and helpless, and they feel that the more radical language gives them a sense of comfort." Anti-American sentiment among Arabs, largely based on the belief that United States policy is tilted sharply in favor of Israel, was present long before the war on Iraq. Widespread sympathy for the Iraqi people, fed by the images of the wounded and dead, has intensified that sentiment. In the antiwar demonstrations, protesters have repeatedly called on their leaders to take action against the United States, either by tossing out American diplomats or refusing to let Arab airspace be used for military flights. Arab leaders, pragmatists by necessity, have tried to accommodate those feelings, while also trying not to jeopardize their defense and foreign aid arrangements with Washington. "Most people realize that it's not in our national interest to burn our bridges with the U.S.," a senior Jordanian official said. "But people are frustrated. That's the main thing, and that's something we are all aware of." The concern was underlined on Wednesday, when King Abdullah II of Jordan told the state news agency, Petra, that the television reports of Iraqi civilian casualties in the war made him "pained and saddened." "No country has supported Iraq like Jordan," the king said. "We had said `no' to attacking Iraq when many said `yes.' " Similarly, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt spoke out in his own defense this week in a speech to army officers. He said Egypt used its "entire weight" to influence the United States in an effort to avert the war but failed. While they are concerned about rising public anger, it is unlikely that any Arab leaders worry about antiwar protesters storming their palaces or offices. Changes of government in the region have not occurred that way. Rather, the leaders fear that others might exploit any instability. In an outcome played out in Turkey in 1980 when terrorists threatened the government, antiwar protests could evolve into rolling antigovernment riots, the army would be called in to restore order, and some generals might decide to take power on the pretext of ensuring national stability. In Saudi Arabia and its smaller Gulf neighbors, diplomats and other political analysts imagine a challenge from anti-Western or fundamentalist cliques of princes within the ruling families. All that is speculation. But if the war in Iraq does not end soon, many Arab intellectuals say, its iconic images could set off a dangerous backlash of extremism. A prolonged war, accompanied by gut-wrenching images of Iraqi casualties blamed on the cruelty of American forces, could also immobilize fledgling reform movements. "Some people said, before the invasion of Iraq, that solving the Saddam problem would make the reputation of the U.S. better," said Turki al-Hamad, a Saudi commentator who advocates democratic reforms in the kingdom. "Now if the United States said 2 plus 2 is 4, no one would believe them." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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