LEGITIMATE TARGETS:

Arab Media's Conduct During War Indicative of a Deeper Malaise (Dr. Abdulhamid Al-Ansary, April 21, 2003, Arab News)

Why did the Arab media consent to align itself with the Iraqi regime while at the same time pretending that it was with the people?

It is my view that the answer was stated by the director of one of the satellite channels: "It is competition. In such circumstances, either we win the viewers or others win them." Thus he summarized the way of most of those in the Arab media. Their aim is to win the street at any price. The street is emotional and has little confidence in the Americans. It can be won by fanning the flames of its emotions and encouraging its feelings with dreams of a great Arab victory and a great American defeat.

To a large extent, the Arab media was characterized by selectivity, and it was decidedly on the side of the Iraqi regime. Our intellectuals took over the line and constantly repeated it. Our media then devoted special programs to disseminating and repeating the falsehoods of Sahaf. Their biased point of view was imposed on listeners. Our media attempted to increase the degree of hatred against the coalition by concentrating on the degree of the destruction and the number of civilian victims, without making clear that this was because the regime positioned its forces and tanks in civilian areas. The army of Saddam of which they were so proud because it was the only army which could protect civilians in fact used the civilians to protect itself.

It was the Arab media itself which claimed that the aims of the war were to destroy Iraq, put an end to its capabilities, and, in the end, to occupy it. It did not for a moment consider the role of Iraq's ruler in the destruction and ruin of the country over a period of more than thirty years. It did not consider how he had destroyed the country’s environment, education, health and legal systems. He also set oil wells on fire and destroyed bridges, and he transformed the cities, especially in the south, into wretchedness, deprived even of clean drinking water.

The Arab media attacked the Iraqi opposition and imposed a collective boycott while satellite stations played host to everyone but the Iraqis who were, after all, the ones most concerned. The Kuwaiti media was the sole exception to this rule. Not one satellite channel had the courage to transmit scenes of welcome to the coalition troops in the liberated cities. Instead, the satellite stations made a great fuss over what they called the crimes of the coalition and ignored the crimes of the regime. The correspondents continued to impose their political points of view on viewers. Not one of the satellite stations, except Kuwait, had the courage to show a tape of the chemical strike against Halabja. It was the same with the air attack of the 1991 uprising in which holy places were hit and hundreds of Shiites were killed and tortured. More than 250,000 Iraqi citizens were killed in the uprising.

Nor was their selectivity of topics confined to analysis. It extended even into the presentation of the news. One Arab channel deliberately blamed the weapons and ammunition hidden by Saddam's soldiers who were in civilian clothes in a house. This was shown in its entirety by CNN. The aim of the Arab satellite stations was to suggest that the allies were "savage" in their treatment of civilians. Furthermore, respectable newspapers were not considered to be devout if they did not cover the sorrowful and tragic accident of the journalists who were killed by the coalition forces--in order, they said, to silence Arab satellite stations. Again, the question: Is it possible for the Arab media to be objective?

In my view, it is not possible because the Arab media is controlled by the prevailing general atmosphere and by people who have been fed on the slogans of incitement and inflammatory propaganda for more than half a century.

All of which calls into question the fetishization of press outlets in unfree countries by Western "civil libertarians". Al Jazeera and others, by seeking to fan the flames of anti-Americanism, in effect made themselves combatants. If people are serious about how we need to win hearts and minds, they need to get serious about defeating those who control those same minds now. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 21, 2003 9:40 AM