What the Muslim World Is Watching
New York Times Magazine
November 18, 2001, p.48
("The Bush administration is trying to figure out how to combat Al Jazeera, the incendiary Arabic news station. But as an extended viewing makes clear,
this is one war that can't be won.")
By FOUAD AJAMI
Al Jazeera is not subtle television.
Recently, during a lull in its nonstop
coverage of the raids on Kabul and the
street battles of Bethlehem, the
Arabic-language satellite news station
showed an odd but telling episode of its
documentary program "Biography and
Secrets." The show's subject was Ernesto
(Che) Guevara. Presenting Che as a
romantic, doomed hero, the documentary
recounted the Marxist rebel's last stand in
the remote mountains of Bolivia, lingering
mournfully over the details of his capture and
execution. Even Che's corpse received a lot
of airtime; Al Jazeera loves grisly footage
and is never shy about presenting graphic
imagery.
The episode's subject matter was, of course,
allegorical. Before bin Laden, there was
Guevara. Before Afghanistan, there was
Bolivia. As for the show's focus on C.I.A.
operatives chasing Guevara into the
mountains, this, too, was clearly meant to
evoke the contemporary hunt for Osama,
the Islamic rebel.
Al Jazeera, which claims a global audience
of 35 million Arabic-speaking viewers, may
not officially be the Osama bin Laden
Channel -- but he is clearly its star, as I
learned during an extended viewing of the
station's programming in October. The
channel's graphics assign him a lead role:
there is bin Laden seated on a mat, his
submachine gun on his lap; there is bin
Laden on horseback in Afghanistan, the
brave knight of the Arab world. A huge,
glamorous poster of bin Laden's silhouette
hangs in the background of the main studio
set at Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, the
capital city of Qatar.
On Al Jazeera (which means "the
Peninsula"), the Hollywoodization of news is indulged with an abandon that
would make the Fox News Channel blush. The channel's promos are
particularly shameless. One clip juxtaposes a scowling George Bush with a
poised, almost dreamy bin Laden; between them is an image of the World
Trade Center engulfed in flames. Another promo opens with a glittering shot
of the Dome of the Rock. What follows is a feverish montage: a crowd of
Israeli settlers dance with unfurled flags; an Israeli soldier fires his rifle; a
group of Palestinians display Israeli bullet shells; a Palestinian woman wails; a
wounded Arab child lies on a bed. In the climactic image, Palestinian boys
carry a banner decrying the shame of the Arab world's silence.
Al Jazeera's reporters are similarly adept at riling up the viewer. A fiercely
opinionated group, most are either pan-Arabists -- nationalists of a leftist
bent committed to the idea of a single nation across the many frontiers of the
Arab world -- or Islamists who draw their inspiration from the primacy of the
Muslim faith in political life. Since their primary allegiance is to fellow
Muslims, not Muslim states, Al Jazeera's reporters and editors have no
qualms about challenging the wisdom of today's Arab rulers. Indeed, Al
Jazeera has been rebuked by the governments of Libya and Tunisia for giving
opposition leaders from those countries significant air time. Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia, for their part, have complained about Al Jazeera's extensive
reporting on the misery of Iraqis living under sanctions. But the five-year-old
station has refused to be reined in. The channel openly scorns the
sycophantic tone of the state-run Arab media and the quiescence of the
mainstream Arab press, both of which play down controversy and dissent.
Compared with other Arab media outlets, Al Jazeera may be more
independent -- but it is also more inflammatory. For the dark side of the
pan-Arab worldview is an aggressive mix of anti-Americanism and
anti-Zionism, and these hostilities drive the station's coverage, whether it is
reporting on the upheaval in the West Bank or on the American raids on
Kandahar. Although Al Jazeera has sometimes been hailed in the West for
being an autonomous Arabic news outlet, it would be a mistake to call it a
fair or responsible one. Day in and day out, Al Jazeera deliberately fans the
flames of Muslim outrage.
Consider how Al Jazeera covered the second intifada, which erupted in
September 2000. The story was a godsend for the station; masked
Palestinian boys aiming slingshots and stones at Israeli soldiers made for
constantly compelling television. The station's coverage of the crisis barely
feigned neutrality. The men and women who reported from Israel and Gaza
kept careful count of the "martyrs." The channel's policy was firm:
Palestinians who fell to Israeli gunfire were martyrs; Israelis killed by
Palestinians were Israelis killed by Palestinians. Al Jazeera's reporters
exalted the "children of the stones," giving them the same amount of coverage
that MSNBC gave to Monica Lewinsky. The station played and replayed
the heart-rending footage of 12-year-old Muhammed al-Durra, who was
shot in Gaza and died in his father's arms. The images' ceaseless repetition
signaled the arrival of a new, sensational breed of Arab journalism. Even
some Palestinians questioned the opportunistic way Al Jazeera handled the
tragic incident. But the channel savored the publicity and the controversy all
the same.
Since Sept. 11, I discovered, Al Jazeera has become only more incendiary.
The channel's seething dispatches from the "streets of Kabul" or the "streets
of Baghdad" emphasize anti-American feeling. The channel's numerous
call-in shows welcome viewers to express opinions that in the United States
would be considered hate speech. And, of course, there is the matter of Al
Jazeera's "exclusive" bin Laden videotapes. On Oct. 7, Al Jazeera broadcast
a chilling message from bin Laden that Al Qaeda had delivered to its Kabul
bureau. Dressed in a camouflage jacket over a traditional thoub, bin Laden
spoke in ornate Arabic, claiming that the terror attacks of Sept. 11 should be
applauded by Muslims. It was a riveting performance -- one that was
repeated on Nov. 3, when another bin Laden speech aired in full on the
station. And just over a week ago, Al Jazeera broadcast a third Al Qaeda
tape, this one showcasing the military skills of four young men who were said
to be bin Laden's own sons.
The problem of Al Jazeera's role in the current crisis is one that the White
House has been trying to solve. Indeed, the Bush administration has lately
been expressing its desire to win the "war of ideas," to capture the Muslim
world's intellectual sympathy and make it see the war against bin Laden as a
just cause. There has been talk of showing American-government-sponsored
commercials on Al Jazeera. And top American officials have begun
appearing on the station's talk shows. But my viewing suggests that it won't
be easy to dampen the fiery tone of Al Jazeera. The enmity runs too deep.
(Page 2 of 6)
Indeed, the truth is that a foreign power
can't easily win a "war of ideas" in the
Muslim world. Sure, we can establish
"coalition information centers" -- as the
administration has in Washington, London
and Islamabad -- and dispatch our
diplomats on "listening tours." We can give
Al Jazeera extended access to the highest
American officials and hope that these
leaders will make an impression on Arab
viewers. But anti-Americanism is a potent
force that cannot be readily dissolved.
What's more, Al Jazeera is a crafty
operation. In covering the intifada, its
broadcasters perfected a sly game --
namely, mimicking Western norms of
journalistic fairness while pandering to
pan-Arab sentiments. In a seemingly
open-minded act, Al Jazeera broke with a
widespread taboo of the Arab news media
and interviewed Israeli journalists and
officials, including Ehud Barak and Shimon
Peres. Yet at the same time, it pressed on
with unrelenting anti-Zionist reportage that
contributed to further alienation between
Israelis and Palestinians.
What this means is that no matter how many
Americans show up on Al Jazeera, the
station will pursue its own oppositional
agenda. Al Jazeera's reporters see
themselves as "anti-imperialists." These men
and women are convinced that the rulers of
the Arab world have given in to American
might; these are broadcasters who play to
an Arab gallery whose political bitterness
they share -- and feed. In their eyes, it is an
unjust, aggressive war they are covering in
Afghanistan. Watching Al Jazeera makes all
of this distressingly clear.
Al Jazeera is on the ground in
Afghanistan and reports the news up close. It is the only television
news outlet with a bureau in Kabul. Alas, there is no skyline in the Afghan
capital, no bright city lights that can illuminate America's nighttime raids.
What worked so well for CNN in Baghdad has been impossible for Al
Jazeera in Kabul and Kandahar. Instead, Al Jazeera's Afghanistan coverage
supplies a pointed contrast between the high-tech foreign power, with its
stealth planes and Tomahawk missiles, and the Taliban warriors, with their
pickup trucks racing through stark, rubble-strewn landscapes.
In its rough outlines, the message of Al Jazeera is similar to that of the
Taliban: there is a huge technological imbalance between the antagonists, but
the foreign power will nonetheless come to grief.
In some videotape shown on Oct. 22, a band of Taliban warriors displayed
what they claimed to be the wreckage of the second American helicopter
they said they had downed. There was twisted steel with American markings
shown in close-up. In an interview, a Taliban soldier said triumphantly that
after the first helicopter had been hit, the second came in for support and
rescue, and the Taliban soldiers downed it as well. There was blood, he said,
at the scene of the wreckage -- and added that a search was under way for
the "remains" of the American crews. A stylish warrior of the Taliban with a
bright blue turban, the soldier spoke to the camera with great confidence and
defiance. America's cruise missiles and bombs would not defeat the Taliban,
he promised: "If these Americans were men, they would come here and fight
on the ground. We would do to them what we did to the British and the
Russians." Another warrior spoke with similar certainty. "God Almighty will
grant us victory," he promised.
Al Jazeera's report was presented entirely from the Taliban's point of view.
No doubts were expressed about the validity of the Taliban's military boasts
-- including one soldier's claim that the steel from the American helicopters
would immediately be sold off as scrap metal. The Western news media
presented the same story rather differently. In addition to presenting the
Taliban's claims, CNN noted a strong American denial. In the case of one
helicopter, the Pentagon claimed that only the landing gear of a CH-47 had
been sheared off, after its pilot flew too close to a ground barrier. And a
helicopter that did crash, the Pentagon claimed, did so because of a
mechanical malfunction -- not Taliban gunfire.
A report on Oct. 30 by Al Jazeera's main man in Kabul, Tayseer Allouni,
similarly underscored the ideological preference of the station's reporters.
"The American planes have resumed their heavy bombing of Kabul, causing
massive destruction of the infrastructure of the country," Allouni reported as
his camera surveyed unrelieved scenes of wreckage and waste. Although Al
Jazeera's images revealed a few craters in the street, much of the devastation
appeared to be unrelated to American bombs -- potholes, a junkyard with
discarded shells of cars. Noting that Kabul's notoriously decayed "roads had
not been spared," Allouni then offered a wistful tribute to the Taliban's
public-works efforts. "It appears that all the labors that had been made by
the Taliban government prior to the outbreak of the war to repair the roads,"
he said sadly, "have scattered to the wind."
As Allouni presented it, there appeared to be nobody in Kabul who
supported America's campaign to unseat the Taliban. A man in a telephone
booth, wearing a traditional white cap, offered a scripted-sounding lament
that even Kabul's telephone lines had been destroyed. "We have lost so
much," he said, "because of the American bombing." Allouni then closed his
survey with gruesome images of wounded Afghans. The camera zoomed in
on an old man lying on his back, his beard crusted with blood; this was
followed by the image of a heavily bandaged child who looked propped up,
as if to face the camera. The parting shot was an awful close-up of a
wounded child's face.
The channel's slant is also apparent in tiny modulations of language. Its
reporters in Kabul always note that they are reporting from the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan -- the Taliban's official name for the country.
Conversely, Washington's campaign is being waged not against terror, but
against "what it calls terror."
Al Jazeera has a regular feature in which it briefly replays historical scenes
and events that took place on that calendar day. On Oct. 23, the choice was
an event that had taken place 18 years earlier. On that very day in 1983, a
young man in a Mercedes truck loaded with TNT struck the Marine
barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. The segment revisited the horror
of that day -- the wailing of the wounded, the soot and ruin everywhere. The
images were far more horrible than any I had ever seen of the tragedy. There
was no sympathy in the narration, and a feeling of indifference, even menace,
hung over this dark moment of remembrance. The message was clear: the
Middle East was, and is, a region of heartbreak for the foreign power. |
