10
Nov
2007
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American media assaults Arab and Islamic media out of guilt

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There has been a rise in the number of attacks against the Arab and Islamic media over the past few years. The focus of much of the attacks is al-Jazeera, for no other reason except that al-Jazeera is the best known of the Arab media in the United States, and the most often slandered, libeled and demonized.

Most recently, Kristen Gillespie wrote a column in The Nation, the magazine that normally leans “liberal” except when the issues have to do with the Middle East, Palestine-Israel and Islam. Her column in this week’s issue online, The New Face of Al Jazeera, slams the satellite network in what I consider a very unprofessional and unfair manner.

I say that in this context. Al-Jazeera is doing in Iraq, what the mainstream American media did in Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Gillespie slams al-Jazeera as being unprofessional in a very subtle but vicious manner. She notes accurately that Al-Jazeera broadcasts now in both English and Arabic, and says that the English version is fine. But then she goes on to say that al-Jazeera’s reporters in the field are biased and unprofessional for reporting the harsh realities of the Iraq war. What she is really saying in this is that al-Jazeera has violated the most sacred principle of journalism and is deceitful: they say one thing in English and something else in Arabic.

Why is the mainstream American media so harsh in their constant, unfair attacks against the Arab and Islamic World media? Certainly the Arab and Islamic World media have problems. But then, so does the media in the United States. The American media is biased against Arabs and Muslims. They routinely deny Arab and Muslims equal voice in Op-Ed pages, for example. They constantly publish racist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims, stereotypes when written about Blacks, Hispanics and other “acceptable” minorities and religious groups, would be intolerable.

So why the attacks?

I think it is becuase the mainstream American media has a guilty conscience. Al-Jazeera is doing what they are supposed to be doing, but are not. They should be covering the Iraq war the way the mainstream American media gallantly and courageoulsy covered the vietnam War, publishing the ugly truth despite its rough and oftentimes horrendous edges. Instead, the American media allowed itself to be “compromised,” by accepting a self-imposed status as “embedded.” Being an “embedded” journalist in Iraq is not a mark of distinction. There were embedded journalists reporting during the Vietnam War but they were denounced as hacks and shills for the American government and for the Military. The greatest reporting came from independent journalists like Dan Rather who rejected government and military control and reported the harsh, ugly truth, a truth that ended up changing how Americans viewed the Vietnam War. It was American journalists, not soldiers, who exposed the war crimes that took place during Vietnam like My Lai. The Iraqi My Lai might be the rape and murder of the Iraqi girl, by American Marines who then murdered her family to keep the rape and murder a secret. It was a soldier who helped expose that crime, not the media. Rumors of Marine war crimes in Iraq are abundant but only seem to surface when a soldier with conscience — and they are the true heroes of Iraq — stand up and declare that immoral conduct is wrong and must be exposed.

No, the American media is failing to properly cover the war in Iraq, covering it from an idealogical standpoint. I understand why. The American media is under public pressure. The conservative fascists in the American media (Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, the very racist FrontPage Magazine and its demagogue David Horowitz, and Anne Coulter) are leaning on them, pulling the heartstrings of an uneducated American public that has been confused by the causes of Sept. 11, 2001, to blame all Arabs and all Muslims, when in fact it was the result of a handful of fanatics, Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who claim to represent Islam, but do not.

The re-definition of patriotism caused by the terrorism and President Bush’s simplistic, fascist declaration “You are either with us or against us” policies also have cast journalists who question the war as being unAmerican, not just by the rightwing critics, but by their own colleagues.

Their conduct in covering the Iraq War is pathetic and shameful. And the only response they have is to redirect attention elsewhere, and say that al-Jazeera is biased because its images reflect the harsh realities of the Iraq War and convey views that Americans reject.

I think a part also stems from the lingering Crusades. The war between Christianity and Islam has never ended in the minds of many Americans.

You can read my column on the topic at www.ArabWritersGroup.com or at the new Society of Professional Journalists SPJ-Arab Journalists al-Sahafiyeen blog where Arab American professional journalists are slowly shattering the iron-fisted ceiling that oppresses Arab and Muslim writers in America under the guise of a phony claim of “freedom of the press.”

Ray Hanania