This dilemma was brought into sharp relief when the Syrian dictator Hafez Al-Assad died. Suddenly, Syria hit the headlines, and the gates of Damascus sprung wide open. The world news caravan was on the move, and I’d hardly left the arrivals hall when I was set to work. “Our correspondent has arrived in Damascus. What is the atmosphere there?” As if I knew, so I hid behind a wall of trivial facts, like all the other journalists did: The procession will go this way, the burial will be there on that day, President A will be attending but Leader B will not, there will be x number of days of national morning ... It would work a few times, but it was boring, and you could serve it up from the studio just as easily. When a leader who has ruled for this long dies, editors want to know more—as in, “What’s going to happen now in Syria?”
And that was one of the blank spots. Assad would be succeeded by his son; that much was certain, but after that? It seemed to me that the regime wouldn’t be rushing to share power with an opposition it had been repressing with an iron fist for decades. Damascus had been brought to a standstill by security measures, loudspeakers blared out the whole day, “Dear Assad, we support you with blood and soul,” and the pinboards in the corridors of the Ministry of Information were decorated with sheets of paper reading: “General assembly tomorrow at 7:00 AM at the main entrance. Obligatory attendance for the funeral of Our Leader for Eternity.” This wasn’t exactly the sound of a new wind blowing, and the few Syrians I spoke to were mainly afraid of chaos. They’d rather see another strong man come into power than go through any risky experiments, they said.
What was going to happen in Syria? A successor is almost always weaker, because fewer people are indebted to him. He would be supported by the powers who’d supported his predecessor, but they’d only do that as long as their own pockets were being filled—and for that their own positions had to remain unthreatened. The possibility of a new wind was therefore limited, and why would a dictator want to hand over some of his power? Say he introduced democracy, and it went wrong and you had a coup. Who’d be first against the wall, along with his family? Not to mention the risk that would arise of being tried as a former dictator.
I think the correspondents should have said, “We don’t know what the new leader or the people want. We can’t know because it’s a dictatorship.” Then we could have explained what a dictatorship was, with the conclusion that one chief crook would probably be followed by another in Syria.
But the senior correspondents who’d been specially flown in by CNN or the BBC said something else, and so did I. We quoted the spokespersons who talked up the regime in their pitch-perfect English, and used words like “openness,” “thaw,” and “Damascan spring.” We reported that critics, such as the aforementioned MP Riad Sef, would be free to act, and that the new leader had promised modernization, complete with Internet cafés, satellite dishes, and mobile telephones.
That’s the way Syria was going, we suggested, making up a story that was remarkably similar to the ones at the funerals of the Moroccan King Hassan and the Jordanian King Hussein, in previous years. “For decades, this country has been ruled by the iron fist of the now deceased, a leader from the old school. He brought stability but also stagnation, and now the people can’t wait for the reforms his son will bring. He belongs to the new generation, and these people are more familiar with the West. The only question is how much the leader will dare to do because some forces are against reform.” As if dictatorship was a kind of misunderstanding that the successor would clear up, like replacing an incorrectly installed computer program.
The funeral, “with a massive turnout of people come to pay their last respects to the president,” went ahead without incident, and the following day Syria went back to being on a par with Colombia in the news pecking order.
Then came September 11. Suddenly, in the words of one Saudi commentator, Arabs were “the dish of the day,” and for the correspondents on the ground it was party time. It wasn’t that we jumped up and down or admitted it to each other. Every profession has its taboos, but you didn’t have to be an anthropologist to understand that celebrating a war or a bomb is just not done—despite the fact that we correspondents would be out of a job if there weren’t any bombs or wars. The attacks meant that I’d get thousands of euros worth of extra commissions from the news department of NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster. The newspaper gave me a big travel budget and almost unlimited space, in prime spots and with excellent photographs. I was almost humming Thank You-Bin-La-den.
But all of the excitement quickly gave way to frustration, because now correspondents were paying the price for their inadequate reporting of the Arab world over previous decades. How could my audience know that the Arab world was made up of dictatorships and that, in this kind of system, everything was different? The Western media had “covered” dictatorship, true, but only in supplements and documentaries. The suggestion had been that this kind of background information was optional and that you still could understand the Arab world if you followed just the news. But the news was always about the Arab League, violent incidents, and photo opportunities at events like the Euro-African summit.
The main question on September 12 was how much support Al-Qaida had. How big was the enemy and how afraid should the West be? Bin Laden had committed the attacks “in the name of Islam.” If a 100 million Islamic Arabs supported this, the West could expect a colossal conflict.
Well, yeah. In Western countries you could get out the opinion polls, and look at parliamentary acts and the opinion pages of the papers. But Arab “parliaments” and “papers” didn’t deserve these appellations, and opinion polls didn’t exist or were unreliable—in a dictatorship, who was going to say what he honestly thought to an anonymous voice over the phone?
The question of how many Muslims Bin Laden was speaking for couldn’t be answered, but this was hard for correspondents to admit. So, like my fellow reporters, I simply had a go. I said that talk shows on Al-Jazeera were sympathetic towards Al-Qaida, and that famous Arabs from the entertainment industry were often extremely critical of America and that this didn’t seem to affect their popularity. There were long-running productions of plays that were critical of the U.S., protest songs against Americans got to number one in the charts, and films with a negative depiction of the West were box-office hits.
It was guesswork. The more often I was asked about the popularity of Bin Laden, the more I was tempted to give an honest answer. I wanted to shout it on the radio, or write it in the newspaper in capital letters: “I Don’t Know. I Can’t Know. This is a Dictatorship.”
I didn’t do it. But what an advantage more openness would have brought. Correspondents would no longer have had to act like Arab know-it-alls, dodging around the blank spots of their knowledge. They would simply be able to say that things were different in a dictatorship, that you should remember that a human rights activist’s salary was being paid by Western organizations when you heard them calling for “solidarity between East and West,” and that the Arab scholar who called fundamentalism the main enemy was being watched by the secret police—that is, if he didn’t work for them.
If correspondents had given more explanations and been more open about dictatorship, they might have been able to “decode” the great quotes coming out of the Arab world after 9/11. The same went for the images—for example, the angry men burning a flag and shouting, “America, Satan!” Certainly, in the aftermath of 9/11, these were frightening shots for Westerners, and even more so if they weren’t put into context: Guys, you probably think that a demonstration is something citizens use freely to express whatever they are for or against, but in a dictatorship such “outbursts of anger” are often staged or are at least heavily managed by the regime. Many of the demonstrators work for the secret services or are, at the least, being closely watched by them. Bear in mind that Arab regimes can kill two birds with one stone with such mediagenic outbursts of anger. They give their subjects the impression that they are charting the
ir own course and dare to stand up to the mighty America. At the same time, they are signaling to Western governments that this wound-up rabble might also be the boss-in-waiting—would you rather do business with them?
If correspondents in the Arab world had been open about their limited vision, we could have produced a different kind of reportage. It would have been possible to write an article saying, “I can’t prove it and it might be nonsense, but it seems the dictators” propaganda within the education system and the state media has tremendous effect on ordinary Arabs, and they appear much more afraid of the West than of their own leaders. At least if I take a random Egyptian and ask him about his country’s position in the world order, he’ll mostly say something like, ‘We’re the cradle of civilization, our soldiers are amongst the best in the world, and the Suez Canal is the most important canal in the world. Egypt has got the Al-Azhar mosque and forms the bridge between Africa and Asia, between the Eastern and Western parts of the Arab world and Islam. Whoever controls Egypt controls the world, and that’s why world powers are always trying to take us over.’ In Iraq, even when people are out of their compatriots’ earshot, they tell the following story, ‘We have the oldest civilization, the most fertile land in the Middle East, and a lot of gas and oil. We are the hinge between the Turkish, Persian, and Arab worlds. Whoever controls us holds the world in their hands, and that’s why the big powers are working against us.’ And when I go to Syria, this is what I often hear: ‘Our country also comprises what has become occupied Palestine, and we once had Lebanon, part of Jordan, and a province that Turkey stole from us. The real Syria is a world treasure, and that’s why the big powers chopped us up into pieces and try to dominate us.’ ”
The words are different, but the refrain in every Arab dictatorship is the same: EVERYONE IS AGAINST US. It’s banged into ordinary Arabs through the media and their education from a very young age, so don’t expect them to be pro-Western. They might want to get rid of their dictators, but all they’ve heard about all the time is that there’s a much greater threat beyond their borders—the West.
There was another advantage to greater transparency. If you said that there were blank spots in your knowledge, you could then explain how you got around them—what kind of compass you used to navigate the map of dictatorship. I would have loved to have been honest about my own presuppositions or, even better, my perspective. It had been formed during my year as a student in Egypt, when I’d almost casually asked my peers whether Islam was compatible with democracy and human rights. Their answers had varied widely: They aren’t compatible, because Islam is Eastern and democracy is Western; they are, because Islam is the highest form of democracy; they aren’t compatible, because you have your human rights and we have ours; they are compatible, because Islam is another word for democracy and human rights.
Everyone had their own interpretation, and could support it with a personal mixture of Koranic verses, the speeches of the Prophet, and historical examples. Who was right? At that time, you’d get top marks on your anthropology course if you answered “nobody.” Unless you believed that one of those interpretations embodied God’s will (and how were you going to fact-check that with God?), you’d have to come to the conclusion that “Islam” didn’t exist. There were only interpretations, and it was all about who had the power to enforce his own interpretation as Holy Law. As a correspondent, I’d stuck with this view and—coincidentally—I’d also found confirmation that Muslims interpret their religion in many different ways. But who knows what I would have come home with if I’d presumed that Islam was in essence nonviolent or, indeed, intolerant?
It’s easy to be wise after the event but, looking back, I don’t think that the big Western media did a good job in the aftermath of 9/11. Not only did we fail to be honest about the fact that we simply couldn’t know if Bin Laden had the support of ordinary Muslims, we also didn’t address properly the second big question after the attacks: Why do they hate us?
The problem was already there in that word “hate.” In the Western media, the battle with Al-Qaida was already a battle against Al-Qaida, like in a Hollywood film with a hero and a villain. You could identify with the hero because you got to know who he was, what he dreamed of, and what he feared. The villain was pure evil, and all you got to know about him was what he wanted: Power, revenge, money. But why he wanted that ... The villain is always an obstacle, and that’s why you have a happy ending if the hero kills him. The villain doesn’t have any motives, dreams, or uncertainties—he’s not actually human. This is the role that fundamentalism is often assigned in the big Western media: They hate us, and we have to get rid of them. And how exactly are we going to do that? Watch Inside the Middle East tonight, here on CNN.
Western reporting of Al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11 was one-sided, and in retrospect it’s easy to figure out why. Who could have explained the villain’s motives? Palestinian and Algerian terrorists had, for example, always explained their massacres to the Western public; we even know that some Palestinians tried to commit their hijacks and attacks just before the evening news in America to make sure they hit the headlines. These terrorist organizations also had Western sympathizers and a “political wing” to explain their demands in the media, clear up misunderstandings, and participate in talks.
But Bin Laden recorded his video messages in Arabic, used examples from Islamic history that would be incomprehensible to Westerners, and peppered his speeches with clichés about “Zionist crusaders.” Al-Qaida had no political wing, and in any case we probably wouldn’t have allowed it to speak up in the climate of anger and fear after September 11. As well, following the passage of anti-terrorism legislation, Al-Qaida sympathizers in most Western countries were immediately locked up.
It was quite logical: You’re hardly going to give terrorists a free podium. The consequences were that Al-Qaida couldn’t respond to Western public opinion, and Bin Laden was almost exclusively explained and analyzed by his opponents—Western and Israeli analysts, and anti-fundamentalist Arabs and Muslims. These directed their attentions to two things: Bin Laden as an Islamic variant of Hitler, and Bin Laden as the kind of extremist who says, like some animal rights activists and anti abortion campaigners, “My truth is the only truth, and I’m right to lay it down with violence.”
But Bin Laden’s story had a third dimension, and this hardly made the Western media. Western governments had been supporting the most important Arab dictatorships—namely, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Algeria—with money, weapons, and intelligence for decades. Bin Laden pointed out this interference in practically every video, and his message could be summarized in two words: Sod off.
There was also a longer version, and it went something like this: Muslims are poor and weak because they are repressed and exploited by dictators. You Westerners support the dictators. If we attack you, we’ll drive a wedge between you and the dictators. In any case, we’ll draw the attention of ordinary Muslims to the support that their repressors are getting from the West. Then the dictators will fall, and we will be able to reconstruct our territories.
Prominent Westerners often labeled the 9/11 attacks as “a direct assault on Western civilization.” But whoever looks at Bin Laden’s story will see that he presents his program as one of self-defense. The West—more particularly, America— might have received a thrashing, but Al-Qaida’s guns are directed at the Saudi royal family, the regime in Cairo, and other Arab dictators. According to Bin Laden, the Islamic world is involved in a civil war, America is supporting his opposition in this war, and that’s why he hit America. Al-Qaida is not out to rule New York or London, at least not primarily. Mecca is the main prize for him.
This part of Bin Laden’s message has remained, for the most part, out of the Western news stream, meaning that very few Westerners know about their enemy’s motives. There has been virtually no debate in the West about its support of dictators, and leading figures continued calling on Muslims in
the Islamic world to enter into a “discussion about their faith.” But a Muslim who starts a debate about the interpretation of Islam in a key country such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia goes straight to prison because talking about faith is also talking about politics. In prison, that Muslim will be tortured by whomever the CIA trained for that purpose.
Now, after the event, I can say more precisely what I would have liked to have done differently. For while Al-Qaida was represented with bias, there was another group that remained almost invisible in the Western media in the aftermath of 9/11: The nonviolent faction of political Islam—those Muslims who say they want to express and promote their conservative or fundamentalist interpretations of Islam without violence. These nonviolent fundamentalists were a blind spot for the West, and a very large one. Not only could no one say how many of them there were, we didn’t know what they really were, or what their agenda was.
People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East Page 9