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THE
ROVING EYE
When
stereotypes collide
Pepe Escobar
CAIRO - The reaction in most of the Arab world
was instantaneous: even from the depths of the shadowy
underworld where he still lurks, Osama bin Laden has not
lost his fabulous sense of timing. After a long silence,
the world's former Public Enemy Number One - recently
dethroned by Saddam Hussein - has delivered a crucial
audio message to all Muslims at the start of the
three-day Eid festival, which marks the end of the hajj.
Al Jazeera has been rebroadcasting the entire, uncut bin
Laden tape around the clock. The audio is excellent, and
an array of different sources in Cairo, apart from Al
Jazeera, affirm that it is indeed bin Laden's voice.
At first some were thinking - irony of ironies -
that bin Laden himself had provided the smoking gun the
administration of US President George W Bush is
incapable of digging up: the lethal connection between
Iraq and al-Qaeda. But after attentively listening to
the message on Al Jazeera - an activity obviously not
pursued by Secretary of State Colin Powell's minions -
everything is clear. Bin Laden exhorts Muslims to
support the Iraqi population - not the Iraqi government.
He calls again for a jihad against the United States.
And he brands any Arab ruler who would support the US
against Iraq as "an apostate whose blood should be
spilled".
Bin Laden's latest propaganda coup -
as far as the Arab world is concerned - contrasts with
the de facto failure of Powell's presentation at the
United Nations Security Council. The No 1 propaganda
challenge for the Bush administration remains how to
prove a connection between al-Qaeda and the need, right
here, right now, not later, of regime change in Iraq.
The awesome, relentless US propaganda machine may have
swayed a great deal of domestic opinion, but the
indisputable fact remains that the majority of world
opinion is still not convinced about the evidence, the
timing and the motives of the Bush administration - and
suspects a hidden agenda.
It's always crucial to
keep in mind the sequence of events. The United States
arbitrarily determined that its so-called war against
terrorism would be a total, global, unlimited war.
Unable to exterminate al-Qaeda, or even apprehend its
leadership, it switched to an easier prey, the "axis of
evil". Unable to confront nuclear-armed North Korea, it
concentrated all its efforts on the weakest link: Iraq.
For one year now the US has been imposing on the whole
world a mono-thematic agenda: war against Iraq. An
avalanche of polls confirm week after week that the
absolute majority of popular opinion around the world is
convinced there's no evidence Saddam Hussein is about to
pulverize the planet with a few vials of anthrax.
Anti-war activists in London preparing next Saturday's
huge rally in Hyde Park speak for much of public opinion
everywhere when they point out that "every piece of
compelling new evidence for the necessity of war turns
out to be even more ludicrous than the last, so we've
now arrived at plagiarized student theses and crackly
intercepted phone calls that couldn't secure a
conviction for possession of dope".
Apart from
the doctoring of dossiers or pure and simple plagiarism,
there's also the indisputable fact that in the United
Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair is now facing an
unheard-of rebellion by his top spies at MI6. Asia Times
Online has confirmed that last week they used one of
Blair's favorite weapons - the strategic leak - against
the prime minister. The British Broadcasting Corp (BBC)
received a Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) classified
paper, written last month, showing that for British
intelligence there is no connection whatsoever between
Iraq and al-Qaeda. The paper said there had been
contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and some of Saddam
Hussein's intelligence services in the past, but they
led to nowhere because of total mistrust and absolutely
incompatible ideologies.
Washington's hawks
obviously don't give a damn about popular sentiment
anywhere. They react with the usual vocabulary: these
people are leftists, communists, anti-globalization
protesters, anti-imperialists, anti-Americans or
whatever. But the current global anti-war movement is
not composed only of activists and militants: it
involves all sectors of civil society, the average Joe,
Kim or Ahmad. Even in Egypt, where President Hosni
Mubarak's government in fact cracks down on any
manifestation of popular anger, there is now a committee
for human shields willing to go to Iraq. Ahmed Abdel
Salam, the head of the committee, says: "They are all
volunteers, and no government has the right to stop them
from defending Arab land. Because today it is Iraq;
tomorrow we know it will be Egypt." Abdel Salam says:
"We have volunteers from Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, the
[United Arab] Emirates and Qatar, and we hope that this
mass migration to Baghdad will put pressure on many Arab
governments."
All over the world, a river of
humanity is saying - as the organizers of the London
rally put it - that the war against Iraq will be waged
"in the name of ridding the world of chemical weapons,
by the power that spread napalm and Agent Orange across
half a continent. It will be waged to rid the world of a
dictator who gassed his own people and invaded Iran,
when those acts could only have been carried out with
the backing of the only superpower in the first place."
Even US public opinion is increasingly uncomfortable
with the hawks' methods of coercion, threat and force -
their strategy to market a new war. But it is also true
that a great deal of US public opinion only retains that
Saddam Hussein is part of the axis of evil; US corporate
media have bought into this Bible-thumping reference
uncritically. So Joseph Goebbels' maxim once again is
the rule: If you repeat something often enough, people
will believe it whether it is true or not.
The
war has not even started, but casualties mount on every
front. The European Union is divided: France and Germany
lead a peace front, and a collection of former
Soviet-satellite nations that begged to enter the Union,
plus some second-rate EU powers, are supporting the war
(Spain, for instance, supports the United States but
also wants more money from the top EU donors, France,
Germany and Benelux). The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) - an irrelevant mechanism in the
post-Cold War world - is split: diplomats in Brussels
widely deride the "parade of vassals" - the Eastern
European countries recently admitted to NATO. The UN
Security Council is split: among the five veto-wielding
members, there are two hawks (the United States and
Britain) against three relative doves (France, Russia
and China). Trans-Atlantic relations are in tatters,
with once again US hawks - with characteristic elegance
- throwing a barrage of abuse against not only French
and German politicians and diplomats, but against their
people as well.
All this noxious polarization
has been brought about by a single issue: the war on
Iraq.
The images that Americans and Arabs have
of each other are also key victims of the propaganda
wars. Bahgat Korany, a professor of political science at
the American University in Cairo, enumerates the five
major stereotypes that Americans have of Arabs.
Curiously, they all begin with B: Bedouin, belly dancer,
bazaar man, billionaire, bomber.
Abdel Moneim
Said, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies, also in Cairo, analyzes in detail
what is behind these stereotypes: "The Bedouin - not
necessarily negative - is portrayed as a treacherous,
lecherous womanizer and kidnapper, warring, raiding and
looting. The belly dancer practices an art passed down
through the ages, but is portrayed as a seductress, the
symbol of degeneracy, prostitution and crime. The bazaar
man exists in any society, but in the Western media he
represents the oily haggler and wily ripoff artist. The
billionaire represents those filthy rich Arabs, bloated
by a wealth they do not deserve and who inevitably
squander their fortunes, ostentatiously, on debauchery
and gambling."
The bomber, according to Moneim
Said, is a unique stereotype: "It always comes with the
prefix 'Arab' or 'Muslim'. Never, for example, were the
members of the Baader Meinhof Gang called 'German'
terrorists, or the members of the Red Brigades
'Catholic' terrorists. Bomber, thus, denotes more than
just abhorrent criminal behavior: it has come to connote
a society and a religion." Monem Said adds a sixth B to
the list compiled by Korany: backward, a term infamously
used by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after
September 11, 2001, to define Islam.
It's fair
to argue that these stereotypes are now being vigorously
enforced by the absolute majority of the US media - and
in a smaller scale by some media sectors in some
European countries. The stereotypes of the American as a
dangerous cowboy and the Arab as a lethal terrorist are
even stronger after September 11. Monem Said agrees that
"the Arab image of the ruthless American cowboy, guns
blazing regardless of right and wrong, and the American
image of the Arab terrorist - driven by a relentless
frenzy and always ready to blow something up, or blow
himself up, if he gets the urge to kill someone - have
collided head-on".
Everybody in fact has been a
victim of the propaganda wars. In recent US polls, Egypt
and Saudi Arabia plummeted in the ratings of Americans'
favorite countries. Egypt used to beat Israel in
popularity, now it ranks lower. Saudi Arabia used to
have a positive image, now it's negative. According to
the latest Gallup poll, France and Germany are also
going down - because of their approach to the Iraqi
crisis. In the Arab world, Washington's hawks and the
uncritical US media are targets of tremendous popular
anger - an anger that encompasses the wider Arab-Israeli
conflict, the suffering of Palestinians under occupation
shown around the clock on TV, and the US obsession of
smashing Iraq.
Al Jazeera at least tries to
bridge the gap. The United States always derided Arab
media as an extension of Arab's autocratic regimes. Al
Jazeera is not an Arab CNN - especially in the sense
that it does not function as a 24-hour rolling press
release of the Pentagon and the State Department. Al
Jazeera follows the BBC tradition: one point of view has
to be counter-balanced by an opposite point of view.
When Al Jazeera instantly became a huge hit in the West
as well, the US establishment immediately branded it as
a propaganda tool of the Taliban. Washington demanded
that networks not rebroadcast bin Laden's interviews
because they might contain coded messages to terrorist
sleeper cells. It was a classic case of US hypocrisy
regarding freedom of speech. Not by accident, Al
Jazeera's office in Kabul was hit by a US not-so-smart
bomb hours before the Northern Alliance entered the
Afghan capital in November 2001.
Monem Said
tries to find explanations for the "sad irony of a large
and growing Arab-Muslim presence in the West and the
persistence of a negative Western image of Arabs and
Muslims". He enumerates some of them: "The West has
little accurate knowledge about Islam, which for long
has been regarded as a form of heresy and a rival to
Christianity. Also, history shows a lengthy record of
conflict with the Arab-Muslim world, from the Crusades
to the Ottoman encroachment into Europe to the gates of
Vienna, and from the Muslim rebellion against the
British Empire in India to liberation movements in the
Middle East. The Zionist cause and Israel have also
taken their toll on Arab-Western relations." And of
course there are all sorts of distortions operated by
the media: "Because of [their] general lack of knowledge
of Arabic, the media approach to events in the Middle
East is through a distorting lens that has worked to
foment certain stereotypes." Monem Said also recognizes
that "the Taliban, the armed Islamist groups in Algeria
and the general attitude towards women in Islamic
societies have done enormous damage to the Western image
of Arab and Muslim peoples".
A solution for
Arabs is to speak and convey their message in the
dominant language: English. That's exactly what Al
Jazeera wants to do. The network is studying the launch
of an English-language service - something that would
render CNN totally irrelevant as far as coverage of Arab
issues is concerned. Mustafa El-Feki, an Egyptian
political scientist, knows that Al Jazeera is still an
exception, and he chooses to criticize the Arab media as
a whole as still incapable of communicating: "To make
others hear us, Arabs should learn the technique of
understanding the way the other side thinks. We should
talk to them using their language instead of ours." He
mirrors progressive Arab thought when he says that the
image of Islam must be corrected after September 11 and
the launch of the war against terrorism. Most of all,
says El-Feki, "we should stop blaming others for our
problems. We are to some extent responsible for the
current state of affairs. If Arab countries had true
democracy, were progressing in technology and had a
united agenda, we would never have reached such a
humiliating state."
The Arab-American divide is
now joined by the European-American divide. In America's
corporate media, the French are now depicted as
cowardly, venal, anti-American and, of course, are
lumped together as "old Europe" with Germany by that
stellar scholar Donald Rumsfeld. France's and Germany's
irredeemable crime is not to follow the Bush
administration's Iraq obsession. The crude barrage of
stereotyping by the US media - an extension of the
notorious francophobia of the Bushites - has just
reinforced the widespread popular perception not only in
France and Germany, but also in practically every Latin
and Northern European country, of the Bushites as a
bunch of trigger-happy cowboys following a
fundamentalist Bible-thumping Texas preacher. British
playwright Harold Pinter described Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld as a "bloodthirsty wild animal", and the
definition stuck - even in faithful US-ally Britain.
The abuse from both sides of the Atlantic now
mirrors the incomprehension between Arabs and Americans.
And all because of what? Because France and Germany are
saying what the majority of public opinion worldwide is
saying. The UN, and only the UN - through its weapons
inspectors, and for as long as it takes - has to decide
whether Iraq is a menace to mankind or not. And to
launch a war against an Arab nation is to play Osama bin
Laden's game. Bin Laden himself has sensed this great
new marketing opportunity - and he has delivered his
message right on time. It seems that once again the
invisible man is betting on winning the propaganda wars.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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