Some good signs in bad times

S. Abdallah Schleifer

May 14, 2005 The Cairo Daily Star, p.3

Subhead: A veteran journalist takes stock of moral ambivalence

Vatican City – I’m here because I have been invited to deliver a paper at a gathering of Italian scholars organized by a Vatican think tank that is trying to explore how both Western as well as Arab and Muslim world media can help avert the now proverbial clash of civilizations.

This commitment by the Roman Catholic Church to fostering dialogue rather than diatribe with Arabs and with Muslims is so marvelously refreshing in comparison to the stream of never-ending hateful comments about Islam from an assortment of right-wing American evangelical Protestant clergy. So today’s conference and the invitation to me to deliver the keynote speech not only because I am American journalist who has worked and then taught in the region over the course of (gasp!) forty years, but also specifically because I am a convert to Islam is but the latest sense I have that there is a shifting in the breezes that blow across both Washington and the rest of the West and the Arab world.

Here are a few other good signs in these terrible times in which in which non-combatant Iraqi Shiite civilians at prayer are being blown up by suicide bombers, in which a busload of unarmed Iraqi National Guardsmen who surrendered to an insurgent force are then systematically executed, in which satellite television and even more grossly, the internet have been turned into platforms for a grisly performance art of horrendous decapitations or gangland executions as media events – and all of these outrages performed to ecstatic shouts that desecrate the phrase “ Allahu Akbar” and the Quranic recitations that have accompanied these barbaric acts over the past few years. And all during these terrible times so much of the Arab media has played accomplice – hailing the murderers of non -combatants –  (and I am talking about targeted not accidental victims so please spare me the utterly invalid moral equivalences of Falluja etc.) as mujahideen, patriotic warriors in a holy resistance against occupation while maintaining a profound near-silence about this “resistance’s” propensity to mass murder Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish civilians, and the summary executions of all Iraqi government armed forces taken by the insurgents as prisoners of war.

And this silence from the very same commentators who raved on for days upon days when American television as well as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya broadcast footage of an American GI , in a moment of rage, not as a standard operating procedure, killing one disarmed insurgent in a mosque in Falluja.

Now the Arab media along with just about everybody else in the world save the Israel lobby and those in both houses of the U.S. Congress beholden to it (a description which unfortunately covers a lot of Congressmen and Senators)  and the pre-millennialist Christian Zionists) has observed over the years the obvious double-standard in American policy towards Israel and the Arabs, but has never blinked at its own double-standard in which Arab nationalist and Islamist banners have come to mask a rampant Sunni Arab Supremacism. So many times when I reminded my Cairene friends of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians murdered by the Baathist regime (not to mention the million or so dead from the two Gulf Wars started by Saddam) they tell me with a slightly patronizing if not bored tone, that “yes we know Saddam was bad but….” Well they never knew. Arab satellite television wasn’t around at the time and the book The Republic of Fear which documented the crimes of Saddam Hussein’s regime was banned in just about every Arab country including Kuwait on the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. And they weren’t terribly interested or suspected another American conspiracy when Arab Sunni militias started to massively massacre African Sunni civilians in Darfur.

The point I am trying to make is that the ideological or sectarian road- block baring observation and self-criticism is breaking down in the Arab world.  It started, most boldly a little more than a year ago when Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, then editor in chief of the London-based newspaper Shawq al Awsat began a column with this terrible haunting phrase: “Most Muslims are not terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims” and he went on to explore the sort of political and perverted religious culture that has over the past decade produced this phenomena. He was at the time very much alone and very much condemned in Arab and Islamist media but he did draw some comfort from email correspondence in Arabic from ordinary readers who were sympathetic to his stand in interesting contrast, to the largely negative response from Arab and/or Muslim readers responding to him in English ( the column was reprinted in English, in Jeddah, in the sister publication Arab News.)

But here are more recent and cumulative signs:

*  The Foreign Policy Research Institute is a venerable American think tank goes back to the mid-fifties and it has always represented the “principled realism” school of American cold-war foreign policy.  The last time I spoke there about Arab media, all that the elite FPRI audience wanted to talk about was anti-Semitism in the Arab press and a reasonable request given the devastating effect that MEMRI , a translation service run in the states by former Israeli intelligence officers was having on American media by translating and circulating some of the outrageous stuff (and fortunately totally opportunistic and cynical hyperbole that could easily be reversed by circumstance) then appearing in the Arab press – you know, like “Hitler should have finished the job!” The Israelis would have had to pay millions for the effect on American attitudes that such stupidities had in these terrible times and certainly fed the popular understanding of the clash of civilization thesis.

This time around – no questions about anti-Semitism but a lot of obvious, sincere and thoughtful interest when I argued that Arab satellite television news channels were a positive force for democratic process in the Arab world, even if at many times their positive impact was an unintended side-effect of their coverage.

*  Two other colleagues, both American journalists I consider to have been constructive and very well-informed critics of American occupation policy in its earliest and worst manifestations —Tom Friedman of the New York Times and Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer—have acknowledged in their columns the extraordinary wisdom and restraint of Ayatullah Al-Sistani. Both have noted that the Ayatullah is truly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the way, I would add, he has so often been blithely ignored by the administration.

* Most recently a very courageous Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi who lost his job as editor-in-chief of the Saudi daily Al Watan for writing that the Saudi suicide bombers who had launched terrorist attacks in Riyadh were as much victims as perpetrators – victims of a twisted extremist version of Islamic theology that prevailed in certain circles in the Kingdom( and were widely transmitted in mosques and schools) had been uneasily tolerated for too long by a Saudi society that did not share the perverse theo-ideology but lacked the will to openly and directly confront it But he continues his column from London where he serves as media advisor to Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador HRH Prince Turki al Faisal, one of the most outspoken critics of Islamist terrorism in the Kingdom.

Last week Khashoggi called in his column (syndicated throughout most of the Arab world, but sadly enough, not in Cairo) upon the Faisal Foundation in Riyadh to give its highest Annual Award for Service to Islam to Al-Sistani for his fortitude in preserving Iraq from civil war. Al-Sistani has managed this by constantly telling the millions of Iraqi Shi’ites who follow him that they must not be provoked by the “resistance” into reprisals against the Sunni Arab civilian population – a strategic goal which Al- Zarqawi (the Al Queda chief in Iraq) has openly acknowledged in captured documents and in Jihadi-Salifi web sites; web sites that also carry his rants in which all Shi’ites are described as “apostates” which means worthy of slaughter.

Khashoggi called upon the Mufti of Saudi Arabia and the Sheikh of Al Azhar to give Al Sistani the moral support he deserves by going to Al Najaf and to stand there with him. To take a stand, that we all must do, because we can do no other.                END.