Arab Media Portray
War as Killing Field
New York Times
By SUSAN SACHS
April 4, 2003
AIRO, April 3 — It was a picture of Arab grief and rage.
A teenage boy glared from the rubble of a bombed building as a
veiled woman wept over the body of a relative.
In fact, it was two pictures: one from the American-led war in
Iraq and the other from the Palestinian territories, blended into
one image this week on the Web site of the popular Saudi daily
newspaper Al Watan.
The meaning would be clear to any Arab reader: what is
happening in Iraq is part of one continuous brutal assault by
America and its allies on defenseless Arabs, wherever they
are.
As the Iraq war moved into its third week, the media in the
region have increasingly fused images and enemies from this and
other conflicts into a single bloodstained tableau.
The Israeli flag is superimposed on the American flag. The
Crusades and the 13th-century Mongul sack of Baghdad, recalled as
barbarian attacks on Arab civilization, are used as synonyms for
the American-led invasion of Iraq.
Horrific vignettes of the helpless — armless children,
crushed babies, stunned mothers — cascade into Arab living
rooms from the front pages of newspapers and television
screens.
For Arab leaders and Arab moderates, supported by Washington,
the war has become a political crisis of street protests,
militant calls for holy war and bitter public criticism of their
ties to the United States.
They had hoped for a short war with a minimum of inflammatory
pictures of Iraqi civilian casualties. Instead, the daily message
to the public from much of the media is that American troops are
callous killers, that only resistance to the United States can
redeem Arab pride and that the Iraqis are fighting a pan-Arab
battle for self-respect.
"The media are playing a very dangerous game in this
conflict," said Abdel Moneim Said, director of the Al Ahram
Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "When you
see the vocabulary and the images used, it is actually bringing
everybody to the worst nightmare — the clash of
civilizations."
Sensationalism has not gripped all media. Some mainline
government-owned newspapers like the staid Al Ahram in Egypt and
two of the privately owned international Arabic papers based in
London, Al Hayat and Asharq Al Awsat, have reported the war in
neutral language. They show bandaged victims in Iraqi hospitals
but not the gory pictures of ripped bodies that fill the pages of
their competitors.
Government control of the media is not the issue in any case,
since nearly all newspapers in the Arab world, including those
with the most savage coverage of the American invasion, publish
at the pleasure of the governments.
In most countries, the government appoints all newspaper
editors, including the so-called opposition press. Even a
privately owned paper like Al Watan in Saudi Arabia must toe the
government line in reporting on domestic politics and
personalities.
The biggest influence on much of the media coverage has come
from the satellite news channel Al Jazeera, which started
broadcasting from Qatar in 1996. It made its name with
on-the-spot coverage of the Palestinian uprising that gave
viewers an unblinking look at bloody and broken bodies.
Many governments, aware that Al Jazeera is widely considered
by Arab audiences to be credible, have allowed their own stations
to run Jazeera footage of the war to demonstrate their own
anti-war credentials. (On Wednesday, Al Jazeera announced that it
was suspending its reporting from Iraq after the Iraqi government
barred two of its correspondents in Baghdad.)
The rage against the United States is fed by this steady diet
of close-up color photographs and television footage of dead and
wounded Iraqis, described as victims of American bombs. In recent
days, more and more Arabic newspapers have run headlines bluntly
accusing soldiers of deliberately killing civilians.
Even for those accustomed to seeing such images from Arab
coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the daily barrage
of war coverage in newspapers and on hourly television reports
has left many Arabs beside themselves with anger.
"He is `Shaytan,' that Bush," shouted Ali Hammouda, a
newsstand operator in Cairo, using the Arabic word for Satan and
pointing to a color photograph in one of his newspapers.
(Page 2 of 3)
The image, published in many Arabic papers, showed the bodies of
a stick-thin woman and a baby, said to be victims of American
shelling in central Iraq. They were lying in an open wooden
coffin, the baby's green pacifier still in its mouth.
"Your Bush says he is coming to make them free, but look at
this lady," Mr. Hammouda exclaimed. "Is she free? What did she
do? What did her baby do?"
Fahmi Howeidy, a prominent Islamist writer in Cairo, says the
reactions are not necessarily pro-Saddam. "Of course we think
Saddam Hussein will not continue in power, but if he resists for
weeks, at least he will defend his image as a hero who could
resist U.S. and British power," Mr. Howeidy said.
"If this happens, we can expect chaos in the Arab world,
because we don't know how the people who already criticize Arab
regimes will express their anger after that," he added.
"Maybe there would be an extremist group or a single person
who would do something against the government. We don't know
about the army, but maybe there are people who feel
humiliated."
Since the war began, much of the Arabic press and the private
Arab satellite stations have displayed no squeamishness about
what they show. War is carnage, the editors have said, so why
mute the screams or hide the entrails of the wounded and
dead?
"Arabs, like anybody else, don't like the sight of blood or
pictures of corpses, but it's a matter of principle that we have
the right to know what's happening," said Gasa Mustafa Abaido, an
assistant professor of communications at Ain Shams University in
Cairo. "What we see in the media is an indirect way for the
governments and the public to reject the war."
The images, however, are not presented as fragmentary evidence
of the evils of war but as illustrations of a definitive
black-and-white view of the war and the United States. The way
they are presented, and the language that accompanies them,
amplifies their impact.
President Bush, in one Egyptian weekly newspaper, is shown on
each page of war coverage in a Nazi uniform. American and British
forces are called "allies of the devil." Civilian casualties are
frequently reported as "massacres" or, as another Egyptian paper
said, an "American Holocaust."
A popular Arabic Web site, one of many to display the most
gruesome images of the war, showed a picture of a little girl
bleeding from her eye, the same image that was used by many
newspapers in the region. The caption reads: "My dead mother is
liberated and so am I."
Al Manar, a satellite channel run by the Muslim militant group
Hezbollah, broadcasts pictures of wounded children in tandem with
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's declaration that American
weaponry is the most precise in the history of warfare.
The Arab media's reporting of the war may also drown out the
more moderate voices that avoid brutal imagery and metaphors of
endless victimization.
"In the longer run, these images can breed a certain type of
people, not the ones who are looking to develop our societies but
those who think how to sacrifice themselves," said Dr. Said, of
the Al Ahram Center in Cairo.
As an Arab moderate who calls for liberal reforms and
"renaissance," he said, "I personally find great difficulty
communicating that language to the public. People are infuriated
and helpless, and they feel that the more radical language gives
them a sense of comfort."
Anti-American sentiment among Arabs, largely based on the
belief that United States policy is tilted sharply in favor of
Israel, was present long before the war on Iraq. Widespread
sympathy for the Iraqi people, fed by the images of the wounded
and dead, has intensified that sentiment.
In the antiwar demonstrations, protesters have repeatedly
called on their leaders to take action against the United States,
either by tossing out American diplomats or refusing to let Arab
airspace be used for military flights.
Arab leaders, pragmatists by necessity, have tried to
accommodate those feelings, while also trying not to jeopardize
their defense and foreign aid arrangements with Washington.
(Page 3 of 3)
"Most people realize that it's not in our national interest to
burn our bridges with the U.S.," a senior Jordanian official
said. "But people are frustrated. That's the main thing, and
that's something we are all aware of."
The concern was underlined on Wednesday, when King Abdullah II
of Jordan told the state news agency, Petra, that the television
reports of Iraqi civilian casualties in the war made him "pained
and saddened."
"No country has supported Iraq like Jordan," the king said.
"We had said `no' to attacking Iraq when many said `yes.' "
Similarly, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt spoke out in his
own defense this week in a speech to army officers. He said Egypt
used its "entire weight" to influence the United States in an
effort to avert the war but failed.
While they are concerned about rising public anger, it is
unlikely that any Arab leaders worry about antiwar protesters
storming their palaces or offices. Changes of government in the
region have not occurred that way.
Rather, the leaders fear that others might exploit any
instability.
In an outcome played out in Turkey in 1980 when terrorists
threatened the government, antiwar protests could evolve into
rolling antigovernment riots, the army would be called in to
restore order, and some generals might decide to take power on
the pretext of ensuring national stability.
In Saudi Arabia and its smaller Gulf neighbors, diplomats and
other political analysts imagine a challenge from anti-Western or
fundamentalist cliques of princes within the ruling families.
All that is speculation. But if the war in Iraq does not end
soon, many Arab intellectuals say, its iconic images could set
off a dangerous backlash of extremism.
A prolonged war, accompanied by gut-wrenching images of Iraqi
casualties blamed on the cruelty of American forces, could also
immobilize fledgling reform movements.
"Some people said, before the invasion of Iraq, that solving
the Saddam problem would make the reputation of the U.S. better,"
said Turki al-Hamad, a Saudi commentator who advocates democratic
reforms in the kingdom. "Now if the United States said 2 plus 2
is 4, no one would believe them."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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