Another quick Arab media tour..
On al Jazeera December 21, Faisal Al Qassem hosted another one of his delightedly taboo-smashing programs. The topic? The absurdity of Arab leaders. Here's a quick translation of part of his intro:
"Why is it that whenever an Arab leader dies, the people begin to cry and wail as if the umma can't survive without him? How long will we live with this slave mentality? Why do we continue to live in this patriarchal age where the leader is everything....?... What have these kinds of leaders accomplished for us? Haven't they become a symbol for corruption and dictatorship and backwardness and repression...?"
Qassem even made fun of the personality cults cultivated by Arab dictators. It reminded me of one time I was in Syria, and I started laughing at the sheer number of Assad posters in a particular area, and this Syrian guy who I was hanging out with - a pretty liberal, decent, funny guy - suddenly turned icy and whispered angrily "don't make fun of our president." I think it was just because he was afraid that someone would overhear and I'd get in trouble - or he would - but still, it was sobering. And hence, refreshing to hear Qassen openly mocking the personality cult. By the end, the guest who was defending Arab leaders - really! - was complaining that the show was biased against his position. Like always, the show was accompanied by a poll, which this time was "do you agree that Arab leaders have become a curse upon their people?" By the end of the program, 90% of internet voters said yes.
Meanwhile, on December 24, the lovely Jumana Nimour broke a long and mysterious (to me!) absence from the airwaves to guest host an episode of More Than One Opinion on the topic of Al Qaeda's recent threats. The guests included Sami al Faraj, a Kuwaiti academic, and Abd al Bari Atwan, editor of the Arab nationalist Al Quds Al Arabi and sometime confidant of bin Laden's. The program debated bin Laden's goals and his new strategies, wondered whether the threats were serious and whether al Qaeda had the capability to carry them out, and speculated about their timing. Faraj argued that while you always had to prepare for the worst case scenario, in his view the absence of any major strategic attacks since 9/11 suggested that al Qaeda did not have the ability to carry out such attacks any more. Atwan disagreed, arguing that the pattern of attacks suggested that al Qaeda was pursuing a strategy and reminding us that it was obviously an organization capable of surprises. What's most interesting about the segment is simply the reminder that Arabs are as puzzled about these issues as are Americans, a lot of the time, and that al Jazeera remains the premier place where they can and do argue about it in public.
What else? Leading Egyptian journalist Fahmy Huwaydi writes scathingly in Al Sharq Al Awsat about American pressures on the Arab Human Development Report. As he puts it,
The American position on issuing the Arab Human Development Report focusing on freedoms in the Arab world can't be described as anything less than a scandal, and a black mark in the register of the American administration which hurts its credibility and its integrity. Even though we in the Arab world have at a minimum many reasons to doubt this credibility and integrity for reasons known by all, the US administration still sometimes wants to improve this situation and show its rightness, as when it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year trying to improve its image and win the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims.
......
What is astonishing is that Washington won't stop offering us lessons in tolerance and accepting the right to differences and transparency, but then when we practice it, it uses the methods of direct repression to conceal the truth and to murder transparency. If that isn't a scandal, what should we call it?
That's it for now... back to work.
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