EYES AND EARS OF THE ARAB SPRING
BY Aram Bakshian Jr.
The National Interest
January 2012 – February 2012
IN HIS 1998 work Dream Palace of the Arabs, Fouad Ajami wrote, “As
the world batters the modern Arab inheritance, the rhetorical need for
anti-Zionism grows. But there rises, too, the recognition that it is
time for the imagination to steal away from Israel and to look at the
Arab reality, to behold its own view of the kind of world the Arabs
want for themselves.” Whether Ajami realized it or not, these words
offer an eerily prescient view-thirteen years ahead of time-of the
dynamic behind the Arab Spring and its autumn and winter sequels. In
country after country, Arab crowds have taken to the street for a
cause more positive and all-embracing than anti-Zionism: the demand
for an end to corrupt authoritarian regimes and for a greater say
in their own future. What shape that future will take remains to be
seen, and many basic questions have yet to be answered. Can democracy
blossom overnight in societies that have always been dominated by
oppressive force?
If democracy does take root, can respect for minority rights survive
the tyranny of a poor, ill-schooled and often intolerant majority?
Would democratically elected demagogues pose even more of a threat
to peace and stability in the Muslim-Arab world than old-line
authoritarian regimes and monarchies with a selfish stake in
maintaining the status quo and “keeping the lid on”?
Meanwhile, where can one turn for detailed, reliable coverage of what
some now call the “Arab Awakening”? For millions of people around
the world, including actual participants on the ground and in the
streets of the Middle East, the single most important news source for
the events still unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and
Bahrain is the English-language channel of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera
television-news network. Like it or not, it is no exaggeration to say
that Al Jazeera has been the eyes and ears of this crucial news story.
More often than not, Al Jazeera correspondents are the first on
the scene, and Al Jazeera anchors and interviewers provide the most
detailed follow-up, discussion and analysis of breaking events in
the Arab world.
This, to put it mildly, is odd. To offer a European analogy, it
would be as if an English-language television channel owned by Grand
Duke Henri of Luxembourg and operated out of his tiny realm were
the most influential news source for the entire European Union and
for millions of people elsewhere following the current European
politico-economic crisis. But there is no denying the facts:
Al Jazeera’s English-language news channel reaches an estimated
220 million households worldwide. Currently celebrating its fifth
anniversary, in the few years since its founding even its fiercest
critics have come to acknowledge both its increasing global impact
and, more recently, its indispensable role in covering the wave of
revolutionary ferment sweeping the Middle East.
HOW DID so unlikely an enterprise, funded by a minor Arab potentate,
come to occupy such a stellar position? And what sort of information
product is it dispensing to its growing millions of viewers? As
chance would have it, I may be one of the few people still alive who
was present at the very modest beginnings of what is arguably today’s
most strategically influential television-news operation. Although Al
Jazeera’s global English network is only five years old, its roots
run much deeper. Hence my story begins in the mid-1970s at a lavish
reception in what was then one of Washington’s leading hotels, the old
Sheraton Park. The occasion was the launching of Qatar Television,
a modest, strictly domestic broadcast service for the tiny emirate
but, at the time, a dramatic first in a region of backward bedouin
despots where “modernization” usually meant no more than acquiring
fleets of Cadillacs and imported blondes for the reigning dynasties.
For some reason, the al-Thani ruling family of Qatar was different.
The then reigning emir, Khalifa bin Hamad, had been in sole charge
since Great Britain gave up its protectorate in 1972. While he would
be deposed by his Westward-looking son, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani,
in 1995, he must have been a man ahead of his time back in the 1970s to
even think of setting up a television-news service for what was then an
isolated Arab backwater, a tiny patch of arid land on the Persian Gulf.
For hands-on technical assistance, Emir Khalifa had turned to an old
acquaintance of mine, a Levantine, journalistic soldier of fortune
by the name of Levon Keshishian. While we shared little else in
common, Levon and I were both of Armenian ancestry and both pro bono
friends of the Armenian diaspora, giving free advice and assistance
to church and charitable groups. So when Qatar Television threw its
opening-night party in Washington, I was invited by Levon. A tiny
man with an enormous beak (I once recognized him by his nose alone,
protruding from behind a pillar concealing the rest of him in the
main lounge of the National Press Club), Levon had endless energy,
ambition and ingenuity. After becoming the un correspondent for
Al Ahram, the Egyptian daily that was then the most influential
newspaper in the Arab world, he was able to parlay the cachet of that
position into “after-hours” work for various Middle East patrons. A
multilingual polymath who could have come straight out of the pages of
an Eric Ambler spy novel, he once told me that he had five passports
acquired over the years for services rendered to assorted regimes
of varying degrees of unsavoriness. He never traveled without all
of them-just in case. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise to
me that Emir Khalifa bin Hamad, having intuited the importance of
electronic-communications media long before most of his fellow sheiks,
would hire Levon Keshishian to launch the venture. Already an old man
in the mid-1970s, now Levon is long gone and little remembered. But
he deserves a footnote in history as the man who set the long chain
of events in motion that would eventually lead to Al Jazeera as we
know it today.
Why did the previous emir and his son Hamad bin Khalifa after him
recognize the value of a media presence so clearly and so early?
Perhaps because of the particularly tenuous nature of their little
kingdom. Long a fiefdom of Bahrain, Qatar fell under nominal
Ottoman rule from 1872 until 1913. In 1916, as the Ottoman Empire
disintegrated, it became a “protected” state, signing a treaty that
gave Great Britain control of its defense and foreign relations. In
September 1971, as Britain withdrew its forces from the Persian Gulf,
Qatar declared independence. The following February, then crown prince
Khalifa bin Hamad seized power to become emir, just as his own son
would do to him in 1995. He became the sole proprietor of a very
valuable, very vulnerable piece of real estate.
The conventional wisdom that you can’t be too rich or too thin may
apply to society beauties, but you can be too rich and too petite
if you happen to be an Arab ministate sitting on one of the world’s
largest gas reserves, with a population composed largely of non-Arab
immigrants (only 40 percent of Qatar’s 848,000 citizens are ethnic
Arabs, with most of the remaining 60 percent being Pakistani, Indian,
Iranian or other imported help). Qatar also has fewer than twelve
thousand active military personnel to defend it, a tempting gdp of
$91.3 billion a year, and rival regional superpowers Saudi Arabia
and Iran for neighbors. Perhaps members of the al-Thani clan have
a few more little gray cells, sounder business sense and a stronger
survival instinct than many neighboring dynasties; whatever the reason,
Qatar’s ruling family was unique in its early realization of the
importance of winning friends and influencing people via commerce,
diplomacy and the air waves.
It has intelligently diversified its financial portfolio by plowing
raw-material revenues into chemical, industrial and development
projects and a five-star commercial airline, all of which advertise
heavily on Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, two American military bases housing
over thirteen thousand U.S. personnel give Qatar protective status as
one of Washington’s key strategic partners in the region. At the same
time, Qatar has cultivated good relations with a wide range of Arab
opinion leaders, including many political reformists characterized as
“mainstream Islamists,” a supplementary insurance policy backing up
America’s security guarantee for this small, rich monarchy. As Lebanese
Middle East expert Talal Atrissi recently told the New York Times,
it would appear that “Qatar is a country without ideology. They know
that the Islamists are the new power in the Arab world. This alliance
will lay the foundation for a base of influence across the region.”
But it isn’t quite that simple. While many of the voices demanding
freer, less corrupt government in the Arab world fall under the
broad “Islamist” rubric, the crowds that have taken to the streets in
countries like Egypt and Syria are disproportionately young, affluent,
educated, Westernized and, surprisingly often, English speaking. In
other words, they are just the sort of people that form Al Jazeera’s
core viewership and just the sort of people who must form the popular
base for any truly democratic reform in the Muslim world in general
and the Middle East in particular.
Like its viewers, Al Jazeera presents a far more moderate, Westernized
face than Islamic jihadism or rigid Sunni orthodoxy. In fact, there is
very little specifically religious content in its broadcasts. Though
some of its more strident critics accuse Al Jazeera of being an
“Islamist” stalking horse, it is, in fact, a not-for-Prophet as well
as a not-for-profit news operation. As such, it should be welcomed by
all who share the humanist, democratic values of Western civilization.
THE BOTTOM line? After two months of monitoring Al Jazeera’s
English-language broadcasts, I am inclined to take the network’s
moderate, modernist face at face value. A look at the list of Al
Jazeera correspondents, commentators and anchors offers dramatic proof
of its cosmopolitan breadth. You are not likely to find names like
Nick Clark, Dan Hind, Richard Falk, Ronnie Vernooy, Pepe Escobar,
Corey Robin, David Zirin, Amanda Robb and Danny Schechter on any
list of Muslim extremists. And Al Jazeera’s Muslim broadcasters,
like Marwan Bishara (formerly of The American University of Paris),
are scarcely the stuff that militant Islamists are made of.
All in all, the Al Jazeera team matches or exceeds most of its
rivals when it comes to professional credentials, including in the
number of its alumni from Sky News, ITN, BBC, CNN International, the
Economist, ABC, CBS, Canadian Broadcasting and Granada TV. Al Jazeera
has even landed the man whose celebrated Nixon interviews earned
him superstar status as a television journalist. At age seventy-two,
Sir David Frost may be slightly past his prime-there are moments when
his Frost Over the World program could be more accurately described
as Fog over Frost-but he regularly interviews top-tier statesmen,
financial experts and celebrities in a full-length format, offering
viewers much more than the usual domestic-network sound bites.
At a time when Western broadcast and print operations are decimating
staff and closing overseas news bureaus, Al Jazeera is expanding.
Middle East coverage is anchored in Qatar’s modern capital, Doha, with
bureaus in Beirut, Gaza, Ramallah and Tehran; European coverage is
anchored in London with bureaus in Paris and Moscow; Washington, DC,
anchors the Americas, with bureaus in Bogata, Buenos Aires, Caracas,
New York City, Mexico City, São Paulo and Toronto; the Asia-Pacific
region is anchored in Kuala Lumpur with bureaus in Beijing, Islamabad,
Jakarta, New Delhi and Manila; and there are African bureaus in Cairo,
Abidjan, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Harare.
Some bias is inevitable in any news operation. But in two months of
heavy Al Jazeera viewing, I saw no evidence of pervasive pro-Muslim
religious bias. On the contrary, most of the bias on display tended
to be of the same liberal, secular variety that skews much of the
reporting by mainstream American media, e.g., acceptance of “Occupy
Wall Street” demonstrators on their own terms as spokesmen for 99
percent of the American people. The only green bias discernible
had nothing to do with the sacred color of the Prophet’s banner and
everything to do with Western-style tree hugging: a report on how
Tasmanian devils, particularly nasty little antipodean marsupials,
are on the brink of extinction because of their vicious tendency
to bite one another, thereby passing on a contagious, fatal form of
facial tumors.
On the whole, I found myself better informed by Al Jazeera than by
the so-called mainstream media on a wide range of issues during the
two months I monitored its English transmissions. Obviously there was
more detailed, in-depth coverage of the Middle East. While sympathy for
the plight of the Palestinians was apparent, it was at about the same
level that one encounters nowadays on CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. And I was
pleasantly surprised by the global reach of the coverage: flooding in
Colombia, parliamentary crisis in Italy, Mexican military operations
against illegal immigrants entering the country from Guatemala,
reform elections in Morocco, steady coverage of the Canadian pipeline
controversy, pending Supreme Court consideration of Obamacare and
gang violence in Brazilian favelas, to cite a random sampling.
Particularly gripping was a feature-length investigative report on
the abduction and murder of Russian human-rights crusader Natasha
Estemirova by hit men serving Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed thug
currently running Chechnya. This was a moving, disturbing expose of
the true nature of Russia under the heel of Vladimir Putin, a subject
that has been largely neglected by most Western media.
There are, of course, many things to criticize about Al Jazeera. Like
all 24/7 broadcast-news operations, there are far too many recycled
segments offered up as fresh news again and again over several
days and, until recently, Al Jazeera’s coverage of popular protests
against the Sunni monarchy in Shia-majority Bahrain-and their brutal
suppression-was far less aggressive than its coverage of popular
uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world. But, all in all, I came away
from two months of Al Jazeera viewing with a respect for the general
quality of its journalism, an admiration for the physical courage
of its frontline reporters and the conviction that-particularly in
the case of Al Jazeera’s female Muslim correspondents-the network
offered viewers throughout the Islamic world strong, positive role
models for a civilized, secular society.
In essence, the test for the future of Islam’s 1.4 billion adherents
around the world (compared to 2.2 billion Christians) is whether or not
their societies can come to terms with not just the technical aspects
of modernity-it is easy enough to learn how to build bombs and crash
planes invented by others-but with balancing spiritual and secular
concerns in a way that allows for tolerance, intellectual inquiry,
and a civil structure that respects the rights of all individuals and
includes among those rights participation in the making of society’s
laws and their fair enforcement.
Whether or not Qatar’s emir personally embraces all of these
principles, the Al Jazeera English-language service he underwrites
offers news, analysis and encouragement for those who do in the Arab
and Islamic worlds.
Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford and
Reagan and writes frequently on politics, history and the humanities.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
