[iwar] NYTIMES - View from the Gulf

From: yangyun@metacrawler.com
Date: 2001-11-11 18:06:26
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November 11, 2001

THE ARAB VIEW

Newspapers and TV Paint U.S. Action as a Kind of Terrorism

By DOUGLAS JEHL

KUWAIT, Nov. 10 — Osama bin Laden is not being portrayed as a hero in
the Arab media. But neither is the American war in Afghanistan being
portrayed as anything heroic, or even wise or necessary.

Instead, the main message delivered by most Arab newspapers and
television has been that the United States has moved arrogantly,
blindly, even callously into conflict in a country that it does not
understand, and that the consequences could be worse than if the
Americans had left well enough alone.

The dominant images in the Arab media have not been of warplanes
roaring off the flight deck but of Afghan civilians wounded by
American bombs and of Israeli tanks on Palestinian streets. They have
been offered up as examples of a kind of terrorism every bit as bad as
Mr. bin Laden's, but one that hypocritical Americans have proved
willing to countenance.

"The United States has set itself up as the whole world's guardian not
in order to spread the principles of morality in international
dealings, but to serve the selfish aims of its foreign policy," a
columnist, Ahmad Amorabi, wrote this week in the daily Al Bayan in the
United Arab Emirates.

Virtually nowhere in print or on television can be found any defense
of Mr. bin Laden, who is being portrayed as a once- dangerous but now
somewhat pathetic figure hiding in caves. On the Arab satellite
channel Al Jazeera in particular, United States officials who agreed
to interviews have been given significant time.

But it is rare in the Arab media to find a defense of American policy.
United States efforts to demonize Mr. bin Laden have been derided by
Arab editors like Jassim M. Boodai of Kuwait's Al Rai Al Aam newspaper
as "turning him into a modern- day Robin Hood." Particularly in Egypt,
official newspapers have come close to portraying the current conflict
not as one between good and evil, but between moral equivalents.

"Is there any difference between America's bombing of innocent
civilians in their homes and the callousness of Taliban's mullahs?" an
Egyptian editor, Samir Ragab, widely regarded as the voice of
President Hosni Mubarak, wrote on Oct. 31 in his newspaper, Al Gomhuria.

Suspicion, mistrust and hostility toward the West is nothing new in
the Arab media; it reflects attitudes that permeate a region that sees
itself as having been cheated, maligned, outsmarted and outmuscled by
Westerners for much of its modern history. But the current campaign,
with its reliance on military power toward elastic, ill-defined goals,
seems in particular to have stirred Arab misgivings.

"While it should have concentrated on arresting and trying bin Laden,"
Salama Ahmed Salama, the leading Egyptian columnist, wrote this week
in the country's leading newspaper, Al Ahram, "America has resorted to
brute force, heedless of the effects on the Afghans themselves as well
as on other Muslim peoples."

Among specific concerns, the Arab media has focused on the prospect
that even a successful campaign in Afghanistan that toppled the
Taliban and eliminated Mr. bin Laden might leave a vacuum to be filled
by more terror. Newspapers and television have seized anxiously on
warnings from the United States that Afghanistan will be only the
first theater in the war to sound the alarm that an Arab country —
perhaps Iraq or Syria — will be next.

At the outset of the campaign, Arab readers and viewers were offered
the hope that the American action might be coupled with a real effort
by the United States to persuade Israel, in turn, to rein in the
campaign of pinpoint killings and other military activity in
Palestinian lands.

But that hopefulness has been replaced by a bitter sense of betrayal.

This has been particularly true in the last week, since a senior State
Department official, David Satterfield, was quoted as having pointed
an accusing finger not at Israel but at the Palestinians, whose
uprising in Gaza and the West Bank he described as having turned into
"a process of calculated terror."

"According to Washington's definition, terror means Islamic terror and
Arab Islamic terror to be more specific," the pan-Arab daily Al Quds
Al Arabi responded in a lashing editorial. "Israeli terrorism, on the
other hand, which cost the lives of two thousand innocent civilians in
Sabra and Chatila as well as 800 Palestinians since the intifada
began, is only seen by the Americans as `provocation.' "

In some newspapers, particularly the left-leaning Egyptian tabloids,
the photographs of wounded Afghans have been particularly gruesome,
and they have been accompanied with bold headlines screaming
condemnations like "Shame." But even more sedate Arab papers have
included angry accusations, some in defensive responses to complaints
from American lawmakers and editorialists that Egypt and Saudi Arabia
in particular have done too little to support the fight.

Only occasionally have voices surfaced endorsing the American action.

"It appears that the Arabs have once again chosen the wrong position
to adopt," a Kuwaiti commentator, Mohammad al- Rumaihi, wrote last
week in the Saudi daily Al Watan. "By standing shoulder to shoulder
with the U.S. and its coalition against terrorism, they can reap
considerable political rewards."



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