Author: Martin Kramer

An Answer to Al-Jazeera?

On By Martin Kramer

In an earlier entry, I asked: “Could the United States ever create its own alternative to Al-Jazeera? I somehow doubt it.” A couple of weekends ago, on a trip to California, I spent an hour with a man who put my skepticism to the test.

That man is Norman Pattiz, founder and chairman of Westwood One. It’s the country’s largest radio network, and it owns or distributes CBS Radio News, Fox News Radio, CNN Radio News, and the NBC Radio Network. Pattiz also serves on the Broadcasting Board of Governors that supervises the Voice of America. He was the moving spirit behind Radio Sawa, the youth-oriented radio network that plies Arab twenty-somethings with a mixture of pop music and news in an American format. To judge from the numbers (always to be taken with a grain of salt in the Middle East), Radio Sawa has been an overnight success. For example, a survey conducted last month in Amman, Jordan, asked listeners: “What station do you listen to most for news?” Forty-one percent answered Radio Sawa. That compares with 21 percent for the Jordanian Government’s Amman FM, and a mere 10 percent for BBC-FM.

Now Pattiz seeks to escalate the media war. He wants the United States to launch an Arabic-language satellite television station to rival Al-Jazeera, and he’s lobbying Congress to fund it. I visited Pattiz in his offices at Westwood One in Culver City, and he gave me a lite version of the sales pitch he makes in Washington.

His main prop is a short video, prepared in response to doubters in Washington who told him: “We know you can do radio, but what about television?” It’s a great piece of salesmanship. The segment opens with images of angry mobs of enraged Muslims burning American flags. “These are the images that bombard over 300 million Arabs on a daily basis,” says the voiceover (I’m paraphrasing here). “And these are the images sent out by America in response.” What you see, of course, is a completely blank screen. The video goes on to stress the urgency of filling that screen, and fast, with something Pattiz calls MTN, the Middle East Television Network. And to listen to Pattiz tell it, this is a piece of cake. The formula is tried and true, it works in America, and it will work in Araby too. Because when it comes to television, says Pattiz, there’s no rival to good old Yankee ingenuity. Just the “production values” (the slick formatting we take for granted in American television) will keep the Arab viewer riveted to MTN.

What about content? Original programming is an expensive proposition, and even if Congress coughs up $60 million a year, it won’t be enough to fill all those hours. Pattiz would take a lot of content right off the shelf. The American networks, he expects, would provide much of the entertainment for free, or at “patriotic rates.” And game shows could provide cheap and attractive filler. The original part will be news and public affairs.

It’s here, of course, that things begin to get vague. The news format is fairly straightforward, but the commentary is another matter. Pattiz believes he knows what doesn’t work: stressing the good life lived by Arabs in America. This is the staple of public diplomacy, State Department-style. But the millions of Arab television viewers aren’t going to immigrate to this country, says Pattiz, and they really don’t care how great it is to be an Arab-American. What they want to know is how they themselves might benefit from the American model, and how American policy works to their advantage. That’s a harder sell, and it’s not easy to find Arabic-speakers who are prepared to make it. The solution, Pattiz thinks, is to mix commentary and news the way it’s done on Fox, by chatty and opinionated anchors. Lip gloss doesn’t hurt either; after all, it works quite well on Al-Jazeera.

I won’t say more about the tricky question of where to locate such a station. Someone is out scouting sites, and Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar are all in the race, as are off-shore locations such as Cyprus and Rhodes. (Definitely out of play: London.) Pattiz can run down the pros and cons of every alternative, and in so doing, shows himself to have already mastered the intricacies of inter-Arab politics. But at the end of the day, he doesn’t seem to think that it matters. In a digital world, you prepare content wherever it’s convenient, and you can bounce it off a satellite from anywhere. Making sure that the headquarters are cheap and safe is the main consideration. As for politics—well, no host would dare to interfere in America’s message.

So am I persuaded? Pattiz is a persuasive guy—he reminds you that he’s a salesman—and if Congress is ever to put millions into such a project, someone will have to sell it, and hard. The old VOA and State Department types wince at Pattiz’s approach, because it’s not particularly focused on persuading elites. But these critics are the same people who are always warning us about the dangers of the Arab street. It really makes no sense to invest massive efforts to parry Arab “intellectuals” in a PBS-type format. Most of them are incorrigible anyway. It makes a lot more sense just to go over and around them, and there is no medium more suited to that purpose than television. Sure, there are lots of issues to be hammered out here. But if there is one thing that the United States does even better than wage war, it’s television.

So I’ve suspended my skepticism. Let’s bet a nickel on the Pattiz formula. It might do some real good, and I can’t see how it can do any harm. If the Arabs can’t bring themselves to admire our political values, then let’s get them started by admiring our production values. Let the rest follow.

ADDENDUM: There is also a private initiative to provide American-slanted content for MTN (or any other buyer). It’s called Al-Haqiqa Television Inc. Two former ambassadors, Richard Fairbanks and Mark Ginsberg, are chairman and president respectively.

Edward Said CRASSHes

On By Martin Kramer

Edward Said, celebrity professor and advocate for Palestine, has just ended a stretch at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities—acronym CRASSH—at Cambridge University in England. Between his lectures on “The Example of Auerbach’s Mimesis” and “Return to Philology” (serious people never left it), Said huddled in his rooms to settle an old score with the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya. The result is an emission that is truly breathtaking for its sheer hypocrisy.

The Said-Makiya feud is more than a decade old, and it’s not easy to map all its labyrinthine passages. So here is a crib note. Makiya, an Iraqi who first found politics in the bosom of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, later went into exile and set about exposing the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book, Republic of Fear, shattered the complacency surrounding the Iraqi regime, bringing evidence that situated Saddam and his gangs outside civilization. A subsequent book, Cruelty and Silence, brought more evidence of Saddam’s crimes, and also served an indictment against Arab writers who either swooned before the Iraqi dictator, or didn’t see his misdeeds as sufficient cause for America to act. (For more, see my review of the book.)

Palestinian “intellectuals” beat loud drums for Saddam; some of them played shrill flutes against American intervention. Edward Said was the first flautist. In the fray, Makiya accused Said of sacrificing the Iraqi people to the unappeasable god of “Palestine first.” Said in turn denounced Makiya as a traitor to the mother of all Arab causes. The feud later subsided, but the current U.S.-led drive for “regime change” in Iraq, coming as it does in the midst of yet another Palestinian drama, has gotten Said stirred up again—and against Makiya. That’s because it’s hard to read a major newspaper, or listen to National Public Radio, or even thumb your favorite magazine, without bumping into Kanan Makiya. One reason: Makiya is prominent in the “Democratic Principles Working Group,” composed of some 30 Iraqis who belong to the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project.” This has enraged Said to the boiling point; in his column in the Ahram Weekly, he boils over. Take a deep breath, and read it.

Makiya doesn’t need me to defend him, and I won’t. I’m more interested in the patent hypocrisy of Said’s charges. He hardly makes an accusation against Makiya that couldn’t be made—usually with more justification—against himself. I’d describe it as a suicide character-bombing.

For example, Said tells us that that before Makiya went into exile, he was “an associate of his father’s architectural firm in Iraq.” That firm did business with the regime. In the next paragraph, Said steals second base: Makiya was a “beneficiary of the Iraqi regime’s munificence.” By the end of that paragraph, Said has stolen home plate: “Makiya himself had worked for Saddam.” It’s a crude spin on a typical case of son-works-for-dad. And the irony here is that Said’s own father, a Cairene businessman, also kept his son in the office, and compromised him. In fact, according to Said’s own memoirs (p. 289), he signed a business contract for his father that criminalized him. “For the next fifteen years,” writes Said, “I was unable to return to Egypt because that particular contract, and I as its unsuspecting signatory, were ruled to be in contravention of the exchange-control law.” So shall we visit the sins of businessmen fathers on their sons? If we were to apply Said’s severe judgment of Makiya to himself, we would have to include money laundering among his past occupations. (On Makiya’s tortured relations with his father, see the chapter “Oedipus in Samara” in Lawrence Weschler’s Calamities of Exile.)

Said then announces that Makiya “never wrote in an Arab country…whatever meager writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.” And just where in the Arab world would it have been safe for Makiya to have written and published Republic of Fear under his own name? Come to think of it, has Said ever written in an Arab country? Said told an interviewer in 1989 that even were a Palestinian state created, he wouldn’t live in it. “It’s too late for me,” he said. “I’m past the point of uprooting myself again.” “I could have gotten a job at Bir Zeit,” he later said. “But I realized this is something I cannot do. My fate is to remain in New York.”

Said’s “fate” at Columbia University in New York has been—well, prosperous and risk-free. “I get promotions, salary increases, all the perks,” Said admitted in that 1989 interview. Columbia has backed him to the hilt, and his politics have helped to make him a prize-class celebrity. So it’s frankly bizarre to see Said take Makiya to task for finding refuge in these United States, and seeking to work from this seat of unrivalled freedom, power and wealth to free his native country. Isn’t this exactly what Said claims to be doing? And it’s jolting to read Said’s characterization of Makiya as someone caught “between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to his upwardly mobile career).” Said’s whole story (or myth) is that of a man “out of place,” caught between countries and cultures. (“Whether I’m with Americans or with Arabs, I always feel incomplete.”) And has anyone been more bent on upward mobility?

But the heart of Said’s complaint is Makiya’s role as an interlocutor between the US government and the Iraqi opposition, and Makiya’s effort to fashion a post-war vision for Iraq. Never mind that in the late 1980s, Said did the same sort of thing on behalf of the PLO, lobbying George Shultz’s State Department for US recognition. (In Said’s words, Arafat “used a number of people, including me, as go-betweens with the US Administration.”) What really offends Said is Makiya’s vision of Iraq’s future. Makiya believes that “federalism is a necessary condition of democracy and that it means devolving power away from Baghdad to the provinces.” And he believe that “a democratic Iraq has to be an Iraq that exists for all its citizens equally, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. That means a non-Arab Iraq.” Said’s scornful rejoinder: it would require “magic” to “de-Arabize the country,” the evidence that the Iraqis want federalism is “pretty negligible,” and federalism never works anyway. (“One would have thought,” writes Said, “that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country’s federalism was a total success.”)

Wait a minute. The last time I looked, Said was proposing precisely this for Palestinians and Israelis: a one-state solution for Arabs and Jews, who are supposed to downgrade their Arab and Jewish identities, and live as citizens in one de-nationalized state, based on “the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community.” In this one state, which is now Said’s “solution,” Jews and Arabs would live in “federated cantons.”

So let me get this right, Professor Said: Iraqis can’t possibly be “de-Arabized,” but Palestinians apparently can; Iraqis don’t want federalism, but Palestinians do; and federalism hasn’t worked anywhere, but in Israel-Palestine it’s not only doable, it’s the only “solution.”

Have I found a contradiction here? You bet. It’s rooted in Said’s belief that the Palestinians are a chosen people among the Arabs, and that they must be the first to break their shackles. Who are the Iraqis to hope for more than Saddam? They’re more or less accustomed to the iron fists of dictators. It’s enough to insist that the Americans don’t bomb them. But the Palestinians? They deserve so much more: sympathy, solidarity, secularism, democracy—and, Said has decided, all of Palestine. A couple of years ago, an Israeli correspondent asked him: “So what you envision is a totally new situation in which a Jewish minority would live peacefully within an Arab context?” Said: “Yes. I believe it is viable. A Jewish minority can survive the way other minorities in the Arab world survived.” Clearly we are dealing here with someone who really doesn’t know much about, say, Iraq. Introduce this man to an Iraqi Kurd.

My point here is not to defend Makiya’s vision of Iraq’s future, which I don’t necessarily share. My point is to demonstrate that Edward Said, as a master of self-awareness, is much overrated. He can’t see the obvious parallels between his predicament and Makiya’s; he sees only the differences, and naturally they all work in his favor. And he is so fixated upon Palestine that the rest of the Arab world is reduced to a blur. Now for Said-watchers, pro and con, there’s nothing new in all this, but it’s still disappointing. A few years ago, Said told the New York Times that his own circumstances had prompted him to consider writing a book on “late style,” about writers and composers “full of unresolved dissonances,” people who “go out with more complexity and more energy than they came in.” No one knows how late in the day it is for Said, but I see no new complexities here. All I see in this latest character-bombing (not just against Makiya, but against Bernard Lewis) is an attempt to score one last point before the curtain falls.

With Makiya poised to make a dent in history, and Lewis riding a runaway best-seller, I’d say it’s too little, too late.

Georgetown Blows Fuses

On By Martin Kramer

Georgetown University, where Arab demonstrations occur almost daily, witnessed something rare on Monday: a demonstration by Jewish students against remarks made by one of the university’s faculty. Professor Hisham Sharabi was reported in the Beirut press to have given a speech at a Lebanese university, where he said this: “Jews are getting ready to take control of us and the Americans have entered the region to possess the oil resources and redraw the geopolitical map of the Arab world.” Georgetown rushed to distance itself from anything Sharabi might have said. (This is not the first time a Georgetown professor has blown a fuse in the Arab world. Back in April, Halim Barakat published a bizarre piece in the London Al-Hayat, claiming the Jews had lost their humanity.)

Sharabi is emeritus, but he is listed as one of ten core faculty at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His “academic” activities abroad are not entirely out of character with the Center’s own activities at home.

I have before me the June 2002 issue of the CCAS News, the newsletter of the Center. The headline of the lead article runs as follows: “CCAS Responds to Ongoing Crisis in Palestine.” The crisis is described in these words:

Twenty months into the current intifada, the situation in the Palestinian occupied territories continues to go from bad to worse. In a flurry of large-scale military violence, the Israel Defense Forces stepped up their reoccupation of West Bank towns and villages, culminating in the rampages on Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin in April, the devastating loss of civilian life and the destruction of key Palestinian Authority (PA) ministries, civil society institutions and civilian infrastructure.

Nowhere is there even an allusion to how the situation in Israel went from bad to worse, the flurry of large-scale terrorist violence by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, culminating in the suicide bombing rampages in Netanya, Jerusalem, and Haifa in March, the devastating loss of Israeli civilian life, and the destruction of the key civil society institutions of the Israeli peace movement.

In fact, the CCAS News is indistinguishable from the newsletters of the dozen Arab advocacy organizations based in Washington. Throughout the spring, the Center conducted a straightforward propaganda campaign, inviting a succession of Palestinian spokespersons and pro-Palestinian “peace activists” who addressed Georgetown’s students. There’s really nothing new in all this: since the 1970s, the Center has been a hotbed of political activism in the service of the Palestinian (and other Arab) causes. Arab governments and corporations with Arab business paid the bills.

What is new is that since 1997, the Center has been the “core” of a National Resource Center on the Middle East, and receives Title VI federal funding through the U.S. Department of Education. The subsidy has been worth $223,000 a year. How can that be, when Georgetown’s Arab studies concept is so remote from the usual model of a balanced Middle East center? Answer: while the money comes from the Department of Education, the recipients are chosen by academics on review panels. They apparently think it useful to have a propagandizing presence in the heart of Washington, at the U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

There is something perverse in any process that provides a direct government subsidy for the agitprop of Sharabi and his colleagues. Let the Arab governments, whose ambassadors enjoy the run of the place anyway, pay the full freight. There is undoubtedly some politically disengaged Middle East center that deserves the funds far more than the Georgetown lobby. The competition for the 2003-2005 cycle of funding is underway. The Georgetown experiment has run for six years, and has failed. Give someone else a chance.

UPDATE: The Metro section of the Washington Post now runs this opinion column, slamming the Georgetown club.