Arab media dominated by gruesome Israeli aggression
- From: "Muslim News" <editor_@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Muslim News" <submit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 4 May 2002 12:12:12 +0100
AMMAN, Jordan The explosion of Arab satellite television stations and Web sites
has had a profound impact on Arab public opinion by showing live, nonstop
images of the Israeli crackdown on Palestinians. These TV and e-mail images
have fueled huge demonstrations across the Arab world, and in both Egypt and
Bahrain protesters have been shot. Could this roiling Arab street topple a
regime? No, none of the Arab regimes are in any danger right now. But Arab
regimes' surviving or not is the wrong question. The right question is how they
will survive.
What many are having to do to survive is to slow down whatever modernization,
globalization or democratization initiatives they were either pursuing or
contemplating and to focus, at least rhetorically, on the old agenda of the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
The biggest victims of the West Bank war will not be Arab leaders, but Arab
liberals - as fledgling democratic experiments are postponed, foreign
investment is reduced, security services are given more leeway to crack down
and all public discussion is dominated by the Palestine issue.
King Abdullah of Jordan, one of the most progressive leaders in the Arab world
today, told me: "I have no intention of putting Jordan's modernization program
on hold. We are moving ahead, but I cannot do this by myself. I need the public
with me." But keeping the public and politicians focused on modernization is
not as easy as it was a year ago. Jordan, like other Arab countries, has been
bombarded by independent Arab satellite television stations, which compete for
audiences by showing gruesome, images of Israel brutalizing Palestinians. When
I covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it took hours or days for
film footage to get out, and Arab regimes could tightly control what was shown.
A few weeks ago, Arab News Network carried live, from a Palestinian village
next to Jenin, a report from a family that had been locked into a room by
Israeli forces who were sweeping the area. The mother, who had a cell phone,
called ANN, pleading for help for her kids. The whole Arab world listened in -
live.
"You hear the screams," said a Jordanian editor. "It comes right into your
bedroom. You go to bed seeing Palestinians killed and you wake up seeing them
killed ... If you put anything else on the front page other than this, people
will laugh at you."
This was not the case a year ago, when Jordanian news was dominated by the
king's innovative modernization program, which is supposed to kick off this
year with a radical reform of the education system, connecting every Jordanian
school to the Internet, and new investments in rural development. Once the
initiative was running, the king was planning to hold elections in the fall for
a new Parliament that would endorse this progressive agenda.
As part of this whole push, Microsoft signaled its intent to invest $2 million
in a creative Jordanian software firm. Microsoft conditioned its investment,
though, on Jordan first amending its copyright, labor and company laws to bring
them up to world standards. The cabinet amended the laws by fiat, but was
hoping that a new Parliament would ratify them.
But with the Jordanian population so inflamed about events in the West Bank -
"The most popular TV program here now is Hezbollah television, can you believe
that?" said a Jordanian businessman - ministers cannot talk publicly, the way
they need to, about the domestic reform agenda, the press isn't interested and
the palace is rethinking whether to hold elections. It is worried that in the
current mood, Islamists could sweep the day instead of progressives.
Source: The New York Times
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