Why does the Western media refuse to see the
epochal resurgence of Egypt's revolutionary spirit? Because love is blind
Hani Shukrallah , Monday 10 Dec 2012
On Friday morning, and as Egypt’s resurgent
revolution was preparing to lock horns yet again with forces bent on its
destruction, I received (an exceedingly) long distance call from an Australian
broadcast journalist. They wanted a phone interview with me on the
confrontation between “the Muslim Brotherhood and the pro-Mubarak forces,”
explained the female voice on the other side of the line. Utterly baffled by
the bizarre question, it took me a while to reply. Finally, with admittedly a
nasty chuckle, I said it seemed that by the time Egypt’s news gets half way
across the globe to reach down under, it tends to be rather distorted.
My Australian colleague took my unpleasantness
in stride, and genially asked if they could phone me a little later for the interview.
Yet, and despite my having agreed reluctantly to the interview, I was so
disgusted with what I felt was the Western media’s almost obdurate
unwillingness to understand, or even see what was going on in our country, I
decided not to take it after all. Repeated rings of my mobile phone went
unanswered.
Distance, in fact, had nothing to do with it.
Egypt was once again making world history; millions of Egyptians across the
country were engaged in open popular revolt against the rule of the Muslim
Brotherhood, almost literally the mother of all modern political Islamist
movements, not least the dread Al-Qaeda, which had occupied the centre stage of
global politics – and Western media attention – for close on three decades.
So remarkable was this
new wave of the Egyptian revolution, its reach extended from the heartland of
Brotherhood-support in Upper Egypt to Mediterranean Alexandria, which in turn
had appeared to have thoroughly renounced its rich cosmopolitan heritage to
become the distasteful playground of grim Taliban-like Salafists.
It was, moreover, the
first ever popular uprising against a ruling Islamist movement, much wider in
scope, intensity and social composition than any of the revolts we’d seen
hitherto against the Ayatollahs’ rule in Iran.
And yet, the Western
media seemed unmoved and uninterested. “They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but they cannot see.”
So pronounced has been
the Western media’s neglect and disinclination to even see with a bare minimum
of clarity the epochal transformation taking place in Egypt that over the past
week my Facebook page has been regaled with postings of: PETITION: The Egyptian
Revolution 2.0 Needs International Coverage.
Though the petition
was strongly reflective of the above, I did not sign it – for two reasons. As a
journalist I am constitutionally averse to any kind of pressure on media
professionals, whether it takes the shape of government censorship, attacks by
fascist hooligans of the sort we’ve been witnessing Brotherhood and Salafist
thugs making on Cairo’s Media City, or even the benign form of a Facebook
petition.
Secondly, it’s futile.
You have neither the clout, power of intimidation, blackmail nor means of
tangible punishment that the pro-Israel lobby has been deploying most
effectively against the Western media for decades (and which, it so happens,
our own MB has been aping on a considerably more local scale through its
e-militias, truncheon-wielding militias, no less than its take-over bid of the
state owned media, and its “constitutional” bid to muzzle all media.)
Nor should you. And
pleading is embarrassing, let alone ineffectual.
Why then this obdurate
blindness that seems suddenly to have struck the Western media vis-à-vis Egypt?
I would suggest two
basic reasons, one deep-seated, almost visceral, while the other is conscious,
interest-bound and utilitarian.
The default setting of
the Western media’s perspective on Egypt, as on Muslim-majority nations in
general, is derivative – a function of “Western Man’s” very sense of identity.
The great Edward Said has shown just how fundamental has been the “Orient”,
particularly the Muslim “Orient”, to the formation of the identity of modern
Europe, later redefined as “The West”.
And while the “West”
may not particularly love Islam and Muslims, it simply adores their
“difference”, just as a miserably married couple will revel in the misfortune
of their divorced neighbours. It makes them feel good about themselves.
It was thus that
modern Europe denied the great Muslim/Arab tradition of rationalism and
humanism, even as it appropriated it. Al-Farabi (Latinized, Alpharabius), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina
(Avicenna) had not given this tradition over to a Europe just emerging from its
“Dark Ages”, but were mere postmen of history, delivering the message from
Europe’s ostensible infancy in Ancient Greek. And thus too, the West’s
“rationalism” came to be contrasted with the Muslim Orient’s “mysticism” and
supposedly unquestioning adherence to religious dogma, the West’s attachment to
freedom versus the Muslim attachment to despotism, individualism versus
tribalism, etc.
During the past thirty
years or so, and in conjunction with the rise of political Islam, such
Orientalist nonsense was revived, dusted-off, polished and updated with
extraordinary zeal. Not surprisingly, the Islamists willingly and enthusiastically
jumped on the bandwagon. Practically overnight, the myth of fundamentally
Islamic peoples who had been ruled by “Westernised elites” and were now coming
into their own, became the conventional wisdom permeating all discourse on
Muslim-majority, particularly Arab nations.
Arch-Zionist and one
time British spook, Bernard Louis would tell us such things as: “To the modern
Western observer,” Islamic behviour in the modern world may appear anomalous,
anachronistic and absurd, but he would hasten to add, “it is neither
anachronistic nor absurd in relation to Islam.” By 1990, well before the 9/ 11
atrocity, Louis would take his bizarre-Muslims theory a little bit further,
giving us the Clash, “the perhaps irrational but surely historical reaction of an
ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Samuel Huntington would
later “develop” it into one of the most ridiculous pieces of political theory
ever (badly)-written, “The Clash of Civilizations”, first in essay, then in
book form.
But clash, dialogue or
love-fest, the real point is the dissimilarity. In contrast to the rest of the
world, and specifically to the “West”, the behavior of Muslims, be it
political, social, or cultural can only be understood “in relation to Islam”,
and this an Islam divested of the greatest and most enlightened of its
traditions, an Islam defined and delimited by modern day Islamists,
conservative, literalist and regressive. Not only was the great tradition of
Islamic rationalism to be denied, but every other feature of the richness and
diversity of our inherited and contemporary culture. Everything from a Thousand
and One Nights to Om Kalthoum would be thrown by the way side.
Mubarak, no less than
Islamist forces in Egypt and outside were happy to subscribe to variations of
such a reductive perspective. For the sitting dictator, it was proof positive
that his vicious police state was the only bulwark standing between the world
and an Islamist flood sweeping the country, beloved Israel, the Greater Middle
East, crossing over into the European heartland, and exploding a nuclear device
in some major American city.
For the dictators in
waiting, it was proof positive that they were “the authentic” representatives
of an overwhelmingly “authentic” population, (“90% of the people,” to quote Mr
Morsi, who won the presidential election by a bare 51% of the vote) – all they
need do is convince the “West” that, in power, they would make nice with
Israel, keep the Greater Middle East safe for the World Bank, IMF and
multi-national corporations, and that their often rabid civilization clashing
was really confined to domestic “others”, including liberal ninnies, commie
agitators, licentious riff-raff such as artists, writers and journalists, and,
of course, local Christians, Shiites and Bahaais.
The Arab Spring,
especially the Egyptian revolution, came to unseat the all pervasive,
pernicious paradigm. And for a brief period the Western media seemed happy to
discover that for Arabs and Muslims too, there was “something in the soul that
cries out of freedom,” as Obama was to quote Martin Luther King Jr. in his
salute to the Egyptian revolution on 12 February 2011.
Yet, even during those
glorious 18 days of Jan-Feb of that year, I would constantly get Western
journalists querying me about “the crucial” or “decisive” part Islamists,
particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, were playing in the revolution. Where they
got such certitude I was at a loss to understand, seeing that there were
millions on the streets, that you’d be hard pressed to find a single sign or
chant in Cairo’s Tahrir or anywhere else in the country calling for the
application of Sharia’a or “governance by what God has ordained,” that the
revolutionary banner of: Bread, Freedom, Social Justice, had not an ounce of
Islamism in it, that Christians and Muslims, women and men, fought together
shoulder to shoulder, and that egalitarianism among all Egyptians had been the
overriding ethic of the Egyptian revolution.
All too soon, the
readiness of the Brotherhood and its Salafist allies coupled to the
unpreparedness of the revolutionaries (due to 30 years of the eradication of
politics under Mubarak) seemed to bear the deep-seated bias out. The extremely
nuanced and complex reality of post revolutionary Egypt would be made to
disappear, and the Western media’s coverage of the emergent political landscape
in the country would regress into – what I’ve come to call – infantile
Orientalism.
Deep-seated bias is
only one part of the explanation, however. The second secret to the love affair
is much more down to earth, essentially a function of realpolitik. For the US-led Western alliance, the Muslim
Brotherhood in power in Egypt proved to be the answer to a prayer.
Notwithstanding all
the rhetoric about the liberation of “Islamic Palestine”, Egypt’s new rulers
would swear themselves blue in the face that they would uphold the commitment
to the peace treaty with Israel, collaborate with the “hated enemy” in fighting
terrorists in Sinai, bring in American troops and sophisticated spying
equipment into the troubled peninsula’s demilitarized Area C, all the while
maintaining “strategic ties” with Washington.
It would take the US/Egypt
brokered truce in Gaza, however, to have Western media and pundits drooling
over Mr Morsi and his up-and-coming Muslim Brotherhood run and controlled
regime. All of a sudden, they discovered that not only was the MB president as
compliant as his predecessor on “Israeli security”, but that he was proving a
much more effective partner in this respect.
Suddenly, the
realization hit home: Here was a democratically elected president (albeit
narrowly), backed by “authentic” Islamist Muslims, not only in Egypt but
throughout the Greater Middle East, able not only to intimidate and pressure
Hamas into “reasonableness”, as Mubarak’s Omar Suleiman was known to do, but to
do so in his capacity as Big Brother to the errant Palestinian branch of his
movement. A unique and previously unexpected prize of this order was simply too
precious to squander, even for the sake of such niceties as basic liberties and
human rights.
So precious indeed,
that one Israeli political writer suggested only last week that Netanyahu’s
Israel might be in the process of making a strategic shift in its attitude to
Hamas. Translated from the Hebrew by Media-Clips-Isr, Alex Fishman, writing in Yedioth Aharonot, suggests that under Netanyahu’s leadership
Israel was in the process of changing its policy on the Gaza Strip, and that
“Instead of toppling Hamas, it wants to give the Hamas regime power so that it
will ensure quiet and to push it toward the Sunni, anti-Iranian coalition of
Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.” Far-fetched, you might say. Possibly, I admit I
haven’t been following Israeli politics as I should, what with domestic
Egyptian developments overwhelming time and thought. Yet, very indicative, to
say the least.
Rehabilitating Hamas
with a view to “safeguarding Israeli security”, as defined by Netanyhau, no
less than setting up a regional Sunni coalition against Iran are, it goes
without saying, top agenda items in US/European policy in the Middle East.
But there is a more
compelling reason for the Western alliance and its media’s love affair with
Egypt’s Brotherhood – one of even greater strategic import. For some time now,
the US and its allies had come to realize that the rickety, aged and
corruption-ridden police states in the region, however servile, were very poor
guardians of their vital interests. The Arab Spring seemed to have given rise
to a new and ostensibly much more solid foundation on which to anchor these
interests. And as predicted by nearly everyone for years, some form of
political Islam seemed the only viable alternative at hand.
In Egypt, by far
the biggest Arab state and home to Al-Azhar, the very fount-head of Sunni
Islam, the Mother of all Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood, had come
to power and was ready and able to be the sort of loyal friend and guardian of
“vital” Western interests as its predecessors had been, and to do so in a
considerably more “legitimate” and effective manner.
Embroiled for
the past decade in a seemingly endless and harrowing battle against
“terrorism”, specifically against Islamist radicalism, and with Europe
increasingly phobic about the “demographic nightmare” of the Muslim “enemy
within”, the US and its allies now had a model of the kind of Islamism they
could have only dreamed of. By its very existence, such an Egyptian model was
bound to undercut the dread radicals and ameliorate the “Islamist threat”, all
the way from the heart of Paris to the Qaeda infested hills of Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
This veritable
treasure was as valuable to hold onto as its opposite, the collapse of such a
model, was to be dreaded. Indubitably, such failure would provide a powerful
boost to Islamist radicals everywhere, a further argument that Jihad rather
than a “Western, Secularist-imported democracy” is the only way forward.
The love affair is
thus explained, and as the popular saying goes “Love is blind.”
And yet, here at home,
the souls of millions of Egyptians continue to cry out for freedom, come what
may.
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