Interpretation from Arabic
Allow me at the outset to congratulate Her Excellency Sheikha Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa for initiating the debate on this important subject in the United Nations, which is a haven for peoples, in particular for smaller peoples. I would like also to congratulate her team on their thorough preparations for this event. I wish further to salute the interpreters, who I hope will be merciful to my statement.
Today we are talking about the role and responsibility of the media in fanning – or extinguishing – the flames. The question I shall try to answer is this: Is the media leading us – as diverse cultures throughout the world – towards greater understanding or towards greater strife? Before addressing that subject, I want to briefly set out the concepts. Everyone in this Chamber is very well aware of the meaning of information, by which I mean written, audio-visual and on-line information. I approach this matter from two perspectives: first, the Western media; and secondly, the Arab media. In speaking of “Western” information I do not include the entire West; I am speaking of the media emanating from the great Powers holding permanent seats on the Security Council – with the exception of Russia and China, of course. In speaking of the Arab media, I include a very large sector of the world, inhabited by 300 million people, 60 per cent of them illiterate.
The interaction between these two forms of information is the subject of my statement today. Let me start by saying that, in my view, there are a number of facts. I believe that we need to move away from McLuhan’s concept of the global village. In the light of the information revolution, I would like to raise a new concept for the world in which we now live: the concept of a single building. But that building has certain apartments that are well lit, air conditioned and well heated. Other apartments lack water, electricity, air conditioning and perhaps even sanitation. The building’s residents must coexist. How can they coexist? Communication among the residents of the building takes place through information. Information is a peacetime “war” between the eastern side of the building and the western side: the Arab side and the Western side.
In my opinion, Western information in general is biased, for a number of causes. The first is Western orientalism, which traditionally defined differences between cultures on the basis of racial superiority. Some people have since criticized this theory, but cultures always retain some remnants of their past. Secondly, the events of 9/11 and Iraq have fanned the flames of those old concepts of racial differences. Western information media also work on the basis of the theories of Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations: production, distribution and market response. Here, market response is what led to something I have read relating to the French Channel 2, which a few years ago did not like a statement made by former Lebanese President Harawi and thus described it as a statement made by “the Muslim President of Lebanon”. But Lebanon never has had a Muslim President, and probably never will have one: the President of Lebanon is always a Christian. And yesterday, there was a discussion on CNN about a very small portion of a film made in Gaza; it was said that this incited children to turn to terrorism.
But this market response often ignores the fact that in the global building a child dies every minute from a treatable disease – that is, in the poor apartments. Thousands of women in those poor apartments die as a result of abortions, which they undergo because of their poverty: they do not wish to have large families. This is not shown in the Western media, which show only the issues they want to convey to the consumer. The information media themselves have created certain needs among consumers, and those needs must be addressed. Thus, the news consists of information that is of broad interest among the target audience. If the target audience bases itself on a web of concepts and opinions that define what is to be said to that audience, the result is simply that the media responds to the needs of that market. Thus, it is the target audience that determines the quality of the news: the death of one child per minute is not news. News is the arrest of three people who are training for terrorism. In the Western media, the whole of Iran is reduced to Ahmadinejad. All the Arab peoples are reduced to Bin Laden or sometimes Al-Zawahiri.
This situation of bias also controls the Arab media. In general, the Arab media only retransmits what is produced by the Western media. Despite the many protests in the United Nations and within and outside the West and the many criticisms levelled at the new liberal media, what I call information pollution continues.
Let us now move to the other side of the building: the Arab inhabitants. The Arab media exists in a certain environment, which has five distinctive elements. The first is the failure of the post-colonial elites in Arab countries to establish States possessing an enterprise for a national renaissance. The second is the failure of development in its various aspects; information on this is available in United Nations reports and I need not go into the details. Thirdly, a very large number of Western soldiers are in the Arab region, either as occupiers or as peacekeepers – but in either event they are soldiers. The fourth element is the widespread existence of coercive Governments in the region, supported by the West. And the final element is the widespread existence of suicide bombers. That is the environment in which we find the Arab media.
It is thus no surprise that the Arab public accepts the unreasonable – the absurd. Some call Bin Laden a hero. Some say that the events of 9/11 were planned and executed by the CIA. There is a majority that will accept and believe such statements. So, in this part of the building the media propagates myths: cultural myths, social myths and political myths. In the social sphere we have the interpretation of dreams and horoscopes on Arab channels. In the political area there is talk of a Mahdi – or messiah – and the establishment of a unified State. Given that situation, it is not at all strange to see the majority of Arabs having recourse to what I call the moral victory, by going back to their roots. Hence the extremism in their social and political positions.
Moreover, those media lack something that exists partially in the Western media: freedom. The existence of coercive Governments and the absence of an enterprise for national renaissance, to which I just referred, distort information and the media. The first post-Second-World-War Arab renaissance enterprise was based on something that could be called national bias, which in some ways resembles Naziism or coercive socialism. That enterprise failed. Now in the Arab world a new enterprise called “political Islam” is being advocated. This is an outdated enterprise, and I expect it to fail as well. Let me say very quickly that I am speaking here about the political interpretation of Islam; I am not talking about Islam as a faith.
Finally, as I said, there is no modern enterprise for national renaissance in the Arab world. Today there are about 50 satellite channels; the Arabs spend about $1 billion on them annually. They spend that sum to speak to Arabs about Arabs. The Western influence on these media is very clear. Many Western programmes have been translated into Arabic, notably “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” – except that in the Arab world it is two million, not one million. This is all part of the same subject.
We are flabbergasted at the accumulation of these negative elements in all of the building’s apartments – the Western ones and the Eastern ones – and at the lack of attempts to renovate some of the apartments. We leave it to the media to attach blame on a daily basis, saying that the reason for this bad situation is the arrogant Western neighbour: many in the Western media continue to see Arabs as Raphael Patai saw them in The Arab Mind: a group of people controlled by fear and obsessed with sex. As a result of all of this, the media on both sides – which have woven a social fabric conducive to extremism – advocate discord, not peace. The media and those who work in it have relinquished their cultural responsibility, as regards both transmission and reception of information.
The Arabs have a famous saying: War starts with words. We want to see the Western media retreat from certain sins it does not wish to acknowledge. We would like the Western media to avoid temptation, even though it is unaware that it is exposing itself to temptation. The sins and temptation not recognized by the Western media leave the inhabitants of the building in constant misery and enable those who call for terrorism and war to flourish.
I should like to conclude by saying that both the Arab and the Western media have a responsibility to recognize that this situation has a negative impact on the Arab public in many ways. The Western media refuses to accept the fact that human beings are being denied their natural right to live and their right to establish a State – I am sure you understand what I am saying. The worst thing today is that machines are being invented that do away with the need for people, while the Arabs keep producing more people, which in turn gives rise to further development problems.
The final question is how to benefit from the media and change it from an element of discord to one of unity. Knowledge is the foundation. Our knowledge of the other must be better; our knowledge of the West must be better as well. I am not speaking of the elites: there is no problem with the elites. But there is a problem with the masses and the broader public. We all bear responsibility.
I use this forum to issue a call upon all of us to look at the residents of the building and move them from discord to rapprochement and tolerance.