The Guardian reports: Al-Jazeera’s editorial independence has been called into question after its director of news stepped in to ensure a speech made by Qatar’s emir to the UN led its English channel’s coverage of the debate on Syrian intervention.
Journalists had produced a package of the UN debate, topped with excerpts of President Obama’s speech, last Tuesday when a last-minute instruction came from Salah Negm, the Qatar-based news director, who ordered the video to be re-edited to lead with the comments from Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.
Despite protests from staff that the emir’s comments – a repetition of previous calls for Arab intervention in Syria – were not the most important aspect of the UN debate, the two-minute video was re-edited and Obama’s speech was relegated to the end of the package.
There are hints at staff dissatisfaction within the film, available for viewing on al-Jazeera’s website and YouTube, which notes that the emir “represents one of the smallest countries in the Arab world … but Qatar has been one of the loudest voices condemning Syria”.
The episode left a bitter taste among staff amid complaints that this was the most heavy-handed editorial intervention at the global broadcaster, which has long described itself as operating independent of its Qatari ownership.
Marc Lynch writes: “Why does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign saviors?” That is how the inflammatory Al Jazeera talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem opened his program in December 2003. On another Al Jazeera program around that same time, Egyptian intellectuals Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Fahmy Howeidy debated whether it would take American intervention to force change in the Arab world. Almost exactly seven years later, Tunisians erupted in a revolution that spread across the entire region, finally answering Qassem’s challenge and proving that Arabs themselves could take control of their destiny.
Throughout this year of tumult, Arabs have debated the meaning of the great wave of popular mobilization that has swept their world as vigorously as have anxious foreigners. There is no single Arab idea about what has happened. To many young activists, it is a revolution that will not stop until it has swept away every remnant of the old order. To worried elites, it represents a protest movement to be met with limited economic and political reforms. Some see a great Islamic Awakening, while others argue for an emerging cosmopolitan, secular, democratic generation of engaged citizens. For prominent liberals such as Egypt’s Amr Hamzawy, these really have been revolutions for democracy. But whatever the ultimate goal, most would agree with Syrian intellectual Burhan Ghalyoun, who eloquently argued in March that the Arab world was witnessing “an awakening of the people who have been crushed by despotic regimes.”
In March, Egyptian writer Hassan Hanafi declared that the spread of the revolutions demonstrated finally that “Arab unity” — long a distant ideal in a region better known for its fragmentation and ideological bickering — “is an objective reality.” This unified narrative of change, and the rise of a new, popular pan-Arabism directed against regimes, is perhaps the greatest revelation of the uprisings. Not since the 1950s has a single slogan — back then Arab unity, today “The People Want to Overthrow the Regime” — been sounded so powerfully from North Africa to the Gulf. This identification with a shared fate feels natural to a generation that came of age watching satellite TV coverage of Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon over the previous decade. Al Jazeera, since its rise to prominence in the late 1990s, has unified the regional agenda through its explicitly Arabist coverage — and its embrace of raucous political debates on the most sensitive issues.
Mehdi Hasan writes: On Friday 11 February, thousands of Arabs spilled on to the streets of the Middle East’s capitals, from Rabat to Amman, to celebrate the downfall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Doha, in the sleepy Gulf emirate of Qatar, was no different: hundreds of youths brought traffic to a standstill on the coastal Corniche Road. Shortly before midnight, some of them recognised one of the drivers stuck in the jam: the then Al Jazeera director general, Wadah Khanfar, who was on his way home from the network’s headquarters to grab a few hours sleep. After pulling him out of his car, dozens of Qataris queued up to hug and kiss him and thank him for his channel’s unrelenting, round-the-clock coverage of the uprisings in Cairo and Tunis.
“I wept,” recalls Khanfar, seven months later, when I meet him in the café of a central-London hotel. “I was very emotional.” He pauses. “In the Arab world, journalism really is an issue of life and death.”
He isn’t exaggerating. So far this year, Al Jazeera’s correspondents and producers across the Middle East have been harassed, arrested, beaten and, in the case of the cameraman Ali Hassan al-Jaber, killed (by pro-Gaddafi fighters in Libya). As Arab governments toppled from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya – and, last month, Yemen – Al Jazeera has been on hand to beam the pictures of ecstatic protesters, revolutionaries and rebels into the living rooms of ordinary Arabs across the region – and beyond. In Tunisia, the network picked up camera-phone footage from Facebook and other social-networking sites of the riots and protests that took place in the wake of the fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in December 2010, and gave them a regional prominence they otherwise would not have achieved.
In Egypt, for 18 days straight, Al Jazeera’s cameras broadcast live from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, giving a platform to the demonstrators, while documenting the violence of the Mubarak regime and its supporters.
“The protests rocking the Arab world this week have one thread uniting them: Al Jazeera,” the New York Times observed on 27 January, as it reported on how the channel’s coverage had “helped propel insurgent emotions from one capital to the next”. “They did not cause these events,” argued Marc Lynch, a professor of Middle East studies at George Washington University, “but it’s almost impossible to imagine all this happening without Al Jazeera.” Or, as a spokesman for WikiLeaks tweeted: “Yes, we may have helped Tunisia, Egypt. But let us not forget the elephant in the room: Al Jazeera + sat dishes.”
Marc Lynch writes: “Why does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign saviors?” That is how the inflammatory Al Jazeera talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem opened his program in December 2003. On another Al Jazeera program around that same time, Egyptian intellectuals Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Fahmy Howeidy debated whether it would take American intervention to force change in the Arab world. Almost exactly seven years later, Tunisians erupted in a revolution that spread across the entire region, finally answering Qassem’s challenge and proving that Arabs themselves could take control of their destiny.
Throughout this year of tumult, Arabs have debated the meaning of the great wave of popular mobilization that has swept their world as vigorously as have anxious foreigners. There is no single Arab idea about what has happened. To many young activists, it is a revolution that will not stop until it has swept away every remnant of the old order. To worried elites, it represents a protest movement to be met with limited economic and political reforms. Some see a great Islamic Awakening, while others argue for an emerging cosmopolitan, secular, democratic generation of engaged citizens. For prominent liberals such as Egypt’s Amr Hamzawy, these really have been revolutions for democracy. But whatever the ultimate goal, most would agree with Syrian intellectual Burhan Ghalyoun, who eloquently argued in March that the Arab world was witnessing “an awakening of the people who have been crushed by despotic regimes.”
In March, Egyptian writer Hassan Hanafi declared that the spread of the revolutions demonstrated finally that “Arab unity” — long a distant ideal in a region better known for its fragmentation and ideological bickering — “is an objective reality.” This unified narrative of change, and the rise of a new, popular pan-Arabism directed against regimes, is perhaps the greatest revelation of the uprisings. Not since the 1950s has a single slogan — back then Arab unity, today “The People Want to Overthrow the Regime” — been sounded so powerfully from North Africa to the Gulf. This identification with a shared fate feels natural to a generation that came of age watching satellite TV coverage of Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon over the previous decade. Al Jazeera, since its rise to prominence in the late 1990s, has unified the regional agenda through its explicitly Arabist coverage — and its embrace of raucous political debates on the most sensitive issues.
Roy Greenslade writes: The revolutionary fervour of the Arab Spring came alive last night at City University London in a lecture by Wadah Khanfar, the former director general of Al-Jazeera.
In describing his reaction to the various uprisings, particularly in Egypt and Libya, he illustrated just what is meant by a journalism of attachment or commitment.
Exhibiting an unashamed passion throughout his talk, he told a packed audience:
“In our search for a fixed pivotal point around which our editorial mission is centred we find nothing better than the people with their collective mind and their instinctive opposition to oppression, arbitrariness and corruption…
I learned from my experience as a reporter, and then as director of a media institution, an important basic fact: that we should always posit people at the centre of our editorial policy.
I don’t say this simply to reiterate a beautiful slogan with which we decorate our literature or market our institutions. I truly believe this to be a moral commitment, a scientific approach and an essential interest.”
Khanfar, the first non-Western journalist to deliver the James Cameron memorial lecture, cast Al-Jazeera’s journalism as a sort of democratic mission.
He told how the Egyptian regime’s early response to the gatherings in Tahrir Square was to close down the network’s offices and to ban its reporters and crews from working.
So the broadcaster sent a message to its Egyptian viewers telling them: “If the authorities have banned our reporters from working, then every single one of you is an Al-Jazeera reporter.”
That led, he said, to hundreds of activists supplying the network with a stream of news and video clips via social network sites.
The resignation last week of Wadah Khanfar as managing director of Al Jazeera has provoked speculation that scandal lurks beneath his departure. Many have pointed to a WikiLeaks cable stating that Khanfar had succumbed to pressure from the U.S. in 2005 and played down civilian casualties in some of the network’s coverage of the Iraq War. Others have argued that larger political matters related to its coverage of the Arab Spring — especially its unrestrained, albeit selective, endorsement of democratic reforms — forced Khanfar’s ouster.
Both suggestions contain more fancy than substance: it is hard to believe that Doha did not already know about Khanfar’s talking to the U.S. ambassador or that pro-democracy strands in Al Jazeera’s programming would end his career. (Khanfar regularly ruffled feathers during his tenure.) A far likelier explanation is that, after eight stressful years, Khanfar simply decided that he had contributed all he could to the network. Indeed, his contributions have been transformative.
The more intriguing question is what comes next for Al Jazeera. On one level, the network is doing well. It has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding in 1996. Al Jazeera English’s reputation for solid journalism continues to improve, as evidenced by its surge in popularity in the United States during this year’s Arab uprisings. The network is developing franchises in sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, and the Balkans. There is even talk of Al Jazeera Urdu. But despite its expanding global reach, the Arab world’s flagship 24-hour satellite news channel must now face the fact that Arabs’ dependence on it is decreasing. As more and more of the region gains access to the Internet, a proliferation of information providers is eroding Al Jazeera’s dominance. Meanwhile, the revolutions that the network helped drive have unleashed a cascade of largely local news outlets, which provide more direct competition. There is no doubt that Al Jazeera will remain a major force in the region for years to come, but its singular role as a unique provider of open, honest content may already be a thing of the past.
On Monday, Omar Chatriwala reported in Foreign Policy on revelations from cables newly released by Wikileaks on pressure applied to Al Jazeera by the Bush administration. On Tuesday, the Qatar government suddenly replaced Wadah Khanfar, the director-general of the al-Jazeera satellite TV network, with Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, an executive at Qatargas and a member of the country’s ruling dynasty.
Al Jazeera has been making waves in the Middle East ever since it aired its first broadcast on Nov. 1, 1996. In its news dispatches and talk shows, the pan-Arab satellite channel, which is funded by the state of Qatar, has been a strident critic of U.S. foreign policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories, even while it has been a thorn in the side of many an Arab autocrat. But after the last dump of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, on Aug. 30, articles have begun to circulate — especially in Iranian and Syrian media outlets — about Al Jazeera’s close relationship with a surprising interlocutor: the U.S. government.
In particular, a newly released cable issued by the U.S. Embassy in Doha and signed by then ambassador Chase Untermeyer, details a meeting between an embassy public affairs official and Wadah Khanfar, Al Jazeera’s director general, in which the latter is said to agree to tone down and remove what the United States terms “disturbing Al Jazeera website content.”
There have been longstanding accusations that Al Jazeera serves as an arm of its host nation’s foreign policy, and earlier leaked documents referred to the news organization as “one of Qatar’s most valuable political and diplomatic tools,” which could be used as “a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries.” Another document urges Sen. John Kerry to engage the Qatari government on Al Jazeera during a visit to the Gulf country, saying, “there are ample precedents for a bilateral dialogue on Al Jazeera as part of improving bilateral relations.”
Despite those assertions by U.S. diplomatic sources, both the network and the Qatari government fiercely insist that it is editorially independent and free from interference.
Skeptics take the latest leak as proof, though, that Al Jazeera is susceptible to external pressures, not least in part due to the document’s summary:
PAO [Public affairs officer] met 10/19 with Al Jazeera Managing Director Wadah Khanfar to discuss the latest DIA [U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency] report on Al Jazeera and disturbing Al Jazeera website content…. Khanfar said the most recent website piece of concern to the USG [U.S. government] has been toned down and that he would have it removed over the subsequent two or three days. End summary.
In what some are seizing upon as evidence of an American-Qatari conspiracy, the cable, dated October 2005, continues with a quote from Khanfar saying, “We need to fix the method of how we receive these reports,” mentioning that he had found one of them “on the fax machine.”
Later, there is a reference in the memo to a sort of understanding that’s been reached between Al Jazeera and the U.S. government:
On a semantic level, [Khanfar] objected to the use of the word “agreement” as used in the August report on the first page, under the heading “Violence in Iraq”, where a sentence reads: “In violation of the station’s agreement several months ago with US officials etc”. “The agreement was that it was a non-paper,” said Khanfar. [A non-paper is diplomatic jargon for a proposal that is unofficial and has not been committed to.] “As a news organization, we cannot sign agreements of this nature, and to have it here like this in writing is of concern to us.”
Leaving it at that, the cable appears to be a smoking gun showing Al Jazeera at the U.S. government’s beck and call. Iran-owned Press TV uses this to conclude that “the US government has previously had a say in what content to appear on the al-Jazeera website.” The website ArabCrunch similarly denounced Al Jazeera for responding to U.S. pressure, and says the cable “might have revealed the reason behind the AJ one sided coverage of Iraq in the recent years.” Read in their full context, though, this and other leaked cables tell a very different story.
Dennis Kucinich gets the prize for the worst-timed op-ed of the year: “Time to end Nato’s war in Libya” appearing today in The Guardian.
As the war enters its sixth month, it is time for the US president and secretary of state to clean up the mess they’ve created with this needless military intervention, and to work to seriously to bring about a negotiated end to this war.
Negotiated with who?
Kucinich warned: “Libyan rebels are now advancing on the capital city of Tripoli with the aid of Nato strikes; this is sure to result in a real bloodbath, as opposed to the one that was conjured in Benghazi this past winter.”
Well, Al Jazeera is already in Tripoli’s Green Square witnessing mass celebrations and no word of a bloodbath.
Samer Allawi, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Kabul bureau chief, has been brought before an Israeli military court, almost a week after he was arrested by Israeli officials when he tried to cross the border between Jordan and the occupied West Bank.
Israeli authorities extended his detention by seven days and charged him with being a member of Hamas on Tuesday.
Allawi was arrested on August 10 at the end of a three-week holiday in his home town of Sabastia near Nablus.
The Israeli authorities originally informed Allawi’s family that he would be held for four days for questioning, saying that it was a “security-related arrest”.
Last Thursday, the authorities told Al Jazeera that Allawi’s detention would be extended.
Here’s a circle that should never have been closed.
The Goldstone Report, once credited with having provided a hefty shove as Israel veered towards pariah status, is now being held up by Israelis as having unintentionally demonstrated why, when the need arises, Israel will be able to launch Cast Lead Two and once again chant: “we have no choice” — no choice but to slaughter hundreds more Palestinians.
Israel grappled on Sunday with whether a retraction by a United Nations investigator regarding its actions in the Gaza war two years ago could be used to rehabilitate its tarnished international image or as pre-emptive defense in future military actions against armed groups.
The disavowal, by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who led a panel of experts for the United Nations, appeared in an opinion article in The Washington Post. He said that he no longer believed that Israel had intentionally killed Palestinian civilians during its invasion of Gaza.
Many here considered the article truly significant. Commentary came in a flood, ranging from gracious praise to vindictive indignation. Some cited the message of Proverbs 28:13 that whoever confesses and renounces his sins “finds mercy.”
Still, the question remained whether the harm the Goldstone report caused — the ammunition it gave to those who view Israel as a pariah state and question its right to exist; the campaigns that have stopped some Israeli officials from traveling abroad for fear of arrest for war crimes — could be undone.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that Israel would work “to formulate practical and public diplomacy measures in order to reverse and minimize the great damage that has been done by this campaign of denigration against the State of Israel.”
A number of officials said that while the blow to Israel’s name had been great, the renunciation of the harshest conclusion would help in the future.
“The one point of light regards future actions,” Gabriela Shalev, a law professor and most recently Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said on Israel Radio. “If we have to defend ourselves against terror organizations again, we will be able to say there is no way to deal with this terror other than the same way we did in Cast Lead.”
“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” Judge Goldstone wrote in the Washington Post. But it matters little what kinds of revisions Goldstone would now make; the most significant thing is that he is perceived as having disavowed some of his own conclusions.
The political impact of the report always had more to do with the identity of its author than the report’s contents. Thus the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict quickly became known simply as the Goldstone Report. It’s supposed authority derived not from the fact that it had been produced by independent international fact-finding mission under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council — what mattered more than anything else was that Goldstone was Jewish and a Zionist.
Israel — the theory went — would be forced to sit up and pay attention if a humanitarian rebuke came from such an impeccable source. But on the contrary, Goldstone ended up being elevated to the status of presenting an existential threat to the Jewish state, on a par with Iran.
He has now effectively disarmed himself.
Israel, long enamored with the notion that its soldiers have higher moral standards than any other military force, has been quick to declare that it has been vindicated. The Goldstone Report itself has ended up better serving those who want to sustain Israel’s sense of victimhood than in being the cause of any change in Israel’s behavior.
There’s a lesson here: don’t attach too much attention to a 500-page report that few people have read, or to the ethnicity or ideology of the messenger. The reason Gaza changed the world’s view of Israel was largely thanks to on-the-ground reporting — not a report — and it came from the voices and faces and presence of young journalists who were describing what they saw, as it happened.
Al Jazeera shone the brightest spotlight on Gaza — in his report, Goldstone did little more than reiterate what we already knew.
Libya’s revolutionary leadership is pressing western powers to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi and launch military strikes against his forces to protect rebel-held cities from the threat of bloody assault.
Mustafa Gheriani, spokesman for the revolutionary national council in its stronghold of Benghazi, said the appeal was to be made by a delegation meeting the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in Paris on Monday, as G8 foreign ministers gathered there to consider whether to back French and British calls for a no-fly zone over Libya.
“We are telling the west we want a no-fly zone, we want tactical strikes against those tanks and rockets that are being used against us and we want a strike against Gaddafi’s compound,” said Gheriani. “This is the message from our delegation in Europe.”
Asked if that meant that the revolutionary council wanted the west to assassinate Gaddafi, Gheriani replied: “Why not? If he dies, nobody will shed a tear.”
But with diplomatic wrangling focused on the issue of the no-fly zone, there appeared to be little immediate prospect of a foreign military assault on Gaddafi’s forces, let alone an air strike against the Libyan dictator.
On Libya’s eastern front, taking towns may be easy for Col. Muammar Qaddafi – but holding them is something else again.
After days of being pounded by rocket fire and bombing runs from forces loyal to Qaddafi, Libya’s rebel army piled into their pickup trucks yesterday afternoon and cut a ragged retreat from the oil town of Brega to Ajdabiya, 40 miles to the east. They left mounds of ammunition and supplies behind them as they fled, Qaddafi’s fighters surging behind.
That was all according to plan, says Mohammed el-Majbouli.
“We drew [Qaddafi’s forces] forward, and then we maneuvered behind them and trapped them,” says Mr. Majbouli, a former member of Qaddafi’s special forces who is now organizing rebel fighters.
He says a reserve force of rebels with military training had been hidden in homes in the eastern third of the sprawling petrochemical complex at Brega. After the Qaddafi men passed at about 8 p.m. last night, the rebels came out, retaking the town as well as about 20 prisoners from Qaddafi’s forces.
Majbouli’s claim of victory, which is also made by senior officers who have defected to the rebel cause, could not be independently confirmed. But if he is right, it would be the fourth time Brega has changed hands in less than two weeks, emphasizing the strange, shimmering nature of the conflict being fought in Libya’s coastal desert.
While it remains easy for Qaddafi to rain mortars and rockets on rebel checkpoints, he doesn’t appear to have more than a few thousand men, at most, committed to his eastward advance. Without indiscriminate fire on the cities of Ajdabiya or Benghazi – just the sort of act that might galvanize the international community into action, which Qaddafi is likely keen to avoid – it’s hard to see his forces advancing quickly much farther east.
Muammar Gaddafi’s army won control of a strategic rebel-held Libyan town and laid siege to another as the revolutionary administration in Benghazi again appealed for foreign military help to prevent what it said would be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people if the insurgents were to lose.
The rebels admitted retreating from the oil town of Ras Lanuf – captured a week ago – after two days of intense fighting and that the nearby town of Brega was now threatened.
The revolutionary army, in large part made up of inexperienced young volunteers, has been forced back by a sustained artillery, tank and air bombardment about 20 miles along the road to the rebel capital of Benghazi.
The head of Libya’s revolutionary council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, claimed that if Gaddafi’s forces were to reach the country’s second-largest city it would result in “the death of half a million” people.
In 2003 America and Britain invaded Iraq without a United Nations mandate. Today NATO is emphasising that it won’t move without both a UN resolution and substantial political support from the Arabs. The Arab League has now called for a no-fly zone.
At the League meeting Omani foreign minister Yusuf bin Alawi warned that if the Arabs didn’t take a strong stance they would open the door to unwanted foreign interference. This may seem contradictory: at the same time he asked the UN to intervene. But his point is a good one. If NATO forces act under a UN resolution and responding to an Arab request, the Arabs will be well-placed to end the intervention at the right moment.
I understand the worries of those who fear Western intervention, after all the West’s crimes against the Arab world. I wish the Arabs were capable of moving by themselves (and I certainly hope that once the revolutions have run their course we will finally see an independent Arab world taking care of internal Arab problems). I like Asa’ad Abu Khalil’s idea of using Egypt and Tunisa as staging posts for volunteer Arab soldiers who wish to aid their brothers in Libya.
It’s a difficult, cloudy situation. The only clear thing is that the Libyans need immediate help. The Transitional National Council’s warning that half a million will be killed is not mere rhetoric, but an entirely logical and legitimate fear.
Thousands of Libyans march down the Corniche in Benghazi, chanting, “Free Libya,” “Revolutionaries,” “Beasts,” and other slogans. It is part of their military training. They are all volunteers, who chose to become fighters and join the rebel forces in areas like Ras Lanuf, Brega and Zawiyah , which are experiencing heavy air strikes by Gaddafi’s forces.
Among those is Ahmed, 25 years old, an Egyptian who has worked in construction in Libya for the past four years. In spite of his family’s pleas, he refuses to leave Libya. “I came to Libya and it was prosperous, I will leave it as prosperous as it was. I will stay here and fight with my friends until Libya is free, just like Egypt is free now,” said Ahmed who looked pale, but seemed very confident of victory and liberation.
Ahmed is one of many Egyptians who decided to stay and join the Libyan revolution. The volunteers are from both genders and all ages. Nada, 18, is a student who was born to an Egyptian mother and a Libyan father. She was born in Alexandria, but moved to Benghazi at the age of eight and has been living there ever since. She still visits Egypt every year.
“I love Egypt, it’s my second home, but I love Libya too, and I am going to stay and fight where I am needed,” said Nada passionately. Nada wears her hair short and she looks very practical in her suit and yellow shirt, which signifies that she is one of the organizers of the anti-Gaddafi sit-in. She joined the sit-in on February 18, along with her mother, another supervisor.
Four men have been arrested for the murder of an Al Jazeera journalist and evidence has emerged that Muammar Gaddafi’s regime is sending undercover squads to carry out a campaign of assassinations, rebel officials claimed yesterday.
The Independent was told that four men were caught in the city of Ajdabiya with evidence linking them to the death of Ali Hassaon Al Jaber, who was killed near Benghazi on Saturday. Under questioning, the suspects allegedly confessed they had been ordered to silence opposition figures and drive out international presence from territories of the protest movement.
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley see in the Egyptian revolution not simply the end of a repressive regime but the rebirth of the Arab world. In the newly emerging Arab world, the new Nasser is Al Jazeera.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, pillars of the Arab order, are exhausted, bereft of a cause other than preventing their own decline. For Egypt, which stood tallest, the fall has been steepest. But long before Tahrir Square, Egypt forfeited any claim to Arab leadership. It has gone missing in Iraq, and its policy toward Iran remains restricted to protestations, accusations and insults. It has not prevailed in its rivalry with Syria and has lost its battle for influence in Lebanon. It has had no genuine impact on the Arab-Israeli peace process, was unable to reunify the Palestinian movement and was widely seen in the region as complicit in Israel’s siege on Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Riyadh has helplessly witnessed the gradual ascendancy of Iranian influence in Iraq and the wider region. It was humiliated in 2009 when it failed to crush rebels in Yemen despite formidable advantages in resources and military hardware. Its mediation attempts among Palestinians in 2007, and more recently in Lebanon, were brushed aside by local parties over which it once held considerable sway.
The Arab leadership has proved passive and, when active, powerless. Where it once championed a string of lost causes – pan-Arab unity, defiance of the West, resistance to Israel – it now fights for nothing. There was more popular pride in yesterday’s setbacks than in today’s stupor.
Arab states suffer from a curse more debilitating than poverty or autocracy. They have become counterfeit, perceived by their own people as alien, pursuing policies hatched from afar. One cannot fully comprehend the actions of Egyptians, Tunisians, Jordanians and others without considering this deep-seated feeling that they have not been allowed to be themselves, that they have been robbed of their identities.
Taking to the streets is not a mere act of protest. It is an act of self-determination.
Where the United States and Europe have seen moderation and cooperation, the Arab public has sensed a loss of dignity and of the ability to make free decisions. True independence was traded in for Western military, financial and political support. That intimate relationship distorted Arab politics. Reliant on foreign nations’ largesse and accountable to their judgment, the narrow ruling class became more responsive to external demands than to domestic aspirations.
Alienated from their states, the people have in some cases searched elsewhere for guidance. Some have been drawn to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, which have resisted and challenged the established order. Others look to non-Arab states, such as Turkey, which under its Islamist government has carved out a dynamic, independent role, or Iran, which flouts Western threats and edicts.
The breakdown of the Arab order has upended natural power relations. Traditional powers punch below their weight, and emerging ones, such as Qatar, punch above theirs. Al-Jazeera has emerged as a full-fledged political actor because it reflects and articulates popular sentiment. It has become the new Nasser. The leader of the Arab world is a television network.
Unlike the bland, state-owned Egyptian station, or its more conservative, Saudi-owned rival Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera has captured the hopes of the crowds gathering on the streets of Cairo.
“The genius of Arab satellite TV,” Abderrahim Foukara, Washington bureau chief for Al Jazeera, once told me, “is that it [has] captured a deep-seated common existential pain called Arab sensibility and turned it into a picture narrative that speaks to something very deep in the Arab psyche.”
Put another way: There is no chance that the world would be watching these extraordinary events play out in Egypt if Egyptians had not watched the Tunisian revolution play out in their living rooms and coffee shops on Al Jazeera.
The media is by no means the only force at play in the continuing upheaval in Egypt, the Tunisian revolution, or the copy-cat demonstrations going on elsewhere in the Arab world. At root is a raw anger fed by decades of political, intellectual, and economic stagnation that has led to a powerful convergence of the region’s three main political trends — pan-Arab nationalism, nation-state nationalism, and Islamism.
However, Arab media have been at the vanguard of articulating this new and explosive development. Arab satellite television, such as Al Jazeera — and the increasingly aggressive ethos of Arab print journalism exemplified by newspapers like Egypt’s Al-Masry Al-Youm and Tunisia’s crusading Kalima Tunisie — have fueled a sense of common cause among Arabs across the region every bit as real as the “imagined communities” that are at the core of the concept of nation.
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Here’s a circle that should never have been closed.