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Arab media paint US action as a kind of terrorism

With a gun resting on a wall behind him, Ayman el-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, makes a statement in a videotape issued to the Qatari satellite channel Al-Jazeera. PHOTO: AP

Osama bin Laden is not being portrayed as a hero in the Arab media. But neither is the US war in Afghanistan being portrayed as anything heroic, or even wise or necessary.

Instead, the main message delivered by most Arab newspapers and television has been that the US has moved arrogantly, blindly, even callously into conflict in a country that it does not understand, and that the consequences could be worse than if the Americans had left well enough alone.

The dominant images in the Arab media have not been of warplanes roaring off the flight deck but of Afghan civilians wounded by US bombs and of Israeli tanks on Palestinian streets. They have been offered up as examples of a kind of terrorism every bit as bad as bin Laden's, but one that hypocritical Americans have proved willing to countenance.

"The United States has set itself up as the whole world's guardian not in order to spread the principles of morality in international dealings, but to serve the selfish aims of its foreign policy," a columnist, Ahmad Amorabi, wrote this week in the daily Al Bayan in the United Arab Emirates.

Virtually nowhere in print or on television can be found any defense of bin Laden, who is being portrayed as a once-dangerous but now somewhat pathetic figure hiding in caves. On the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera in particular, US officials who agreed to interviews have been given significant time.

But it is rare in the Arab media to find a defense of US policy. US efforts to demonize bin Laden have been derided by Arab editors such as Jassim M. Boodai of Kuwait's Al Rai Al Aam newspaper as "turning him into a modern-day Robin Hood." Particularly in Egypt, official newspapers have come close to portraying the current conflict not as one between good and evil, but between moral equivalents.

"Is there any difference between America's bombing of innocent civilians in their homes and the callousness of Taliban's mullahs?" an Egyptian editor, Samir Ragab, widely regarded as the voice of President Hosni Mubarak, wrote on Oct. 31 in his newspaper, Al Gomhuri.

Suspicion, mistrust and hostility toward the West is nothing new in the Arab media; it reflects attitudes that permeate a region that sees itself as having been cheated, maligned, outsmarted and outmuscled by Westerners for much of its modern history. But the current campaign, with its reliance on military power toward elastic, ill-defined goals, seems in particular to have stirred Arab misgivings.

"While it should have concentrated on arresting and trying bin Laden," Salama Ahmed Salama, the leading Egyptian columnist, wrote this week in the country's leading newspaper, Al Ahram, "America has resorted to brute force, heedless of the effects on the Afghans themselves as well as on other Muslim peoples."

Among specific concerns, the Arab media has focused on the prospect that even a successful campaign in Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban and eliminated bin Laden might leave a vacuum to be filled by more terror. Newspapers and television have seized anxiously on warnings from the US that Afghanistan will be only the first theater in the war to sound the alarm that an Arab country -- perhaps Iraq or Syria -- will be next.

At the outset of the campaign, Arab readers and viewers were offered the hope that the US action might be coupled with a real effort by the US to persuade Israel, in turn, to rein in the campaign of pinpoint killings and other military activity in Palestinian lands.

But that hopefulness has been replaced by a bitter sense of betrayal.

This has been particularly true in the past week, since a senior state department official, David Satterfield, was quoted as having pointed an accusing finger not at Israel but at the Palestinians, whose uprising in Gaza and the West Bank he described as having turned into "a process of calculated terror."

"According to Washington's definition, terror means Islamic terror and Arab Islamic terror to be more specific," the pan-Arab daily Al Quds Al Arabi responded in a lashing editorial. "Israeli terrorism, on the other hand, which cost the lives of 2,000 innocent civilians in Sabra and Chatila as well as 800 Palestinians since the intifada began, is only seen by the Americans as `provocation."'

In some newspapers, particularly the left-leaning Egyptian tabloids, the photographs of wounded Afghans have been particularly gruesome, and they have been accompanied with bold headlines screaming condemnations such as "Shame." But even more sedate Arab papers have included angry accusations, some in defensive responses to complaints from US lawmakers and editorialists that Egypt and Saudi Arabia in particular have done too little to support the fight.

Only occasionally have voices surfaced endorsing the US action.

"It appears that the Arabs have once again chosen the wrong position to adopt," a Kuwaiti commentator, Mohammad al-Rumaihi, wrote last week in the Saudi daily Al Watan.

"By standing shoulder to shoulder with the US and its coalition against terrorism, they can reap considerable political rewards."
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