Just as is the case with communists, Zionists, or Catholics, there are underlying conflicts, a wide scale of opinions and interpretations, and enormous differences between Islamic fundamentalists. The difference is that Islamic fundamentalists aren’t free to speak openly. Their books are banned, their websites are shut down, and their leaders are tried or murdered. There’s no International League of Fundamentalists or any arenas such as the ones that the Vatican and the Zionist World Congress have in which to deliver resolutions or formulate binding conclusions. Whom should I speak to, to find out what the nonviolent fundamentalists really want?
If you interview a leader in the West, you can figure out what his followers think. If the leader subsequently contradicts himself or deviates from his previous line, he’s called to account. For instance, how can he get away with telling the media that September 11 was punishment for American interference in the region, if he said at last month’s party congress that September 11 was an attack on humanity? If a leader tries this on, he either has to defend himself or resign. That’s how power works in a democracy, and that’s how, after a few interviews with the leaders, you can get a reasonable insight into the opinions of the groups represented by them. But in a dictatorship, the leadership group represent only themselves.
Nowhere was the problem so acute as with the semi-underground Muslim Brotherhood. This is the largest fundamentalist movement in the world, with branches in every Muslim country. They are not bearded adventurers who excitedly threaten the West in grainy videos or kill kidnap victims; they are doctors, engineers, scientists, and lawyers. They say that they are nonviolent; but, in the past, the brothers have used violence, and factions have spawned Hamas, the Algerian GIA, and Al-Qaida. Muslim Brothers counter that European social democrats aren’t outlawed when extreme leftist splinter groups commit attacks; on the other hand, leading figures within the Brotherhood frequently express undemocratic or anti-Semitic sentiments. These are often later withdrawn, denied, or modified, and then these remarks are denied or modified, so the movement’s real agenda remains opaque.
What can you do? In retrospect, I think the best way would have been for correspondents to admit their ignorance. I and my colleagues could have said something like, “It’s impossible to guess what the nonviolent branch of ‘political Islam’ is really planning, and I’ve only been able to speak to a few dozen of them properly. But they seem like decent people; they all say that they want to realize their ideals without using violence, through their local training college, hospital, or law clinic. Perhaps all of these nonviolent fundamentalists were taking me for a ride, but I don’t think these people lay awake in bed at night wondering how to destroy the West. They’d be more likely to be lying awake wondering how to prevent the West from destroying them. What we in the West see as ‘development aid’ and ‘consciousness-raising,’ they see as a foreign power using donor darlings and political pressure behind the scenes to try to change them, their beliefs, their male-female social relationships, and the relationship between gays and straights, and between old and young. Supporters of political Islam feel threatened by this kind of interference,” I’d end. “They want to shape their own futures, but that doesn’t make them instant terrorists.”
Perhaps we correspondents should have tried to make the “nonviolent fundamentalists” more visible in this manner, but it was always going to be a tough sell. We just didn’t know what we were looking at.
Here is one final example of how this fed through to the reporting. After 9/11, the Egyptian regime ran a number of show trials of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. A show trial is by definition public, so I found myself in a military court on the road that leads to the Suez Canal, next to a cage containing seventy-eight men.
It was like a zoo, only the men were behind the bars, while pigeons flew in and out of the holes in the roof, cooing and crapping. Outside, billboards lauded the greatness of the Egyptian fighting forces; inside was chaos, women holding up babies, and inconsolable teenagers who stood on tiptoes to wave or to push food through the bars. The men had already spent months without any contact with the outside world, and their families knew that after they’d been sent down they’d see them for precisely three minutes every six months. I copied this down in my notebook, since it was a “telling piece of information”—three minutes every six months.
It was the day that the military judge would assess the evidence against the men, who stood accused of having orchestrated an “attempted coup.” The prosecutor presented his first piece of evidence, at which point the public tribune chanted, “Reject! Reject!” The judge looked at the baseball bat in question—the only weapon seized in the case—handed it to an agent, and said, “I reject this.” Those present applauded the ruling that this evidence did not count. “Allahu akbar,” came from inside the cage, and one suspect even cried out, “Judge! I’m fifty-five. I’m much too old for a coup. I’m a granddad!” Grins all round from the lawyers and some of the suspects. Second piece of evidence: Books that anyone could buy on any street corner, and cardboard boxes with magazines about technology and aeronautical engineering. The judge said loudly, “I reject these.” Cue more cheering.
Then came the lawyer for the defense, and he proved without much difficulty that the “crown witness” was a different person from whom he said he was, and that the police had raided a different house than they said. His final piece was a tape recording on which the suspects were supposed to have been discussing their revolutionary plans. It played only static. For a while, the mood in the barracks was almost jovial. What was the regime up to?
The answer came a couple of months later, when the judge sentenced everyone to years of forced labor. The suspects had no right to appeal, and the presiding “officer” was, of course, not a judge. The sentence he handed down had been decided in advance, just like the results of an Arab election.
That’s how the show trials went. If human rights activists or other donor darlings had been in that cage, Western media and politicians would have screamed blue murder. But the defendants were “fundamentalists”—they were lumped together with Al-Qaida, and so the regime could do with them as it wished. In fact, because forced labor in the Egyptian heat is a death sentence for older people, the verdict was tantamount to authorizing dozens of murders. In Egypt alone, tens of thousands of people have been thrown into prison after similar show trials, and no one has said a thing. In the meantime, the Egyptian regime receives 2 billion dollars’ worth of weapons and cash from the United States each year.
If I had to sum up the Arab world by using one image, it would be that show trial: Regimes stamping out opposition—more often than not on the sly—under the cover of arguing that they are terrorists. The West stands by, looks on and, when necessary, offers a helping hand. That’s why you can’t decide whether the opposition is the Islamic variant of fascism or the Islamic variant of Christian democracy.
The truth is missing in dictatorships; that’s what makes the system so enduring. But there was more that made the Middle East opaque, and for that I had to go to Lebanon and the Holy Land.
PART II
Chapter Seven
A New World
In a book you can tell the important stories one after another, but in life they often overlap. For this reason, I have to take a step backwards in time, to under a year before the 9/11 attacks radically transformed my job as correspondent.
I transferred to another Dutch broadsheet, the NRC Handelsblad, where I could focus more on background pieces. I also went to work for the NOS Journaal television news program, where I’d be able to study the medium of television from the inside. And I decided to move—I’d had enough of the pollution and third world chaos of Cairo, and a couple of unpleasant things had happened to me.
I’d gotten into an Egyptian prison through the Dutch acquaintance of an inmate, and had come out feeling disgusted. After enduring the spectacle, in the boiling heat, of twenty men being confined in a cell measuring fift
een square meters, their feet having become deformed by enforced standing, and infections and sores caused by the toilet being in the cell ... Suddenly, I’d had enough of the cruelty with which some Egyptians treated their fellow men. I almost exploded at a taxi driver when he refused to get out of the way of a blaring ambulance, and a few weeks later at the zoo I knew that I wanted a trial separation from Cairo. It was full of unhealthy animals in rusty cages, rancid shrubbery, and rubbish everywhere. Worst of all were some of the visitors, screaming hysterically until one of the monkeys had a heart-wrenching panic attack, bombarding the elephants with fruit and stones, and feeding plastic to the giraffes. I was at the zoo with a Dutch girlfriend, and the kids kept throwing stones at us, too—apparently, we fell into the same category as the animals. As these things go, the kids egged each other on, until one of them dared to run up to us and say: “Fuckyouwoman!” That’s when the lights went out for me; when they came back on, the kid was lying on the ground. Bystanders hurried over to us and I began to apologize, but everyone reacted with complete understanding, and the boy offered his excuses. I’d always kept my cool in the past when faced with little bastards like these, but I was never shown so much respect as when I crossed the line with violence. I have to get away from here, I decided, there and then.
I looked at a map and thought, What place is more logical to go to than Lebanon? In the clichéd terms of the travel guides, it was the Switzerland of the Middle East, with snow-topped mountains, and an educated and cosmopolitan population. To Lebanon, then ... but I’d barely arrived when there were more changes. The peace process between Israel and Palestine ran aground in a new and violent conflict—what came to be known as the second intifadah. My colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had previously covered both Israel and Palestine; but when the violence escalated, I was called up.
So as well as covering the Arab world, I went to do another Big Story, and what a story it was. After the September 11 attacks, the Arab world had certainly become “closer” for the Europeans; however, as a diplomat explained, “Arabs and Palestinians are foreign policy; Israel is domestic news.”
I spoke to that diplomat during my first reception at the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv. In Cairo and Beirut, I’d been to four of these receptions; each time, whenever the Dutch national anthem was played, everyone had stood around sniggering in a typically Dutch way. In Tel Aviv, the same thing happened; but then the Israeli anthem was put on, and many of those present suddenly sang along heartily. This was new—sober Dutch people singing a national anthem with tears in their eyes, and a Dutch embassy playing the anthem of its host country. A while later, one of the guests told me that he sold apartments in Tel Aviv to Dutch Jews who no longer found Amsterdam safe because of its Moroccan youth gangs. Another said that he sold Amsterdam apartments to Dutch Jews who no longer found Tel Aviv safe because of the Palestinian attacks.
Reactions from the Netherlands also showed that my countrymen invested much more emotional capital in Israel and Palestine than in the Arab world. I’d received a few letters in response to my articles about the Arab world, but not many. On one occasion, someone with an Arabic last name had criticized the skewed image of his home region, and an Arabic embassy had once tried to explain away a human rights violation. Apart from that, it was pretty quiet; if I did receive letters, they were farcical. I’d recently trekked through the Sinai desert like the Israelites had in the Bible—in my case, though, for the travel supplement. They’d roamed around for years and I’d done so just for three days, but I hadn’t been able to wash any more than they had. I’d commented on this, at which a Bible-thumping pensmith had written in to inform me that the people of Israel cannot have stunk because it said in the Bible that they were very clean. I framed this kind of letter on the wall, just as I’d laughed off terse subscription cancellations: “You’re telling me things I don’t want to know! Enough of that paper of yours!”
When it came to Israel and Palestine, the laughter soon stopped. After just a few articles and cross-talks, an unstoppable flood came my way—faxes with crucifixes, threats, and accusations. If I made a factual error about the Arab world, the news floor would occasionally receive a letter saying, “Your correspondent has made a factual error.” If I made a factual error about Israel, five letters would arrive saying, “Your correspondent is anti-Semitic.” One time, I picked up the telephone and heard, “You’re going to die.” Even my colleague in Tel Aviv was attacked by a Dutch-speaking Israeli: “You’re in for it if that Luyendijk carries on writing those articles.”
It was a new world, and not just because my readers and viewers were emotionally involved. I’d occasionally used the words “media war” in an article, but it wasn’t until I was covering Israel and Palestine that I came to understand what they stood for. In a media war, everything is different, as became clear from my first trip.
The second intifadah had been going on for a few weeks by then. In the beginning, the casualties were mainly Palestinian, but then a crowd in Ramallah lynched two Israeli reservists in front of various camera teams who happened to be in the city. That same evening, Israel bombarded Palestinian cities for the first time since 1967; that was the signal for the world’s press to converge on the Holy Land, and for the NRC newspaper and the NOS broadcasting channel to enlist me.
Wide-eyed, I walked around the astonishingly quickly erected, yet superbly equipped press center in the five-star Isrotel in the Jewish part of Jerusalem. I’d seen Hezbollah and Arab dictatorship press centers, but this was of a different order. As I hesitated over free coffee, tea in eight different flavors, three types of fruit juice, and piles of bread-roll sandwiches, young Israeli men and women walked round in olive-green army uniforms handing out sheets of great quotes. In efficient, friendly, and fluent English, they told us about the forthcoming press conference and the briefing later that day to be given by a defense specialist.
It was so professional: Pictures of the lynching, route descriptions to the cemetery where the reservists were buried ... The world’s media were given everything they needed with practiced skill, and more: Rights-free archive material of Israeli soldiers giving first aid to Palestinians; the phone numbers of spokesmen who could explain the government’s perspective in any major language and in the required number of words; dossiers full of information; print-outs of websites, and piles of leaflets entitled “Terror or occupation—which came first?”
I came across countless journalists who seemed to find this totally normal as they paced up and down across the rugs, discussing the finer details of what they would produce for their newsroom back home, and when and how, with their mobiles clamped to their ears. Jerusalem Capital Studios, which had the satellite connection that correspondents used for their cross-talks with the news programs, was situated next to the Isrotel. This was handy, since many a reporter was expected to give an account of events that same evening, even though he or she had barely set foot upon Israeli, let alone Palestinian, soil.
What kind of world was this? The intifadah escalated, I shuttled between Lebanon and the Holy Land, and with every trip my astonishment grew. A complete alphabet of “optimistic stories” had been cooked up for the correspondents: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic children together in one school; olive branches from Israelis and Palestinians; joint musical performances. You only had to telephone the Palestinian or Israeli organizers of these hopeful projects ... and the great quotes, checkable information, and striking visual details would be served to you on a plate.
The Israeli government press office called me up. “We’ve got an exclusive for you: A Dutch-speaking Jewish woman who has voluntarily joined the army because she realizes that Israel is in danger; an English-speaking terrorism expert who can explain what that danger consists of; and a settler whose son was killed in one of the attacks.” An American correspondent told me that her TV station only flew in reporters for a couple of weeks. “They’ve got to score, score, score. When someone comes up with a ready-made script, th
ey jump at it.” Next time I saw a settler crying his eyes out on television, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering how many camera crews he’d already taken to his son’s grave. And how is something like that set up? “You’re speaking to the government press office. Our condolences for the loss of your child. I’ve got three journalists here, and it’s your patriotic duty to talk to them about your grief?”
I visited a six-story block of flats in Gaza that had just been bombed by Israel. I spoke to neighbors and surviving relatives, and looked for clean-cut illustrations of clichés like despair and bewilderment. A woman told me that the thought that she had to get the washing machine repaired was still going round in her mind. “But then I realized that it lay underneath the rubble. Just like my husband.” Bingo, great quote, and as I went off I saw someone laying brand-new babies’ clothes under the debris, for the camera crews who were on their way.
Every few days I experienced something like this, and the most remarkable thing was the openness with which media manipulation was discussed in Israel. After enduring an attack that caused a high civilian death toll, the Israeli government would wait a standard twenty-four hours before retaliating. The world’s press was given time to pause and reflect on Israeli suffering because, as soon as Israel took revenge, that would dominate the headlines. The Hassadah hospital in Jerusalem allowed camera crews to visit victims of terrorism so they could “show as much blood, pain and tears as possible,” to use the words of an Israeli spokesperson. After one exceptionally large Palestinian attack, the bodies of the victims weren’t removed immediately because the prime minister wanted to record his statement in front of a backdrop of eighteen body bags and a burned-out bus. Other examples of the candor with which Israelis discussed influencing the media included an Israeli government minister heartily complimenting a camera crew who had been clever enough to film a few Palestinians cheering after the September 11 attacks—shot in close-up, it looked like there were quite a lot of them, and the clip was often replayed on American TV; the Israeli government press office proudly announcing that it had forced CNN to make a series about the victims of terrorism to make good for having interviewed the relatives of the perpetrator of an attack; and a Jewish-American businessman bragging to the Israeli media that he’d managed to get rid of the critical correspondent of the Miami Herald by threatening to withdraw advertisements from it.
People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East Page 10
