I thought reporting in Egypt was hard

AUC-QU Bootcamp A partnership of The American University in Cairo and Qatar University, funded by the Carnegie Corporation in New York, QU and the United States Agency for International Development

“Don’t call me back. I will get in touch with you if I find anyone willing to talk.” Click.

That was one of several similar conversations I’ve had with sources here in Qatar. They refuse to speak to me and when I ask for contacts, they brush me off and hurry to warn those around them about the journalist who might call them for information.

The result: in a week of interviews I have two people who have agreed to go on the record- anonymously. Even my official source at the embassy didn’t want his name mentioned.

There is an epidemic fear amongst expatriates here that a small misstep will get them fired and deported. And rightly so. According to Arab News Network, 700 Egyptians were sacked in 1998 because of a dispute between Qatar and Egypt.

However, as my partner Rachel, who collects examples of irony, would note; it’s ironic that we are facing this problem since our story is about Egyptians that have already been sacked due to Qatarization and/or a dip in the Qatari economy. But no, the same fear persists, defying all logic.

The greater irony is that this issue contradicts a lot of what we are being told over and over again in the lectures of this boot camp, about the liberalization of Qatar and its media.

So much so that when I asked Ahmed Al-Sheikh, AlJazeera Arabic’s editor-in-chief, what obstacles they faced in reporting about Qatar, he said that not only are there no obstacles, but there are no stories to report on in this tiny country with the highest per capita income in the world.

But if things are so hunky dory, as both the press-release-plagued newspapers here and the most critical Arab medium are insisting, then how did we, 24 students from Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. come up with so many Qatar-related stories to write about? Stories from restrictions on the marriage of women to non-nationals to the Westernization of the educational system and the buying by the state of lands abroad to try and grow crops that can feed the growing population at home. Is it possible that these topics don’t crop up in news meetings here, not even in news room gossip?

Another rather useless lecture that we had was on journalism ethics and was given by Ibrahim AbuSharif from North Western University Qatar. It was a typical talk on the penetration of convergence and the debate on balance and objectivity, using martyr versus dead, genocide versus crime, printing the cartoons of the prophet or refraining from provocations.

But, like many lectures I have received over the past four years, it was given from the standpoint of the American journalist; the one who has paper-trials, numbers and official sources at his fingertips, and can objectively decide what to use and what to discard. But how do we, as journalists practicing in the Middle East, make that choice? We have only so many bits of information given on the record, how is it possible for us to present the multi-sided story?

I have been told for very long that the problem with Arab journalists lies in their training, in their inability to understand the meaning of balance and objectivity. If there is anything I am learning from this boot camp, it is that the problem is with the societies that these journalists operate in.

A story from my school paper: Israel has no right to exist, AUC Arabs unanimously tell Caravan poll

This story is taken from the last issue that I oversaw as editor-in-chief of the American University in Cairo’s Caravan. It is written by Samura Atallah, one of those who blogged Obama’s speech for NYT and who is currently assisting NYT’s Micheal Slackman in Cairo before her transfer to Brown University in the fall. The rest of the stories can be viewed at auccaravan.org

Despite studying at The American University in Cairo, the majority of Arab students here support a hardline view denying Israel’s right to exist, and that U.S. foreign policy is biased towards Israel.

The Caravan conducted a random poll of 100 Arab students on campus during April. Those selected had to be native to the Middle East, and were asked to respond to questions in a one-on-one interview.

Those polled unanimously opposed the existence of the Jewish state, while half said they did not separate Israel from America.

“The Palestinian land is not Israel’s territory,” said Samar Abul Ezz, an Egyptian studying business.

“They don’t have the right to exist because they took a big piece of land they don’t have the right to,” said Omar El Mohandes, an Egyptian mass communications student.

Students said they didn’t differentiate between the two countries due to the flow of monetary support–Israel has received an estimated $118 billion in aid from the U.S. since its inception, according to government records–and the political solidarity between them.

“We can’t separate them because the U.S. has been the biggest supporter for Israel militarily and economically,” said Yasmine Dinana, another Egyptian mass communications student. “Its foreign policy is directly affected by Israel.”

“It’s unfair how the U.S. supports one county over the other,” said Nadeem Elqershi, a Yemeni and a mechanical engineering junior. “It should change, but it won’t, because this is how it is.”

When contacted, Robert Greenan, spokesman at the American Embassy in Cairo, said it was their policy not to comment on opinion polls.

Provost Lisa Anderson said she also did not want to comment on the survey’s findings.

“Students are entitled to their opinions and it would be inappropriate of any member of the senior administration to endorse or condemn the opinions of students, or faculty for that matter,” she wrote in an email to the Caravan.

Her counterpart, President David Arnold, said whatever the ideas expressed, there is no effort at the university to shape students’ political opinion.

“We are not in the business of trying to produce people who are, quote, more friendly to America,” Arnold said. “Our former provost Tim Sullivan was very fond of saying our job is not to teach you what to think but to teach you how to think and I think that’s the essence of a good AUC education.”

Yet there are some “universal” values that AUC sets in the core of their values such as tolerance, respect for other cultures and religions, and an openness to people and opinions that are different from one’s own, Arnold said.

The poll also found the habit of blaming Israel for the Arab world’s problems exists at the university, with 60 percent citing the country as the reason for at least some of the region’s troubles.

But some respondents allowed blame to be placed on Arab countries too for the region’s troubles.

“We don’t have to blame other states for Arab world’s problems, the Palestinian conflict is no exception,” said Alqershi. “It has to be solved by Arabs, and only Arabs.”

Despite the election of President Barack Obama, who has pledged to improve relations with the Muslim world and has pushed Israel to accept a two-state solution to the conflict, most participants in the poll said they remained skeptical about U.S. foreign policy changing in regards to the conflict.

One who wasn’t was Laila Abdelkhaliq Zamora, a Palestinian in political science who counted the U.S. as an ally. She hoped its policies changed. “It would benefit in the long term with Arab countries,” she said.

- By Samura Atallah

Yes, but…(published in The New York Times)

I was skeptical, I was looking for holes, I was ready with fingers on my keyboard to note any mistake (and there were many), but ultimately, President Barack Obama’s speech appealed to me. He struck all the right chords, using all the right verses of the Qur’an and being brutally honest about the lack of democracy in the very country where he was standing and the abuse of the Palestinian issue by leaders to avoid the democracy issue.

Those around me were not so convinced. “I expected more,” said one of my friends, curled up on the sofa beside me. “You can’t justify the invasion of Afghanistan and spreading chaos and bloodshed for all these years, no matter how ‘traumatic’ 9/11 was.” She added, rightly, that Egypt and Algeria had been the targets of terrorists many times, (Egypt in particular is home to the Muslim Brotherhood, who preaches hatred against America), but no one would tolerate an invasion of these lands. It is not, as the president said himself, America’s job to save us.

But, and this is assuming for a minute the Bush administration’s motives for the invasion were what Obama said they were, knowing that al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan is reason enough to go there and uproot them. No, that’s not where the contradiction lies. Obama said it was a fact that 3,000 people had died on 9/11. It is also a fact that the remnants of the Afghan jihad who later became al-Qaeda were formerly supported by the U.S in the fight against the former Soviet Union, and became radicalized after America’s Arab allies denied them return to their homelands.

Obama’s hurried research about Islam, though a much appreciated gesture by all audiences was off in some places; he pronounced the veil “hajib” instead of “hijab” and failed to come anywhere near the correct pronunciation of Al-Azhar, the 2,000-year-old religious school he referenced so many times.

All these were bland bumps in his speech. Where Obama really lost us is Palestine. He didn’t beat around the bush, at least, and made it clear right away that the American bond with Israel was unbreakable. But he has clearly failed to understand that the problem Muslims have is not seeing both sides of the conflict, but seeing the conflict in historical context. I can safely say that Muslims do not and never will feel responsible for the Holocaust, and do not think it justifies setting up a Jewish state upon Palestinian lands. Lands, which, have shrunk over the decades as settlements have continued to rise and more and more territory has been annexed. And despite the beauty of the words he used about Jerusalem, it was heavily symbolic talk about a messy issue. Palestinians and Israeli may agree on everything, but they will never relinquish their rights to Jerusalem as the capital of their respective nations.

I called my uncle, an avid supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood who had watched the speech on al-Jazeera, to get his take. He was angered by the general and what he thought was unfair treatment of the Palestinian issue. “Hamas should recognize Israel, shouldn’t Israel recognize Hamas? And this Israeli state, what are its borders, and where will the displaced Palestinians go?” Even he agreed, though, that the speech would win over the Muslim world.

Do you know, Obama?

For a second I thought the taxi-driver would tell me to get out of the
car. We had driven no more than a few metres before meeting a barrage
of police trucks, army personnel and plain clothes security officials;
the road was blocked. We turn and try another road, it is blocked too.
I begin to wonder if I will make it to my friend’s place on time for
the speech.

“What is this Obama going to do for us anyway?” bursts out the
taxi-driver. “What does he have in his hands. This is not what we
need!”

He lights up a cigarette and contemplates his options. Several other
drivers around us are doing the same. Smoking while driving is illegal
but clearly the police officers lined up around the block have bigger
problems on their mind.

President Barack Obama was in the Kobba Palace shaking hands with
Hosni Mubarak and making his preliminary statements to the Egyptian
press. He will shortly leave the palace in Heliopolis, where we were
trapped, and head to Cairo University on the other side of town to
deliver his speech.

I receive a call from an American-photographer-friend. He had been
promised permission to watch the speech live by the Egyptian
government controlled Middle East News agency but was denied it at the
last minute. He was now roaming downtown trying to shoot the unusually
empty streets and rows of national security officers, but was
receiving yells about permission to shoot in public- everything in
Egypt needs special permission.

Obama will be speaking at 1 pm, right after the call for noon prayer
has gone. The Muslims he is trying to reach out to, those that put God
above everything and believe jihad is the duty of every good Muslim,
will probably miss the first part of his speech. Others will think God
will forgive them, because this is Obama, I am among the latter.

I make it to my friend’s place through side streets and alleys, but
clearly my plans to head downtown after the speech are ruined The
normally 5 LE trip has cost me double and already I am irritated by
the advent of this American Gamal Abdel Nasser, who will reach out to
us with all his charisma but turn around and pledge unyielding loyalty
to AIPAC. Still I sit down and listen to the much awaited speech,
wondering if Obama knows about the 20 million Cairenes he has placed
under house arrest and hoping it is worth it.

Why investigate an already sexy story? Just pass the sentence.

Decent reporting in the Middle East is a rare find. We all know that. Even when Al Shorouk came out late February with a scoop story that exposed an Israeli attack on Sudanese targets, the report had no named sources and few attributable facts. It was sheer luck that the story was confirmed by CBS and the New York Times a day later, otherwise the newly established paper would have been sued off the racks.

But when two of the most prominent journalists in the region go to cover a murder trial and come back with no more than the following it starts to seem like it’s becoming the norm to take things at face value:-

” [Hesham Talaat Moustafa] was part of the most elite strata of Egyptian society, a high roller of the type that Egyptians have long assumed to operate beyond the reach of the law.” -Michael Slackman, New York Times

“Is this case a sign that the regime is recognizing the mistake of mixing public and private money?” – Hussein Abdel Ghani, AlJazeera TV (translation added).

Not only was he completely off the mark, but Abdel Ghani’s stand up before the camera was a disgrace to objectivity. There was not a single soundbite in his peice that refered to “the mixing of public and private money.” As a journalist, he has no right to draw such inferences from his own opinion, even if he veiled his act by adding a question mark. I say his own opinion because Abdel Ghani, and Slackman, forgot to look at the facts for more than two seconds and ask the obvious question.

The facts are this: last summer a businessman and parliament member Mamdouh Ismail was acquitted after more than 1,000 people drowned when a ferry that he owned sank in the Red Sea because it had been allowed to sail despite evident flaws.

Earlier another businessman who is a member of parliament was acquitted after badly stored blood bags from his medical equipment manufacturer let to the infection and subsequent deaths of several Egyptians.

The list goes on, from cancerous fertilizers imported by the minister of agriculture to monopolizing the steel industry. And each time the culprit is protected by his parliamentary immunity.

It’s naive to simply accept that the regime is caving in to the masses on this one. Even if the National Democratic Party wanted to make a show of democracy, it wouldn’t go as far as giving one of its own a death sentence.

And one can’t help but be suspicious of the swiftness of justice. Egyptian trials normally take years and this one is almost over in less than one.  Not only was Moustafa found guilty faster than you could say “corruption” but state-owned papers were quick to plaster evidence against him all over their pages in spread-long “investigative” peices on the murder, the information for which they had been fed by unusually cooperative official sources.

The question that should have been asked is why didn’t this particular politician’s immunity kick in? Why was he abandoned by his cronies at the NDP and even by his business group? Who did Moustafa anger so much to be punished in this way?

And now I wonder why nobody asked those questions. Why the creme-de-la-creme of journalists in the Middle East wrote their stories based on news reports and a couple of weak sound bites.

Are the words “death penalty” in the headline just sexy enough on their own?

La Lutte Commence Maintenant ‎

(To Miriam, for changing the way I look at things)

So the fragile cease-fire is breaking already, raise your hand if you’re surprised.

Even if the truce had held for a month or a year, the cycle would have picked up again some time. It would have gone something like this: after Gaza and the West Bank are destroyed, Israel and its peers call for its reconstruction, for democratic elections that will bring a new government. A new faction takes over, and calls for the usual, ending the occupation, allowing free trade along the Gaza strip, opening the borders, taking down the apartheid wall. Israel refuses. Palestinian’s get frustrated and violent. Some faction or other begins to rearm, causing Israel to label it before the international community as a terrorist organisation, and before the city has had the chance to get on its two feet, Israel finds an excuse to bring it crashing back down to its knees.

In fact, the excuse is there all along, because Palestinians will get more desperate, and while I am disgusted at Hamas for using the Palestinian condition for their own political gain, Israel will use the Palestinians’ own desperation against them and the human bodies will start to hit the fan again.

But another cycle has shown its face in this war, and though its effects may not seem too disastrous, if reversed, could bring about some sort of force for Israel to reckon with.

This cycle goes something like this; Israel lashes out at one neighbour or the other, Muslims the world over go on demonstrations, and while they’re out there vandalize Jewish institutions. Jews and Muslims in France, Germany, Holland, Canada are at each other’s throats, there is a battle of labels between ‘Muslim media’ and ‘Jewish media.’ Israel picks up on it, using the acts of anti-Semitism to garner sympathy for itself, and prove to the world just how many enemies it has out there, and why a Jewish fortress in the Holy Land is necessary.

But the truth is, there are a lot of Jews out there, even Israelis, who have fought harder for this cause than you or me. And to me they are more noble than some Palestinians, because they had to go against their social, political, and maybe even religious norms, become isolated, despised, imprisoned, because they saw things from a different point of view.

Case in point:

“Today I am about to refuse serving in the Israeli army. I have witnessed this army demolishing, shooting and humiliating people whom I did not know, but have learnt to respect for their ability to go on dealing with these horrors on a daily basis. Reality is complex, of course. There’s history, politics, politicians, boarders, flags. There’s supposed to be a good reason for all of this. This reason is supposed to be my defense. I feel like screaming: ‘This does not defend me! It hurts me!’ It hurts me when people, Palestinians, are being so brutally assaulted, and it hurts me when they later turn their hatred towards me because of it. I wasn’t born to serve as a soldier who occupies another, and the struggle against the occupation is mine too. It is a struggle for hope, for a reality that sometimes feels so far away. I have a responsibility for this society. My responsibility is to refuse.” Raz Bar-David Varon

Varon is a young Israeli woman, currently serving her 4^th prison term for refusing to serve in the army. There are 628 more refuseniks, enrolled in an Israeli group called Courage to Refuse.

Let’s get one thing straight. CtR is a Zionist group. They believe in Israel’s right to exist, which conflicts my belief and probably yours. But the group actively recruits and supports people who refrain from killing Gazans. They publish pieces in Ha’aretz, they have a voice within Israel, one which calls for the withdrawal back to the ’67 borders and ending the occupation.

I don’t care what they believe in, they live in a democracy, their vote affects who runs the IDF, and their interests are the same as mine; they have my support.

Case in point 2:

“No matter the claims of the Israeli government, who, as you would expect, have trumpeted an overwhelming victory in Gaza, something else is perceived by the rest of the world. Even in the US, things are starting to break against the finely tuned Israeli propaganda machine. Perhaps the most startling media example of this was a recent press conference in Washington where Foreign Minister Livni was essentially confronted as a terrorist. Given her recent fatuous claims that there was no humanitarian disaster in Gaza and that Israel, alone and in disregard of UN resolutions will decide when the Gaza campaign is finished,  it seems as if there is some little ray of hope that Israel will start to feel the real effects of its frank crimes against humanity in Gaza. This will hopefully be leveraged by media outrage of the banning of reporters during the 3 week offensive, where even the NY Times expressed concern.  Hopefully this massive war crime will spur all parties concerned to make a more concerted effort to develop a just peace for all peoples in the region.”- Muzzle Watch, affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace- United States.

I don’t care what they believe in, they live in a democracy, their vote affects who runs the White House, and consequently the IDF, and their interests are the same as mine; they have my support.

Because these groups are fighting the mainstream in their respective countries, they don’t get a lot of leeway. More powerful lobbies try hard to shut out coverage of their activities and they are heavily outnumbered.

So you’d think Al Jazeera would give them a voice. You’d think Egyptian preachers would stop saying things like “God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at and whom he cursed so he made monkeys and pigs out of them. They killed prophets and messengers and sowed corruption on Earth. They are the most evil on Earth” in their Friday sermons. You’d think Muslims in Europe would stop vandalizing synagogue’s as an expression of anger. And, you’d think we’d know it was best for us to put aside our stereotypes and start looking for the people who shared an interest with us, and who had a way of realizing those interests, and get on their side.

There are so many divides that need to be closed before a wall strong enough to ward off Israel can exist. One of them is between Arabs and Pro-Palestinian Jews. And a huge change in mentalities is needed for that. A change in mentalities is needed for a lot of things in this battle. When Hamas leaders tell Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim population that this destruction is acceptable because these people will die martyrs, that’s destructive thinking. When we are convinced that this battle between ‘us’ and ‘the Jews’ is decreed by God to last forever that’s mass self-sabotage. And when we see eye to eye with a group of people but refuse to put our hands in theirs because of a fundamentalist stereotype, that’s disastrous and inexcusable.

Try it. Stop saying “Yahod” when you’re angry, and say “the Israeli government.”

DEATH TOLL

1,300 PALESTINIANS; 13 ISRAELIS

HOMELESS: 50,000 PALESTINIANS; 0 ISRALIES

PEOPLE WITHOUT ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER; 400,000 PALESTINIANS,  0 ISRAELIS

I’ll stop trading with Israel if you do first!

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors- William Ralph Inge

At the start of the conflict, Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a fatwa that anyone who fought for Gaza and died would be a martyr. A week later, after 70,000 Iranians had gathered, prepared to give their lives, he quietly withdrew his call for martyrdom, saying in the end Iran’s hands were ‘tied in this arena.’ Despite that Iran has not calmed for a minute its lashing out at Arab leaders for standing and watching Gazans die and for their ‘conspiring with the Zionist state.’

Qatar’s Emir also called for an Arab boycott of Israel and her supporters, but, locally, declined to freeze its trade ties with Israel until the third week of the Israeli offensive.

The list goes on, but that is diplomacy. You say something to your people to keep them happy and something else to your neighbours to keep them from declaring war against you.

What really demonstrates hypocrisy, if not stupidity, is the reaction of the Arab peoples. For they too, have taken the same rhetoric of blaming  every country in the ‘Arab nation’ except the one they belong to for not taking a stand against Israel and the US.

Let’s call things by their names. Arab brotherhood or unity or whatever other name it has taken is a sham. And Jordanians who protest infront of the Egyptian embassy do that because protesting before the Jordanian parliament would get them all arrested and tortured. And Saudis can criticise those who support America either by selling her gas or buying McDonalds in their Friday sermons but they can’t tell his royal highness the king to use his oil weapon to pressure the US because they’d mysteriously disappear.

In fact, while I have been ashamed by the Egyptian government’s attitude over the past month, I have to say the Egyptians themselves have been the only people honest enough to admit to the rest of the world that their own government has betrayed the Palestinians just like the rest of the Arab speaking countries have.

In every war that I have lived through, whether between the US and Iraq, Palestine and Israel, or Israel and Lebanon, Arabs, and I mean the Arab people sitting at home watching TV, have abandoned the core issue of what needs to be done and wasted their energy on criticising their neighbours for what they haven’t done, using that as a mental shield so they wouldn’t have to see their own misgivings. All because we share a language. Venezualans speak Spanish, but they didn’t wait for an agreement with Spain to collectively boycott Israel.

Calling for collective action is just something we buy time with so we don’t have to take individual action. So go demonstrate infront of your own government. Go demand for the dismissal of the Israeli ambassador and the freezing of trade ties with Israel in your country. Go ask your ruler to stop selling gas to the US. Go protest the presence of American bases on your land.  And stop worrying about what the rest of the Arab nation is doing.

DEATH TOLL: 1, 115 PALESTINIAN, 13 ISRAELIS

DEATH TOLL: 1019 PALESTINIANS, 13 ISRAELIS