CAIRO, April
3 — It was a picture of Arab
grief and rage. A teen-aged
boy glared from the rubble of
a bombed building as a veiled
woman shrieked over the
prostrate body of a relative.
In fact, it
was two pictures: one from the
American-led war in Iraq and
the other from the Palestinian
territories, blended into one
image this week on the Web
site of the popular Saudi
daily newspaper Al Watan.
The meaning
would be clear to any Arab
reader: what is happening in
Iraq is part of one continuous
brutal assault by America and
its allies on defenseless
Arabs, wherever they are.
As the Iraq
war moved into its third week,
the media in the region have
increasingly fused images and
enemies from this and other
conflicts into a single
bloodstained tableau of Arab
grievance.
The Israeli
flag is superimposed on the
American flag. The Crusades
and the 13th-century Mongul
sack of Baghdad, recalled as
barbarian attacks on Arab
civilization, are used as
synonyms for the American-led
invasion of Iraq. Horrific
vignettes of the helpless —
armless children, crushed
babies, stunned mothers —
cascade into Arab living rooms
from the front pages of
newspapers and television
screens.
For Arab
leaders and Arab moderates,
supported by Washington, the
war has become a political
crisis of street protests,
militant calls for holy war
and bitter public criticism of
their ties to the United
States.
They had
hoped for a short war with a
minimum of inflammatory
pictures of Iraqi civilian
casualties. Instead, the daily
message to the public from
much of the media is that
American troops are callous
killers, that only resistance
to the United States can
redeem Arab pride and that the
Iraqis are fighting a pan-Arab
battle for self-respect.
"The
media are playing a very
dangerous game in this
conflict," said Abdel
Moneim Said, director of the
Al Ahram Center for Political
and Strategic Studies in
Cairo. "When you see the
vocabulary and the images
used, it is actually bringing
everybody to the worst
nightmare — the clash of
civilizations."
Sensationalism
has not gripped all media.
Some mainline government-owned
newspapers like the staid Al
Ahram in Egypt and two of the
privately owned international
Arabic papers based in London,
Al Hayat and Asharq Al- Awsat,
have reported the war in
neutral language. They show
bandaged victims in Iraqi
hospitals but not the gory
pictures of ripped bodies that
fill the pages of their
competitors.
Government
control of the media is not
the issue in any case, since
nearly all newspapers in the
Arab world, including those
with the most savage coverage
of the American invasion,
publish at the pleasure of the
governments. In most
countries, the government
appoints all newspaper
editors, even for the
so-called opposition press,
and even a privately owned
paper like Al Watan in Saudi
Arabia must toe the government
line in reporting on domestic
politics and personalities.
The biggest
influence on much of the media
coverage has come from the
satellite news channel Al
Jazeera, which started
broadcasting from Qatar in
1996. It made its name with
on-the-spot coverage of the
Palestinian uprising that gave
viewers an unblinking look at
bloody and broken bodies.
Many
governments, aware that Al
Jazeera is widely considered
by Arab audiences to be
credible, have allowed their
own stations to run Jazeera
footage of the war to
demonstrate their own anti-war
credentials. (On Wednesday, Al
Jazeera announced that it was
suspending its reporting from
Iraq after the Iraqi
government barred two of its
correspondents in Baghdad.)
The rage
against the United States is
fed by this steady diet of
close-up color photographs and
television footage of dead and
wounded Iraqis, invariably
described as victims of
American bombs. In recent
days, more and more Arabic
newspapers have run headlines
bluntly accusing soldiers of
deliberately killing
civilians.
Even for
those accustomed to seeing
such images from Arab coverage
of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, the daily barrage of
war coverage in newspapers and
on hourly television reports
has left many Arabs beside
themselves with anger.
"He is
`Shaytan,' that Bush,"
shouted Ali Hammouda, a
newsstand operator in Cairo,
using the Arabic word for
Satan and pointing with
shaking hands to a color
photograph in one of his
newspapers.
The image,
published in many Arabic
papers, showed the bloody
bodies of a stick-thin woman
and a baby, said to be victims
of American shelling in
central Iraq. They were lying
in an open wooden coffin, the
baby's green pacifier still in
its mouth.
"Your
Bush says he is coming to make
them free, but look at this
lady," Mr. Hammouda
exclaimed. "Is she free?
What did she do? What did her
baby do?"
Fahmi
Howeidy, a prominent Islamist
writer in Cairo, says the
reactions are not necessarily
pro-Saddam. "Of course we
think Saddam Hussein will not
continue in power, but if he
resists for weeks, at least he
will defend his image as a
hero who could resist U.S. and
British power," Mr.
Howeidy said.
"If
this happens, we can expect
chaos in the Arab world,
because we don't know how the
people who already criticize
Arab regimes will express
their anger after that,"
he added. "Maybe there
would be an extremist group or
a single person who would do
something against the
government. We don't know
about the army, but maybe
there are people who feel
humiliated."
Since the
war began, much of the Arabic
press and the private Arab
satellite stations have
displayed no squeamishness
about what they show. War is
carnage, the editors have
said, so why mute the screams
or hide the entrails of the
wounded and dead?
"Arabs,
like anybody else, don't like
the sight of blood or pictures
of corpses, but it's a matter
of principle that we have the
right to know what's
happening," said Gasa
Mustafa Abaido, an assistant
professor of communications at
Ain Shams University in Cairo.
"What we see in the media
is an indirect way for the
governments and the public to
reject the war."
The images,
however, are not presented as
fragmentary evidence of the
evils of war but as
illustrations of a definitive
black-and-white view of the
war and the United States. The
way they are presented, and
the language that accompanies
them, amplifies their impact.
President
Bush, in one Egyptian weekly
newspaper, is shown on each
page of war coverage in a Nazi
uniform. American and British
forces are called "allies
of the devil." Civilian
casualties are frequently
reported as
"massacres" or, as
another Egyptian paper said,
an "American
Holocaust."
A popular
Arabic Web site, one of many
to display the most gruesome
images of the war, showed a
picture of a little girl
bleeding from her eye, the
same image that was used by
many newspapers in the region.
The caption reads: "My
dead mother is liberated and
so am I."
Al Manar, a
satellite channel run by the
Muslim militant group
Hezbollah, broadcasts pictures
of wounded children in tandem
with Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's declaration that
American weaponry is the most
precise in the history of
warfare.
The Arab
media's reporting of the war
may also weaken the
credibility of more moderate
voices that avoid brutal
imagery and metaphors of
endless victimization.
"In the
longer run, these images can
breed a certain type of
people, not the ones who are
looking to develop our
societies but those who think
how to sacrifice
themselves," said Dr.
Said, of the Al Ahram Center
in Cairo.
As an Arab
moderate who calls for liberal
reforms and
"renaissance," he
said, "I personally find
great difficulty communicating
that language to the public.
People are infuriated and
helpless, and they feel that
the more radical language
gives them a sense of
comfort."
Anti-American
sentiment among Arabs, largely
based on the belief that
United States policy is tilted
sharply in favor of Israel,
was present long before the
war on Iraq. Widespread
sympathy for the Iraqi people,
fed by the images of the
wounded and dead, has
intensified that sentiment.
In the
mushrooming antiwar
demonstrations, protesters
have repeatedly called on
their leaders to take action
against the United States,
either by tossing out American
diplomats or refusing to let
Arab airspace be used for
military flights.
Arab
leaders, pragmatists by
necessity, have tried to
accommodate those feelings,
while also trying not to
jeopardize their defense and
foreign aid arrangements with
Washington.
"Most
people realize that it's not
in our national interest to
burn our bridges with the
U.S.," said a senior
Jordanian official. "But
people are frustrated. That's
the main thing, and that's
something we are all aware
of."
The concern
was underlined on Wednesday,
when Jordan's King Abdullah II
told the state news agency,
Petra, that the television
reports of Iraqi civilian
casualties in the war made him
"pained and
saddened."
"No
country has supported Iraq
like Jordan," the king
said. "We had said `no'
to attacking Iraq when many
said `yes.' "
Similarly,
President Hosni Mubarak of
Egypt spoke out in his own
defense this week in a speech
to army officers. He said
Egypt used "our entire
weight" to influence the
United States in an effort to
avert the war but failed.
While they
are concerned about rising
public anger, it is unlikely
that any Arab leaders worry
about antiwar protesters
storming their palaces or
offices. Changes of government
in the region have not
occurred that way.
Rather, the
leaders fear that others might
exploit any instability.
In that
scenario, played out in Turkey
in 1980 when terrorists
threatened the government,
antiwar protests could evolve
into rolling anti-government
riots, the army would be
called in to restore order,
and some generals might decide
to take power on the pretext
of ensuring national
stability.
In Saudi
Arabia and its smaller Gulf
neighbors, the scenario
imagined by diplomats and
other political analysts could
involve a challenge from
anti-Western or fundamentalist
cliques of princes within the
ruling families.
All that is
speculation. But if the war in
Iraq does not end soon, say
many Arab intellectuals, the
iconic images of bloodied
Iraqis and brave resistance
fighters could create a
dangerous backlash of
extremism.
A prolonged
war, accompanied by a parade
of gut-wrenching images of
Iraqi casualties blamed on the
cruelty of American forces,
could also immobilize
fledgling reform movements.
"Some
people said, before the
invasion of Iraq, that solving
the Saddam problem would make
the reputation of the U.S.
better," said Turki al-Hamad,
a Saudi commentator who
advocates democratic reforms
in the kingdom. "Now if
the United States said 2 plus
2 is 4, no one would believe
them."