Egyptians are justifiably proud that Cairo is one of the safest big cities in the world, but you are rarely going to read that in the mainstream U.S. press. In a democratic Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably be the largest single political party; the Brotherhood remains committed to nonviolence even though the American-supported Mubarak regime continues to arrest, torture and imprison its members. But you are not going to see long interviews with its leaders on U.S. television.
Joris Luyendijk is an accomplished Arabic-speaking Dutch journalist, still in his 30s, who spent 5 years (1998-2003) as a correspondent in both the Arab world and Israel and has written a brilliant and indispensable book about his experience. If he were American, People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East would surely get him blacklisted from the big papers and the TV networks.
The first half of this remarkable book is about the distorted press coverage of the Arab world; then he turns to Israel, where he shows how the government skillfully manages its international image.
Luyendijk starts by explaining that the glamorous correspondent is often basically just a front man for the news agencies like the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France Presse, which have already gathered the actual information. “The basic task of being a correspondent is not that difficult,” he explains. His job was to get himself to wherever the news had happened, collect the all-important dateline, and then repackage what the wire services had already reported. The on-camera Q&A session may look impromptu, but the presenter knows all the questions beforehand.
At first, Luyendijk found these deceptions embarrassing and comical. But he had studied in Cairo before he became a reporter, and he grew disturbed at how distorted his own coverage was becoming by default, because conventional reporting meant he had to leave out much of reality. He points out that “dancing Arabic letters” look exotic in photos and film, “until you’re told that those strange letters spell out things like ‘Egyptian museum next exit,’ or ‘Lipton’s – the most delicious tea in the world.’”
(He does not mention using “Allah” instead of “God” in articles that are otherwise in English, another exoticizing technique that is surely sometimes deliberate. Articles about France or Latin America do not leave “Dieu” or “Dios” untranslated.)
He found he was covering “summit meetings, attacks, bombings, or diplomatic stratagems,” but he says that also “you have celebrity chefs in the Arab world, and soaps, and shows with hidden cameras, and studios full of serious, grown-up men in suits arguing about football.”
Luyendijk was most disturbed by his own reports on Arab women. He got “great quotes” that showed women are second-class citizens, but his articles “were all giving the impression that Egyptian women were miserable, repressed souls – which ran completely counter to my daily experience of them.”
Some of the distortion is due to the nature of “news.” “When someone is shot on Dam Square in Amsterdam,” he says, “it’s news, but Dutch people know that people aren’t normally shot there. . . Before I went to Syria, I’d seen ‘angry demonstrations in Syria’ on the news; no wonder I’d concluded they hated us and that Syria was unsafe. If you are told only about the exceptions, you’ll think they are the rule.”
As he continued reporting, though, he came to believe that the dictatorships that dominate the Arab world are the greatest obstacle to accurate reporting. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the worst, with Syria in second place, but even the less extreme repression in Egypt can make local people afraid to talk, even privately. You can’t trust government statements, or even basic statistics.
That most Arabs live under dictatorships is not news, although Luyendijk is good at making you feel what the daily fear might be like. Less well known is that “Western governments had been supporting the most important Arab dictatorships – namely, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Algeria – with money, weapons and intelligence for decades.” He points out that Osama Bin Laden makes this point in nearly every propaganda video, but the West pays no attention.
Luyendijk closes the first half of his book with his valuable look at the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. He reports on yet another show trial, this one of 78 Brothers, who are sentenced to years of hard labor without any plausible evidence. The result is in effect a death sentence for the older prisoners. There is no significant overseas coverage of the trial, or protest by Western governments.
He suggests how the Brothers might be explained to the outside world: “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 they want to realize their ideals without using violence, through their local training college, hospital, or law clinic. Perhaps all 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.’”
After a couple of years, Luyendijk left Cairo, and started concentrating on Israel and Palestine. In our second installment, we will see what he learned about Israel’s extraordinary press management techniques.
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