Book Review by Carol van Strum: The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East, by Neil MacFarquhar, 2009. Public Affairs, $26.95
In a prodigious display of ignorant, knee-jerk censorship, some 20 newspapers -– including print editions of The Washington Post and the Boston Globe -– refused to publish Wayne Miller’s “Non Sequitur” comic strip for Sunday, Oct. 3.
The reason? The cartoon satirized the very knee-jerk censorship those 20 editors practiced. It depicted a crowded park with the caption, “Picture book title voted least likely to ever find a publisher: ‘Where’s Muhammed?‘”
Both the cartoon and its censorship reflect the arrogant ignorance of Islam and Middle Eastern cultures that pervades the U.S. population and news media. As a nation, we behave in ways that would make a viper cringe. With typical colonial hubris, we think nothing of invading another country (or whole region) to rip off its resources, control its commerce, and mold its culture to serve our interests. Repeating the most senseless mistakes of history, we send in troops to bend entire populations to our will at gunpoint, without bothering to learn their customs and traditions, much less their language. And then we wonder why they don’t like us.
With our media compromised by commerce, our only remedy for ignorance is to educate ourselves. Short of learning Arabic and traveling to the Middle East, a good place to start is Neil MacFarquhar’s The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. MacFarquhar grew up in Libya, covered the Middle East for Associated Press, and speaks Arabic as fluently as any native. Thanks to that rare skill he became New York Times Cairo bureau chief from 2001 to 2005.