{"id":29473,"date":"2010-10-05T11:36:38","date_gmt":"2010-10-05T16:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=29473"},"modified":"2010-10-05T11:39:44","modified_gmt":"2010-10-05T16:39:44","slug":"wheres-mohammed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/wheres-mohammed\/","title":{"rendered":"Where’s Mohammed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book Review by Carol van Strum<\/strong>: The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East<\/a>, by Neil MacFarquhar, 2009. Public Affairs, $26.95
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

In a prodigious display of ignorant, knee-jerk censorship, some 20 newspapers -\u2013 including print editions of The Washington Post<\/em> and the Boston Globe<\/em> -\u2013 refused to publish Wayne Miller’s \u201cNon Sequitur\u201d comic strip for Sunday, Oct. 3<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The banned comic strip. The joke is that it's against Muslim law to depict the prophet in an image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The reason? The cartoon satirized the very knee-jerk censorship those 20 editors practiced. It depicted a crowded park with the caption, \u201cPicture book title voted least likely to ever find a publisher: ‘Where’s Muhammed?<\/a>‘\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

From one atrocity or war or hotspot to another, MacFarquhar criss-crossed the region, meeting and listening to people in Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Israel, Gaza. Their voices, collected in his book, are the stories he never got to file, from restaurant chefs, game show hosts, limo drivers, hashish farmers and sex therapists to prime ministers, princes, clerics, and the legendary Lebanese diva, Fayrouz. Here in the wealthiest, oil-rich nations, the most common complaint is of brutal, ubiquitous government repression, often sanctioned by some interpretation of Islam. Brave souls who dare to advocate change risk prison, torture and death, but are frustrated by blundering American efforts to impose superficial democracy by fiat. The result is widespread public rejection of all reform \u201cas an American enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among other treasures in his book is MacFarquhar’s history of Al-Jazeera, the \u201cnews junkie’s dream,\u201d founded in 1996 by the emir of Qatar \u2013 a tiny pimple of a nation poking into the Persian Gulf \u2013 expressly to put his emirate on the international map. He did this by establishing a television station independent of the rigidly controlled and censored existing Arab news media, hiring veterans from the BBC to run the station. \u201cThose journalists blasted away the cobwebs hobbling news in the region \u2013 reporting events in real time, interviewing Israeli officials about developments in the Palestinian territories, lending opposition figures in exile a platform to voice their views about the situation under despotic rulers at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Multiple attempts to muzzle or extinguish Al-Jazeera \u2013 by every despotic Arab ruler as well as by the United States -\u2013 speak to the station’s extraordinary success in \u201ccreating a competitive news industry where none existed\u201d and its uncanny ability to get reporters on the ground at the very instant events occur. \u201cWhile working in the Cairo bureau or any hotel room, I kept the station on as long as I was awake because it was always first with breaking news,\u201d MacFarquhar writes. \u201cMore often than not, the English-language satellite stations [CNN or the BBC] either were not covering the event or broke away much sooner. On that score Al-Jazeera provided unfiltered news reporting at its best.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another goldmine in the book is the extensive discussion of Islam, dispelling numerous myths and distortions in American media. Like Christianity, Islam itself is a collection of many sects and philosophies, all attempting to apply hearsay interpretations of events thousands of years ago to a modern, high tech world. The word \u201cfatwa,\u201d described in our media as a pronouncement of murderous intent, is actually and most commonly a religious edict on any subject from the running of a hotel to the length of women’s skirts; the sheer number and frequent triviality of fatwas, and the practice of fatwa-shopping for the opinion wanted, render them almost laughable.<\/p>\n

More serious is the increasing violence and zealotry of fundamentalist Muslims and their intrusion into government across the region. What is most striking in the quotes is that substituting the word \u201cChristian\u201d for \u201cMuslim\u201d produces the same rhetoric as fundamentalist zealots in American politics, including the same obsession with sex. If ever there were proof of the need to separate church and state, it can be found in both Muslim and Christian extremists, for whom religion is not an opiate of the people but a means to control every aspect of their lives.<\/p>\n

Throughout this fascinating, informative, and often funny tour of the Middle East, the United States intrudes frequently and inappropriately as a sort of drunken uncle, embarrassing but too big and destructive to ignore. MacFarquhar points out politely but firmly the numerous occasions when a little tact, common sense, and knowledge of local customs and language could have saved the U.S. its reputation and the Arab people a lot of grief.<\/p>\n

Hizbollah, he says, really does remember to send him a card on his birthday every year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 -\u2013 including print editions of The Washington Post and the Boston Globe -\u2013 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}