Dueling

Two sides are � ghting a cold war over the nature of Libya’s new political

order

Soumaya Ghannoushi21 October 2011

Legitimacies In LibyaLibyaLibyaIn LibyaIn LibyaIn LibyaIn LibyaLibyaLibyaIn LibyaIn LibyaIn LibyaIn

%1

! NEW

WORLD ORDER

Occupy Wall Street Globa l Protests

Global protests against economic injustice

gripped cities over the weekend, predominantly

on Saturday, October 15. Solidarity with Spain’s

“Indignants” and New York’s “Occupy Wall Street”

protesters brought demonstrations over the

concentration of wealth in the hands of a few

and the worldwide economic crisis to cities from

Hong Kong to Tulsa. Hundreds of thousands

joined the mostly peaceful demonstrations, al-

though arrests were made in many cities, and

clashes with police in Rome became particularly

violent. The movement shows no signs of slow-

ing. Gathered here are images from cities large

and small.

People take a part in a demonstration in Puerta del Sol Square in solidarity action for the worldwide protest dubbed “Occupy the City” in Madrid on October 15, 2011.

People take a part in a demonstration in Puerta del Sol Square in solidarity action for the worldwide protest dubbed “Occupy the City” in Madrid on October 15, 2011.

Amsterdam on October 17, 2011

NEW

! WORLD ORDER

AThe vacuum created by Gad-

dafi ’s departure is now fi lled by a

sharp polarisation between two

camps. The fi rst camp is the Na-

tional Transitional Council, made

up largely of ex-ministers and

prominent senior Gaddafi offi cials

who had jumped from his ship as

it began to sink. These enjoy the

support of NATO and derive their

power and infl uence from the

backing of western nations. The

second camp is composed of local

political and military leaders who

have played a decisive role in the

liberation of the various Libyan

cities from Gaddafi ’s brigades, in-

cluding the capital. The thousands

of fi ghters and activists they com-

mand are now convened within

local military councils, such as the

Tripoli council, which was founded

following the liberation of the cap-

ital and which recently elected as

its head Abdulkarim Bel Haj. Ironi-

cally, this hero of Tripoli’s liberation

is the same man who, a few years

back, had been deported, along

with other Libyan dissidents, by

MI6 and the CIA to Gaddafi , who

was their close ally at the time.

There could be no more strik-

ing indication of the rift between

the two sides than the words of

Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the head of

the council and ex-justice minister,

on the eve of Tripoli’s conquest.

Amid the jubilation and euphoria,

a downbeat Abdul-Jalil emerged

to warn that there exist “extremist

fundamentalists within the ranks

of the rebels” threatening to re-

sign if they did not hand over their

weapons.

Abdul-Jalil’s colleague, Ibra-

him Chalgham, who still presides

over the Libyan delegation to the

UN and who had served as foreign

minister under Gaddafi for years,

criticised Bel Haj, dismissing him

as “a mere preacher and not a mili-

tary commander”, statements re-

iterated by NTC member Othman

Ben Sassi, who said of the elected

military council president, “He was

nothing, nothing. He arrived at the

last moment and organised some

people”.

The war of words went on as

Ismail Sallabi, head of the Bengazi

military council who commanded

the famous February 17 brigade,

called on the NTC to resign, casti-

� er six months of de� ant resistance, countless � ery A� er six months of de� ant resistance, countless � ery Aspeeches, chilling threats, and blood-curdling bru-Aspeeches, chilling threats, and blood-curdling bru-Atality, Gadda� has � nally fallen on his sword. His Atality, Gadda� has � nally fallen on his sword. His Acollapse, however, is far from the end of the story. Acollapse, however, is far from the end of the story. AInstead, it heralds the start of a more complicated chapter in his country’s history. As tanks surround Gadda� ’s last outposts in Sirte, the cold war over the country’s future gathers pace. As the common enemy is forced out of the scene, the vast di� erenc-es between those he had brought together return to occupy centre stage.

Soumaya Ghannoushi is a freelance writer specialising in the history of European perceptions of Islam. Her work has appeared in a number of leading British papers, including the Guardian and the Independent.

gating its members as “remnants

of the Gaddafi era” and as “a bunch

of liberals with no following in Lib-

yan society”.

Many fi ghters, such as Sallabi,

are insisting that they played a key

role in toppling Gaddafi . Some go

further, claiming that their swift

capture of Tripoli had taken the

NTC by surprise and that they had

defeated NATO’s alleged plans to

partition the country into East and

West. NATO’s strategy, they main-

tain, was to freeze the confl ict in

the West, eff ectively turning Brega

into a dividing line between the

liberated East and Gaddafi ’s West.

Although there is no concrete evi-

dence for such allegations, they

are understandable given NATO’s

failure to advance into the West or

move beyond Misrata for months.

The late Abdulfattah Younes, the

rebels’ military commander, once

declared at a news conference in

Benghazi, “Either NATO does its

work properly or we will ask the Se-

curity Council to suspend its work.

Misrata is being subjected to a full

extermination. NATO blesses us ev-

ery now and then with a bombard-

ment here and there and is letting

the people of Misrata die every

day. NATO has disappointed us”.

Reports of NATO planes bombing

rebels on many occasions in Ab-

jadia and Misrata and declarations

by NATO Secretary General Anders

Fogh Rasmussen that “there is no

military solution to the Libya con-

fl ict” have only deepened mistrust

of the organisation and its designs

for the country.

Such speculations have been

further corroborated by recent

revelations that some US offi cials

advised the Gaddafi regime on

how to undermine Libya’s rebel

movement, with the potential as-

sistance of foreign intelligence

agencies. For example, David

Welch, an Assistant Secretary of

State under George W Bush, met

with senior Gaddafi aides as late

as three weeks before the fall of

Tripoli at the Four Seasons Hotel in

Cairo, just a few blocks from the US

embassy.

It is clear that two legitimacies

are confronting each other today

in Libya: armed struggle and liber-

ation versus the de facto legitima-

cy of a self-appointed leadership

derived from western support. The

two are locked in a cold (and po-

tentially hot) confl ict over Libya’s

future, the nature of its political

order, and its foreign policy. It is a

contest between a strategy direct-

ed by an internal agenda on the

one hand; and one defi ned from

the outside, by NATO and western

powers, on the other.

These confl icts are part of the

wider scene in the region, which

is characterised by polarisation

between the internal dynamics

of the revolution and the foreign

powers’ logic of containment and

control, of calculated, limited, and

monitored change. These foreign

powers’ strategy is to swap the old

players with new ones while keep-

ing the rules of the game intact,

using proxy wars manned via al-

lied local elites, thus working to re-

cycle the old regime into the new

order in Libya, as they have been

doing in Tunisia and Egypt.

Libya is set to be a scene of

multiple battles: confl icts between

NATO’s men and the fi ghters and

their supporters on the ground,

and confl icts between the foreign

forces that have invested in the

war on Gaddafi : the French, who

are determined to have the upper

hand politically and economically;

the Italians, who regard Libya as

their back garden; the British, who

are determined to safeguard their

contracts; and the Turks, keen to

revive their infl uence in the old Ot-

toman hemisphere. Then there are

the losing players in the new equa-

tion: the Chinese and the Russians.

NEW WORLD ORDER

NEW

! WORLD ORDER

NEW WORLD ORDER

NEW

! WORLD ORDER

NEW

! WORLD ORDER

NEW

! WORLD ORDER

Too often, you consum-ers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read - why wouldn’t you? You think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don’t know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological bi-ases, such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are funda-mental problems at the episte-mological and methodological level. These create distortions, falsehoods and justify the narra-tive of those with power.

In discussing the manners in which the Western intelli-gentsia and media depict the Middle East, the French intellec-tual and scholar Francois Bur-gat complained that two main types of intellectuals tasked with explaining the “other” to Westerners dominate. Firstly, there is what he and Bourdieu, another philosopher, describe as the “negative intellectual” who aligns his beliefs and pri-orities with those of the state, and centres his perspective on serving the interests of power and gaining proximity to it. And secondly, there is what Burgat terms as “the facade intellec-tual”, whose role in society is

to confirm Western audiences with their already-held notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racisms regarding the “other”. Journalists writing for the main-stream media, as well as their lo-cal interlocutors, often fall into both categories.

A vast literature exists on the impossibility of journal-ism in its classic, liberal sense with all the familiar tropes on objectivity, neutrality, and “transmitting reality”. However, and perhaps out of a lack of an alternative source of legitima-tion, major mainstream media outlets in the West continue to grasp to these notions with ever more insistence. The Middle East is an exceptionally suitable place for the Western media to learn about itself and its future, because it is the scene where all pretentions of objectivity, neu-trality towards power, and criti-cal engagement have faltered spectacularly.

Framing the ‘other’Journalists are the arche-

type of ideological tools who create culture and produce knowledge. Their function is to represent a class and per-petuate the dominant ideology instead of building a counter hegemonic and revolutionary ideology, or narrative, in this case. They are the organic in-tellectuals of the ruling class. Instead of being the voice of

the people or the working class, journalists are too often the functional tools for a bourgeois ruling class. They produce and disseminate culture and mean-ing for the system and repro-duce its values, allowing it to hegemonise the field of culture and since journalism today has a specific political economy, they are all products of the hegemonic discourse and the moneyed class.

The working class has no networks, that applies too to Hollywood and television enter-tainment and series; it is all the same intellectuals producing them. Even journalists with pre-tentions of being serious usu-ally only serve elites and ignore social movements. Journalism tends to be state centric, focus-ing on elections, institutions, formal politics and overlooking politics of contention, informal politics, social movements.

Those with reputations as brave war reporters who hop around the world, parachut-ing into conflicts from Yemen to Afghanistan, typically only confirm Americans’ views of the world. Journalism simplifies, which means it de-historicises. Journalism in the Middle East is too often a violent act of rep-resentation. Western journalists take reality and amputate it, contort it, and fit it into a pre-determined discourse or tax-onomy.

The American media al-ways want to fit events in the re-gion into an American narrative. The recent assassination of Osa-ma bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoul-der in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment which changed everything. Too often contact with the West has de-fined events in the Middle East, but the so-called Arab Spring with its revolutions and upheav-als evokes anxiety among white Americans. They are unsettled with the autogenetic liberation of brown people. However, the Arab Spring may represent a revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, a massive blow to Islamist politics and the re-naissance of secular and leftist Arab nationalist politics.

But the American media has been obsessed with Is-lamists, looking for them behind every demonstration, and the uprisings have been often treat-ed as if they were something threatening. And all too often, it just comes down to “what does this mean for Israel’s security?” The aspirations of hundreds of millions of freedom-seeking Arabs are subordinated to the security concerns of five million Jews who colonised Palestine.

There is a strong ele-ment of chauvinism and rac-

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

Nir Rosen

ism behind the reporting. Like American soldiers, American journalists like to use the occa-sional local word to show they have unlocked the mysteries of the culture. ‘Wasta’ is one such word. One American bureau chief in Iraq told me that Muqta-da al-Sadr had a lot of wasta now so he could prevent a long American presence. ‘Inshallah’ is another such word. And in Afghanistan it’s ‘pushtunwali’, the secret to understanding Af-ghans. Islam is also treated like a code that can be unlocked, and then locals can be understood as if they are programmed only through Islam.

Arab culture and Islam are spoken of the way race was once spoken of in India and Af-rica, and it is difficult to portray Arabs and Muslims as the good guys unless they are “like us” as in Google executives and other elites who speak English, dress trendy and use Facebook. So they are made to represent the revolutions while the poor, the workers, the subalterns, the majority who don’t even have internet access let alone twitter accounts, are ignored. And in order to make the revolutions in Tunisia and especially Egypt seem non-threatening, the non-violent tactics are emphasised while the many acts of violent resistance to regime oppression are completely ignored. This is not just the journalists’ fault. It is driven by American discourse which drives the editors back in New York and Washington.

I’ve spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq, and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Ye-men and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I’ve laboured to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at The New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject out-side the Muslim world. He said

even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin Ameri-ca, I wouldn’t be published if it wasn’t about jihad.

Seclusion and nar-row narratives

It is important to under-stand the environment journal-ists inhabit, the interlocutors, translators and fixers they rely on to filter and mediate for them and the nature in which they collect information, ac-counts and interviews. One of the popular myths about re-porting in Iraq is that journalists stayed in the Green Zone, the walled off fortress neighbour-hood that housed the American occupiers and now houses the Iraqi government along with some foreign embassies. This is not true. Throughout the occu-pation, almost no journalists ac-tually inhabited the Green Zone. They stayed in green zones of their own creation, whether secure compounds or intel-lectual green zones, creating their own walls. The first green zone for journalists was the for-tress around the Sheraton and Palestine hotels in Baghdad, which was initially guarded by American soldiers and later by Iraqi security guards. The New York Times soon constructed its own immense fortress, with guard dogs, guard towers, se-curity guards, immense walls, vehicle searches - so too did the BBC, Associated Press, and others, then there were was the Hamra hotel compound where many bureaus moved until it was damaged in an explosion in 2010. CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera English had their own green zone, though freelancers like myself could rent rooms there. And there is one last green zone which is a large neighbourhood protected by Kurdish peshmer-ga, where middle class Iraqis and some news bureaus live.

In principle, there is noth-ing wrong with staying in a se-cure compound. Foreigners are often targeted in conflict zones

and authoritarian countries. You want to go to sleep at night without wondering whether men will kick down your door and drag you away, or whether you should go to sleep with your clothes on so that if a car bomb hits you wont be caught sleeping naked under a pile of rubble. You want to eat decent food and have running water, constant electricity, internet access, conversations with col-leagues. A journalist doesn’t have to live like an impover-ished local. But the less local life you experience, the less you can do your job, and this is what readers need to understand. The average person anywhere in the world goes to work and comes back home. He knows lit-tle about people outside his so-cial class, ethnic group, neigh-bourhood or city. As a journalist, you are making judgements on an entire country and interpret-ing it for others, but you don’t know the country because you don’t really live in it. You spend 20 hours a day in seclusion from the country. You have no basis for judgement because to you, Iraq is out there, the red zone, and the pace of filing can make this even harder.

Most mainstream jour-nalists have since 2004 treated reporting in Iraq like a military operation: going out on limited missions with a lot of planning, an armoured car, a chase car for backup, in and out, do the inter-view and come back home to their own green zone. Or they would more often just make the trip to the actual Green Zone, where officials are easy to meet and interview, where you can enjoy a drink, socialise with dip-lomats and feel macho because you live in the red zone. But in their artificial green zone, they are still sheltered from life - from Iraqis and from violence.

They did not just hang out, sit in restaurants, in mosques and husseiniyas, in people’s homes, walk through slums, shop in local markets, walk

around at night, sit in juice shops, sleep in normal people’s homes, visit villages, farms, and experience Iraq like an Iraqi, or as close as possible. This means they have no idea what life is like at night, what life is like in rural areas, what social trends are important, what songs are popular, what jokes are being told, what arguments take place on the street, how comfortable people feel, or what sorts of Iraqis go to bars at night. Hang-ing out is key. You just observe, letting events and people de-termine your reporting. They also did not investigate, pursue spontaneous leads, develop a network of trusted contacts and sources. Dwindling resources and interest meant bureaus had to shut down or reduce staff, and only occasionally parachute a journalist in to interview a few officials and go back home.

Finessing the social fabric

And since they don’t know Arabic, they literally cannot read the writing on the wall - the graffiti on the wall -whether it is for the mujahedin, for Muqtada Sadr, or for the football teams of Madrid or Barcelona. It means that if they talk to one man, the translator only tells them what he said and not what everybody around him was saying, they don’t hear the Sadrist songs supporting the Shia of Bahrain, or hear the taxi driver complain-ing about how things were bet-ter under Saddam, or discussing the attacks he saw in the morn-ing, or the soldiers joking at a checkpoint, or the shopkeeper cursing the soldiers. In fact they don’t even take taxis or buses, so they miss a key opportunity to interact naturally with peo-ple. It means they can’t just re-lax in people’s homes and hear families discuss their concerns. They are never able to develop what Germans call fingerspit-zengefuhl - that finger tip feel-ing, an intuitive sense of what

is happening, what the trends and sentiments are, which one can only get by running one’s own fingers through the social fabric.

A student of the Arab world once commented that any self-appointed terrorism expert must first pass the Um Kulthum test - meaning, has he heard of Um Kulthum, the iconic Egyptian diva of Arab national-ism whose music and lyrics still resonate throughout the Middle East? If they hadn’t heard of her, then they obviously were not fa-miliar with Arab culture. In Iraq an equivalent might be the Ha-wasim test. Saddam called the 1991 war on Iraq “Um al-Maarik”, or the mother of all battles. And he called the 2003 war on Iraq “Um al-Hawasim”, or the mother of all decisive moments. Soon, the looting that followed the invasion was called Hawasim by Iraqis, and the word became a common phrase, applied to cheap markets, to stolen goods, to cheap products. If you drive your car recklessly like you don’t care about it, another driver might shout at you, “what, is it hawasim?” If you don’t make an effort to familiarise yourself with these cultural phenomena, then just go back home.

Relying on a translator means you can only talk to one person at a time and you miss all the background noise. It means you have to depend on somebody from a certain social class, or sect, or political posi-tion, to filter and mediate the country for you. Maybe they are Sunni and have limited contacts outside their community. May-be they are a Christian from east Beirut and know little about the Shia of south Lebanon or the Sunnis of the north. Maybe they’re urban and disdainful of those who are rural. In Iraq, maybe they are a middle class Shia from Baghdad or a former doctor or engineer who looks down upon the poor urban class who make up the Sadrists. And so in May 2003, when I was the first American journalist to

interview Muqtada Sadr, my bu-reau chief at Time magazine was angry at me for wasting my time and sending it on to the editors in New York without asking him, because Muqtada was unim-portant, lacking credentials. But in Iraq, social movements, street movements, militias, those with power on the ground, have been much more important than those in the establishment or politicians in the green zone, and it is events in the red zone which have shaped things.

You don’t understand a country by going on pre-planned missions; you learn about it when unplanned things happen, when you visit a friend’s neighbourhood for fun and other neighbours come over. You learn about it by driv-ing around in a normal car, not an armoured one with tinted windows. That’s when Iraqi sol-diers and police ask you to hitch a ride and take them towards their home. A few months ago, soldiers at a checkpoint out-side Ramadi asked me to give one of their colleagues a ride to Baghdad. He was from Basra. In addition to the conversation we struck up, what was most revealing was that a soldier out-side Ramadi felt safe enough to ask a stranger for a ride, where-as before he would not have even carried his ID on him, and that a stranger agreed to take a member of the security forces. I’ve since given rides to other Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

Class politicsOver the last year, there

have been a slew of articles about whether the Iraqi secu-rity forces are ready to handle security for themselves, but these have all been based on the statements of American or Iraqi officials. Journalists have not talked to Iraqi lieutenants, or colonels, or sergeants, they have not cultivated these sourc-es or just befriended them, met them for drinks when they were on leave, sat with them in their homes with their families.

So the views of the Iraqi security forces, the Iraqi soldiers and policemen who man check-points and go on raids, are not written about. Meeting with them also lets you understand the degree to which sectarian-ism has been reduced in the security forces, while corruption and abuses such as torture and extra judicial killings remain a problem. And just travelling around the country since 2009 would reveal that yes, Iraqi se-curity forces can maintain the current level of security (or inse-curity) because they have been doing it since then, manning checkpoints in the most re-mote villages, cultivating their own intelligence sources, and basically occupying Iraq. The degree to which Iraq remains heavily militarised has not been sufficiently conveyed, but since 2009 Iraqi security forces have been occupying Iraq, and the American presence has been largely irrelevant from a daily security point of view.

And then there are the little Abu Ghraibs. The big scandals like Abu Ghraib, or the “Kill Team” in Afghanistan, eventually make their way into the media where they can be dismissed as bad apples and exceptions, and the general op-pression of the occupations can be ignored. But an occupation is a systematic and constant im-position of violence on an entire country. It’s 24 hours of arrest-ing, beating, killing, humiliating and terrorising, and unless you have experienced it, it’s impos-sible to describe except by try-ing to list them until the reader gets numb. I was only embed-ded three times over eight years - twice in Iraq for ten days each, and once in Afghanistan for three weeks.

My first embed in Iraq was in October 2003, six months after I first arrived. I was in the Anbar province. I saw sol-diers arresting hundreds of men, rounding up entire vil-lages, all the so-called military aged men, hoping somebody

would know something. I saw children screaming for their daddies while they watched them bloody and beaten and terrified, while soldiers laughed or smoked or high-fived or chewed tobacco and spit on the lawn, as lives were being de-stroyed. I know one of the men I saw arrested died from torture, and countless others ended up in Abu Ghraib. I saw old men pushed down on the ground violently. I saw innocent men beaten, arrested, mocked and humiliated. These are the little Abu Ghraibs that come with any occupation, even if it’s the Swedish girl scouts occupying a country.

Many journalists spent their entire careers embedded, months or even years, so mul-tiply what I saw by hundreds, by thousands and tens of thou-sands of terrorised traumatised families, beatings, killings, chil-dren who lost their fathers and wet their beds every night, women who could not provide for their families, innocent peo-ple shot at checkpoints. Then there are the daily Abu Ghraibs you endure when you live in an occupied country, having to navigate a maze of immense concrete walls, of barbed wire, waiting at checkpoints, waiting for convoys to go by, waiting for military operations to end, waiting for the curfew to end, military vehicles running you off the road, fifty calibre machine guns pointed at you, M16s pointed at you, pistols pointed at you, large foreign soldiers shouting at you and ordering you around. Or maybe in Af-ghanistan, the military convoy runs over a water canal destroy-ing the water supply to a village of 30 families who now have no way to live, or they arrest an in-nocent Afghan because he has Taliban music on his cell phone - like many Afghans do - and now he must make his way through the Afghan prison system.

But if you are white and identify with white American soldiers, then you ignore these

things, they just don’t occur to you. And so they never occur to your readers. Likewise you never think of how your aver-age Yemeni or Egyptian or Iraqi deals with their own security forces on a daily basis because you focus on the elite level of politics and security, and your cars don’t get stopped at check-points because you have the right badges. You don’t get de-tained by the police because you have the right badge. Until you get beaten up by regime thugs like Anderson Cooper, then you can become a hysteri-cal opponent of Mubarak and crusader for justice. Television reporting is overprotective of the celebrity correspondent - they barely go out, they just em-bed -and they do their live shots on the street inside their safe compounds, while making the story more about the celebrity correspondent rather than the story. Then they show the “back story” about the journalist and his work rather than the story.

Robert Kaplan, a terrible writer and great supporter of imperialism, said one smart thing by accident when he criti-cised journalists for not being able to relate to American sol-diers, because journalists rep-resented an elite while soldiers come from rural areas, went to public schools, and come from the working class (we’re not supposed to use that word because everybody in America thinks they’re middle class). But equally they cannot relate eas-ily to the working classes any-where, and so they gravitate to the elites. Focusing on elites and officials is a problem in general, not just in Middle East coverage. An American official visiting the region warrants articles about the region, but it is not studied empirically in its own context. People in power lie, whether they are a general, a president or a militia commander. This is the first rule. But at best, jour-nalists act as if only brown people in power lie, and so they rely on the official statements of white people, whether they are

military officers or diplomats, as if they should be trusted. The latest example is the bin Laden killing, when most mainstream journalists lazily relied on US government “feeds”, and they were literally fed an official ver-sion that kept on changing, but this is business as usual.

The revolution must be televised

One reason for the fail-ure of journalists to leave their green zones may be a com-bination of laziness and aver-sion to discomfort. But in Iraq, Afghanistan, other developing countries and areas of conflict in some countries, you have to leave your comfort zone. You might prefer an English-speak-ing whiskey-drinking politi-cian over six hours of bouncing along dirt roads in the heat and dust in order to sit on the floor and eat dirty food and drink dirty water and know you’re go-ing to get sick tomorrow, but the road to truth involves a cer-tain amount of diarrhoea.

When there are no physi-cal green zones, journalists will create them, as in Lebanon where they inhabit the green zones of Hamra, Gumayzeh, or Monot, which shelters journal-ists from the rest of the coun-try, giving them just enough of the exotic so they can feel as if they live in the Orient, without having to visit Tripoli, Akkar, the Beqa, or the majority of Beirut or Lebanon where the poor live. Like other countries, Lebanon has a ready local fixer and trans-lator mafia who can determine the price, and allow a journalist who parachutes in to meet a representative of all the political factions, drink wine with Walid Jumblat and look at his collec-tion of unopened books (in-cluding one I wrote) and unread copies of the New York Review of Books while never having to walk through a Palestinian refu-gee camp, or Tariq al Jadida in Beirut or Bab al Tabaneh in Trip-oli and see how most people

live and what most people care about.

A green zone can be the capital city or a neighbourhood or a focus only on officials, as long as it shields you from the red zone of reality, or poverty, of class conflict, of challenges to your ideology or comfort. In Egypt, even before the revolu-tion, Cairo got most of the me-dia’s attention, but during the revolution journalists barely ventured outside Tahrir Square. Egypt is 86 million people - it’s not just Tahrir, it’s not just Cairo or Alexandria. Port Said and Suez were barely covered, even though Suez was such a key spark in the revolution. In Libya at first everything was new and everybody was an explorer and adventurer, but now the self-ap-pointed opposition leadership is trying to manage the mes-sage so you can be lazy and just refer to their statements. Yemen was totally neglected, but when people came, it was almost al-ways just to Sanaa. And Yemen’s capital has its own green zone in the Movenpic hotel, situated safely outside the city. Now Ye-men is portrayed as if it were two rival camps demonstrat-ing in Sanaa, even though the uprisings started long before (and were much more violent) in Taez, Aden, Saada and else-where. Yemen is viewed mostly through prism of the war on ter-ror, through the American gov-ernment’s prism, rather than the needs and views of the people.

But if you spend any time with the demonstrators, you realise how unimportant al-Qa-eda and its ideology are in Ye-men, so that they don’t even de-serve an article. And you would do well to remember that even though the Yemeni franchise of al-Qaeda is portrayed as Amer-ica’s greatest threat, AQAP’s re-cord is little more than a failed underwear bomber and a failed printer cartridge bomb.

American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the

American military/industrial/financial/academic/media com-plex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the conse-quences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagan-dists justify the killing of inno-cent people instead of a voice for those innocent people.

There are many brave and dedicated journalists working in the Middle East whose work deserves attention and praise. Some even work for the main-stream media. Too often their in-dependent voices are drowned out by the mass of writers who justify power instead of oppos-ing it. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don’t care. It’s about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them.

This article is based on a speech given at a conference sponsored by Jadaliyya on teach-ing the Middle East at George Mason Univer-sity.

Nir Rosen is an Ameri-can journalist who writes on current and international affairs. He has contributed to The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, among others. His latest book is Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World.