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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A sordid good-bye
By Tarek AtiaLet's look at a few of the most common adjectives used by the Western press to describe the late Hafez Al-Assad: gaunt, wily, inexhaustible, cunning, and brutal. Much of the commentary can be summed up in the way Washington Post columnist E J Dionne Jr described Assad in a piece on Tuesday. Dionne says that Assad was "crafty, perhaps even brilliant," but qualifies that with the assertion that "his was the magic of brutality."
The comment immediately brings us to an important theme: the foregone conclusion. All of the coverage harped on a supposed monumental transition from a stodgy traditionalist, the late Hafez Al-Assad, to his son Bashar, the liberal moderniser. Western-educated, Bashar is seen by the Western press as the long awaited Syrian saviour. He fits perfectly into a pre-conceived picture of the post-peace Middle East.
All too often, the coverage has succumbed to a lazy tendency to subjugate everything in the region first-and-foremost to the "peace process." This bias usually reveals itself somewhere in the first line of all the Assad-related stories.
In general, the coverage has centred on either how Assad's death could potentially benefit Israel, or how it will affect Israeli and American agendas. As the Washington Post's news analysis story put it, Assad's death "could remove an obstacle to peace in the Middle East and eventually prepare the ground for a somewhat more modern and flexible leadership in Damascus."
On Monday, the highly popular MSNBC (Microsoft NBC) Web site led its world news section with an article entitled, "Mideast Script: Waiting for Bashar." It is as if the whole thing was a movie or a play. Once again, the question of peace overshadows everything else. "For those concerned about peace in the Middle East, it is by no means certain that the nation's turn to Assad's son will be smooth," the article states ominously. The sentence is a cavalier challenge to choose your camp. Are you concerned about peace in the Middle East; i.e. are you on Israel's side or not?
Interestingly, the article mentions that Assad is known as "the Lion of Damascus," but doesn't bother to add that 'lion' is the meaning of the Arabic word "assad." Ironically, a new slip inadvertently made up for the first. MSNBC's story on the funeral, the next day, features a quirky typo: "Albright ... viewed the closed casket bearing the Assad's remains."
Zeina Karam, an Arab AP writer, is the only person who informs us that Assad, the lion, was actually a vegetarian. It makes you wonder why none of the others mention it. Perhaps it is because it's considered a positive trait by the liberal Western press. The script demands a type-cast Oriental despot, full of faults.
Outspoken New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman, for instance, is his usual callous self in a column entitled, "Unfinished Business in Syria" writes: "His gravestone should read, Hafez Assad, feared and ferocious President of Syria: He stayed too long and he died too soon." Friedman is acrimonious throughout the column. He writes: "At best he will be remembered for what he didn't do, not for any positive accomplishments."
The Washington Post's editorial on Sunday was even more ruthless. It started with the tirade, "Syrian President Hafez Assad, who died yesterday at age 69, was a ruthless dictator; historians will have to scour the record to find any positive traits. But he did embody a perverse sort of reliability. Usually, this too functioned as a negative: He was reliably intransigent, reliably hostile to Israel, and reliably supportive of terrorism."
So there you have it: the Israeli lobby's point of view in a nutshell.
The harshest pen of all, though, was surely the Daily Telegraph's Anne Applebaum, who wrote an article for the popular American Web site Slate, entitled "Good riddance to Assad." In it, she argues that instead of mourning Assad we should "remember just what a thoroughly evil and unpleasant dictator he was." Applebaum concludes by saying, "No tool of violence was too extreme for him, no methods too immoral, no tactic too unspeakable. ... The world is better off without him."
However, all this false rage and grinding of axes begins to wear very thin. Indeed, the flippancy and hyperbole of all the Assad stories betray a generalised lack of serious thought. On Salon, another major American Web-only publication, the headline, "Is Syria's new president a geek?" appears. The article then informs us, "He loves technology. He wants to bring the Internet to Damascus. But can the Israelis learn to love him?"
If, as the Los Angeles Times predicted, Bashar might be more willing than his father to let part of the Golan Heights go, they just might learn to love him. But for now, the media allows Israel to play the part of the rational spectator to an Arab passion play. On CNN.com on Monday, a front page headline merely states that, "Israel notes the death of Assad." This was very observant of them.
For the most part, the Western press are backing Bashar. Despite their supposed democratic ideals, they seem to fully accept the legitimacy of "republican dynasties." An AP story on Tuesday, quotes a few US Middle East policy experts who basically believe it puts young, forward-thinking Arabs in positions of leadership.
On MSNBC, a writer swoons that Bashar is "not married" and reveals that he is "something of a computer nerd ... happier surfing the net than politicking within the Baath Party." In the story, Rana Kabrani, a prominent Syrian writer, is quoted stating, "because he speaks and understands English, he has been able to see how the Western media operates, which his father wasn't able to do. So he'll know more about the real world."
Thus, reality is outside of the Syrian drama. By quoting a Syrian writer who thinks that the Western media is the only possible representation of the real world, the ultimate fiction is presented as fact. Talk about justifying your own existence.
