America in Arabic
Dina Ezzat shares the anger of the Arab press over US plans in the Middle East
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Mahjoub of the London-based daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi portrays the new US-funded Arab TV station Al-Hurra, the Free One, as not really being free at all. He likens it more to handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners in Guantanamo
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With the US simultaneously launching a new Arabic TV channel to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world and drafting a massive scheme to reform and democratise the Arab region and its surroundings, Arab papers this week had plenty of opportunity to vent increasing anger at American foreign policy.
Hardly a day went by that the press did not offer readers some insight into the American scheme to reform the so-called "Greater Middle East" which includes, along with the 22 member-states of the Arab League, Israel, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. And there was hardly a day where the opinion pages of the leading Arab papers came out without at least one opinion piece on either the scheme or on Al-Hurra (The Free One), the new American- funded channel broadcasting in Arabic.
The vast majority of Arab commentators saw the new US scheme as yet another effort by Washington to impose US hegemony on the world in general and on the Middle East -- with its extended version -- in particular.
The word "imperialism" made frequent appearances in the Arab press when it came to America's future plans for the Middle East. On Sunday, both the UAE daily Al-Bayan and the London-based and Saudi-financed daily Al-Hayat published articles accusing the US of pursuing an imperialist agenda.
"A plan for democracy or the construction of an empire" was the headline of an article by Galal Aref, chairman of the Egyptian Press Syndicate, in Al-Bayan's opinion pages on Sunday. According to Aref, it might well be true that the American president, who is faced with increasing criticism over his foreign policy, especially in havoc-run Iraq, is trying to escape the heat in the run-up to the presidential elections by throwing yet another initiative for the world and the Americans to busy themselves with. However, the US plan for the Middle East is not just a public relations gambit. It is rather an obvious exercise in hegemony by which the president of the world's sole superpower is trying to lay his hands on almost the entire Arab and Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, and perhaps even Indonesia.
American efforts to reshape the Middle East did not originate with this new scheme, Aref stated. It started with "the war on Iraq that was in fact part of the scheme".
The Syria Accountability Act, recently adopted by the US administration, and proposed accountability acts for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Arab papers said, were also part of a wide-ranging scheme to establish US hegemony in the Arab and Muslim world.
"The US has decided to turn the Middle East and a host of neighbouring, mostly Muslim countries, into an American protectorate ... to exercise its taste for imperialism," Saleh Beshir wrote in Al- Hayat on Sunday. Beshir added, "Since every empire claims that it is advocating a certain ideology, the US chose to claim that it was coming to the Middle East to advocate democracy."
For Arab commentators, the problem with the new US scheme is not just motives but also its approach. On Sunday, and again in Al-Hayat, Adel Malek argued that the scheme fails to address the key question in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, that the US administration has been ignoring for some time. Malek predicted that the initiation of the Greater Middle East plan will bring some serious problems to the region. "We are confronting major earthquakes ... to be measured not on the Richter scale but by the Bush scale."
Iraq and the new American plan came under sharp criticism. As some Arab commentators argued, even if one was to accept that the US is coming to bring democracy and development to the Middle East, then one must also believe that the US can bring neither. For these writers, Iraq was a living and nightmarish example of the US failure to deliver peace and prosperity.
"Is it not the case that the two satellite channels, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, have often been prevented [by orders of the US occupation forces] from operating and broadcasting in Iraq?" asked Jihad Al-Khazin on Sunday in his daily column "Eyes and Ears" on the back-page of Al-Hayat.
While the argument is that the US proposal is supposed to promote democracy, in fact, as prominent commentator Talal Salman put it in his daily column in the widely read Lebanese As-Safir on Saturday, "democracy will be imposed on the region after being imposed on the G-8 during their next summit."
The Arab press asked what will become of Arab countries once this plan is put into action; the answers were mostly negative. Many Arab countries, it was said, will lose what they share: their own identity. As Zein Al-Abedine Al-Rikabi wrote in the London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat on Friday, the plan does not recognise Arab countries as a real union and seems keen on breaking the bonds of whatever is left of the concept of Arab unity.
Another common question was what will the US do with strong, popular Islamic opposition when trying to promote democracy and quell Islamism at the same time? Another query: how can the US present itself as a partner, as suggested by the new plan, when it is in fact an occupation force in Iraq and a strong supporter of another occupation force, Israel?
If the US is serious about building a new and modern Middle East, Arab commentators said, then it must first fix the situation in Iraq, encourage a peaceful settlement in the Arab occupied territories, stop its attack on Arab culture and Islamic civilisation and change its image as a mere reservoir of oil and cheap labour.
Harsh as this criticism is, it is mild compared to the attack launched in the Arab press against Al- Hurra. "Al-Hurra and the swamp" was the headline of an opinion piece in Al-Bayan on Tuesday by Aicha Sultan. Sultan underlined the common Arab reaction to the new station that has taken the place of the pre-US invasion Iraqi satellite channel. It is, she wrote, an American propaganda machine that seeks to promote Israeli supremacy in this part of the world.
"But this will not happen," Sultan stressed. "For as long as the Arab world has a memory, Al-Hurra, despite its hi-tech team and rich resources, will fail to change the image of America in the Arab mind," she wrote.
As-Safir's prominent daily commentator Satie Noureddin noted in his column "The last stop" on Monday that the US should not seek "a face-lift in the Arab world but should pursue a new foreign policy on the Middle East ... Otherwise Al-Hurra will fail as did the American-inspired Hi magazine" that was aimed at courting young Arabs who have not shown the slightest interest since it was launched a few months back.
Meanwhile, Arab commentators pleaded with their leaders to carefully prepare a regional counter-proposal and a counterpart Arab satellite station. Such issues, they contended, should figure high on the agenda of the Arab summit scheduled for Tunis starting on 29 March.
