Atrocity in Context

There is no part of the world more crucial to the strategic interests of the United States as is the Middle East. While the traditional problems of the regulation of international affairs are at play there, Arab language satellite channels have created a new force in the region, and Al Jazeera is one of the most controversial and the most important of these. Although there are satellites that are more extreme, no organization of this kind is more professional and sophisticated–characteristics that translate into power. Al Jazeera is not only a new powerhouse in the region, but also a new intellectual force in the world. If we are ever to witness peace and prosperity in the Middle East, it will be promoted either through Al Jazeera or on its model. For that reason those with an interest in conflict resolution should become more engaged in the ways in which the media shape political culture. One place to look for how this will play out is a recent gathering of journalists, academics and intellectuals in Doha, Qatar, called the Fourth Al Jazeera Annual Forum, where the use of this mighty new intellectual weapon was discussed.

The development of mighty weapons often provides ironic opportunities for peacemaking. In his reflections on the use of atomic weapons in 1945, Robert J. Oppenheimer said that the problem posed for mankind by the bomb demanded not only the outlawing of atomic weapons, but also the outlawing of war. He imagined that the development of such terrible devices as he had overseen might make the United States weaker in a relative sense than it was without them, because the only effective control on their use against concentrated and productive urban settlements like those found in the U.S. was through some form of world federation or through conquest and these were politically infeasible. There is little doubt that the problem of nuclear proliferation has dominated the foreign policy of the United States since Oppenheimer made those remarks.

In the very month that Oppenheimer was promoting his views on the irony that his “destroyer of worlds” must inaugurate world peace, another American, Paul Porter, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission was reflecting on another great weapon that would do as much to hasten the process of outlawing war as did nuclear weapons—the television. If nuclear weapons changed the basic calculation of extending the means of politics to include war between great or evenly matched powers, the dissemination of images of conflict would impose the same constraints on asymmetric conflicts. It is well known that the daily news reports from the fronts in Vietnam made Americans less willing to support war that they could witness for themselves as immoral. This new technology would help to render the Tet offensive as a victory for the Vietcong, while most military experts then and now saw it as an operational failure.

It would no longer be necessary in the formation of public opinion about war to rely entirely on “pictures in our heads” as Walter Lippmann had described the problem in WWI. Now atrocities are commonly viewed outside of the brutal and absurd context of war. As the famous Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has said, “people don’t like to see these images put before them as they sip their tea.” In the emerging world of ready access to moving images that has developed since 1945, the atrocities of war become less and less tolerable as the means of war are invariably taken out of context and confronted as “pictures on the screen,” whether at teatime or in the gym. War is more real to us today.

Perpetrating atrocities has always only made sense in the context of the topsy-turvy world of violent conflict. Separate from the case or after the fact, it is hard to fathom what would drive a person to do the things that people at war have always done. The same factors are at work in the use of nuclear weapons. When the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are reviewed today, it is hard to see Harry Truman’s decision in context. A parallel decontextualization of horror through telecommunication is precisely what makes asymmetric war, as we knew it, more difficult to prosecute and what explains the rise of Al Jazeera. The station has thrived on discord. The big events in Al Jazeera’s history are displayed in the station’s studio. One learns there how the coverage of operation Desert Fox in the Iraqi sanctions period led to viewer growth, followed by American attacks on the station in 2001, the coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and most recently the war in Gaza in early 2009. What gives Al Jazeera an edge in the coverage of these events is that the editors are not afraid to tell a story that no one else will tell. Al Jazeera records the use of power in is gritty realistic way that few other stations will do.

Even so, it is important to stress that Al Jazeera’s competitive advantage over programs like BBC Arabic is not merely a willingness to go where no one else will—it is as much a function of management philosophy. To tour the Al Jazeera facility is to confront, in action, a social movement with cameras. Not only does one enter the Arabic channel through a museum/shrine to all those reporters who have been attacked in anger, but the halls of the studio are riddled with inspirational quotations of aspiration and defiance. The original control room has become something of a working museum in its own right, filled with stacks of archival material and quixotic caricatures of leading figures in the organization. To be there is to be in the presence of a journalistic “aura,” as Walter Benjamin would have called it. The only thing close to this in the American context is an old copy of See it Now with Edward R. Murrow or a trip past the Watergate hotel in downtown Washington D.C. Al Jazeera sees itself as a activist organization that gives voice to the marginalized and downtrodden, which its key policy makers repeatedly stress in their public speeches.

At the Forum held in Doha, I was not very impressed with the intellectual quality of the discussion, which suffered from problems that one might expect in the setting: preaching to the choir, theoretical peak jumping from one intellectual cliché to the next and substituting aspiration for analysis. In the end however, intellectual stimulation was not the reason to come to Doha in March, rather it was to see how an unconventional yet world class media organization reveals itself internally—to its employees, stakeholders and partners—and externally—to the rest of the world. Most interesting were the comments of Ahmed Al Sheikh, the Editor in Chief of the channel. Al Sheikh is the gray fox of Al Jazeera and plays a central role in setting the tone for the organization as a whole. He spoke of the recent conflict in Gaza in moving terms and reframed the traditional focus on an investigative news organization; in the place of providing a balanced point of view, they at Al Jazeera are balanced toward the brutalized, where the balance comes from an understanding that the rest of the world is balanced toward the brutalizers.

Al Sheikh was at his best in relating a story of a girl that he saw in the now famous Gaza coverage. The girl, Dalal Abu Aisha, had lost five members of her family and the story was heartbreaking in his telling as it was on air. The Editor in Chief told the audience that he was moved by this episode, which, for him, encapsulates the Gaza war. In speaking, he seemed on the verge of tears. This is important because Al Sheikh’s role in steering the editorial direction of Al Jazeera is atypical. Not only has the Emir of Qatar pledged to leave all editorial decisions to the management, but—given the generous royal source of the funding—there is also no pressure to tone down coverage of such events to appeal to commercial funders.

I have viewed the Dalal Abu Aisha clip and I find it difficult to watch. Yet, I also noticed that it lacks thematic character, and is dominated by episodic qualities, to use a distinction made by the political scientist Shanto Iyengar. It is shot out of context. The atrocity is universalized in the figure of this poor girl, who must be innocent in the affair, and there is little mention of why this house was targeted and what little is mentioned is compatible with a sinister reading. The tragedy is simply revealed as is, and the viewer must empathize with Dalal or be exposed as unfeeling and inhuman. The fact that Al Sheikh claims publicly that events like this are what motivates him in his direction of the channel suggests that he is something of an inverse cynic in Oscar Wilde’s sense: he knows the value of everything and the price of nothing. He is driven to cover the plight of the brutalized and to feel their pain, but not to reach out to those he sees as brutalizers, to address their concerns and to hasten agreements that would stop the killing. In fact, there is little evidence that the leadership of Al Jazeera is very much interested in making peace at all if they have even considered the possibility. When I would introduce myself as a professor of Conflict Resolution at the Forum, I was commonly greeted by perplexed looks which seemed to ask, ‘what does that have to do with power in the Middle East?’

It is easy to ask too much of the Arab satellites. As noted above, they are documenting the plight of the underdog in asymmetric conflicts, which compares favorably to what passes as news on most U.S. broadcasts. Nevertheless, I think it fair to demand much of them for reasons implicit in my analogy to nuclear weapons above. As the English channel gains in popularity, Al Jazeera has an opportunity to do what it does best—give voice to the voiceless. We English speakers have much to learn, not only about what is happening in Middle East, but also about how it is understood there. What the satellite should do with its Arabic channel is quite different. I would hope that we would see more there of atrocity in context and less of an easy conception of the world as divided between brutalizer and brutalized. In such a powder keg, to report the facts is not enough. Viewers in the Middle East seem most in need of frameworks of mutual understanding that would facilitate more productive movements through which to demand social justice. If channel leaders do not take this challenge of communicative action seriously, escalation will provide cover for ongoing brutalization, and as Oppenheimer warned with respect to nuclear weapons, the Arab world may prove weaker with the development of new intellectual weapons like Al Jazeera than it was without them.

Solon Simmons ([email protected]) is an assistant professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (http://icar.gmu.edu/) at George Mason University. He teaches courses on advanced quantitative methods, social theory and on the variously competing and complementary roles of class and culture, ideology and identity in politics and conflicts both domestically and around the world.