Arab Media Watch

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Arab Media Watch: Press Releases

On 18 July 2008, Arab Media Watch chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi wrote to the Daily Telegraph in response to a commentary by Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor.

A day earlier, Nashashibi wrote to the Times in response to an editorial on the Israel-Hezbollah prisoner swap.

War's unintended consequences

Arab Media Watch: Analysis

By Rami Khouri, Arab Media Watch adviser, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

23 July 2008

It is a sign of the times that Barack Obama made his first two presidential campaign stops abroad in recent days to the two active theaters of war, where 180,000 American troops have been engaged in fighting for nearly the past six years. It would be useful to ask the right questions about these wars, now that a new leadership will take office in Washington. One good place to start is to learn the right lessons from the conduct and consequences of these wars, so that any mistakes here are not repeated elsewhere in the future.

Arab Media Watch: Analysis

Neve Gordon - lecturer in politics at Ben-Gurion University and author of Israel's Occupation - highlights the case of the Palestinian village of Ni'lin, whose residents are heroically resisting Israeli land seizures, as an example of how the media, from the BBC to CNN, ignore stories that "shatter the stereotypical perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provided by mainstream news sources."

22 July 2008

Arab Media Watch: Analysis

The presidential hopeful has been accused of flip-flopping over the occupation, but he was never for full withdrawal, writes Sami Ramadani, Arab Media Watch adviser, a political exile from Saddam's regime, and a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

22 July 2008
The Guardian

Arab Media Watch: News Articles

By Rory McCarthy
22 July 2008
The Guardian

Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, yesterday promised an inquiry after video footage showed an Israeli soldier shooting baton rounds at a Palestinian detainee who was blindfolded and cuffed.

Last night's TV

Arab Media Watch: Analysis

By Sam Wollaston
21 July 2008
The Guardian

Ever wondered which way Muslims who are actually in Mecca face to pray? Towards the Grand Mosque, Al-Masjid al-Haram, the holiest place on earth, of course. And if they're in the Grand Mosque, then they face the Kaaba, the black cube at its centre. It turns out that you can actually go inside the Kaaba. Well, you probably can't, but some people are allowed in (if you're reading, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheikh, then good day to you, sir). So where do you face, if you're praying in there? It doesn't matter, that's the answer. It's as if direction has been removed from your life. A bit like standing at the south pole. It doesn't matter which direction you face, it's all north.

That is one of the interesting things I learnt from The Seven Wonders of the Muslim World (Channel 4, Sunday). It wasn't a great documentary, though, unlike Antony Thomas's Qur'an film, which started Channel 4's week of all things Muslim. That was searching and intelligent; this one appears to have been made by Islam's PR department. It's glossy and unquestioning.

Still, the buildings are fantastic, from the extraordinary mud-built mosque of Djenne in Mali, which looks as if it was built by giant termites, to the splendour of Isfahan and the Alhambra. And the hajj scenes from Mecca are extraordinary. I suppose the advantage of the documentary being made by Islam Forever Films is that they get great access to pretty much all areas, bar the Kaaba (we have to make do with a drawing). It is an awesome sight: thousands and thousands of pilgrims circling the Kaaba, an enormous, living, breathing whirlpool of faith.

Arab Media Watch: Analysis

21 July 2008

When Washington decided that the third-ranking US State Department official would join the international talks with Iran in Geneva last Saturday, it was a smart move - not, as some might claim, a humiliating defeat for the United States. Israel for its part swallowed its pride - and its words - last Wednesday when it exchanged Lebanese prisoners for the bodies of its two soldiers whom Hizbullah had kidnapped in 2006 - sparking that summer's war.

Both the United States and Israel are doing things they had said they would never do - the US sits and talks with Iran before Tehran has suspended uranium enrichment, and Israel does a diplomatic deal to retrieve its soldiers' bodies after it had failed to achieve that goal by vicious and prolonged warfare. The fact that the US and Israel were both politically humbled during the same week has been widely interpreted as a double defeat, and victories for Iran and Hizbullah. That is too simplistic a reading of the dynamics in the region.

Arab Media Watch: News Articles

By Rory McCarthy
21 July 2008
The Guardian

AMW media interactions: 7-13 July 2008

Arab Media Watch: Press Releases

During the week of 7-13 July 2008, Arab Media Watch adviser Guy Gabriel was interviewed by Al Jazeera English about media coverage of Sudan, and AMW arranged other interviewees; AMW chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi and director Muna Nashashibi were interviewed by Asharq Al Awsat about AMW, and by a media studies postgraduate student at Westminster University about Israel / Palestine; and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office invited Sharif to meet with and be interviewed by staff members of Al Jazeera Talk, the semi-independent youth website that sits in the Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

A Middle East correspondent for a national British newspaper acknowledged errors highlighted by AMW in the use of certain terminology regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and AMW wrote to a Times correspondent expressing concern at her coverage of the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem. Specifically, she made several mentions of the term 'Arab' that "bring a negatively racial aspect to the story that is not only unnecessary, but something that other Middle East correspondents from the British broadsheets did not do." This resulted in several email exchanges with her;

The Observer published a letter on Palestine by AMW adviser Victor Kattan; the Syrian Embassy published an article by Gabriel and Nashashibi about the Golan Heights; AMW wrote to the Sun and Daily Mail about disparaging comments made by columnists Trevor Kavanagh and Richard Littlejohn about the Arab world; AMW published a press release inviting journalists to attend the launch of a major report on the economic challenges facing oil- and gas-exporting states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Algeria; and AMW adviser Tahrir Swift wrote to Channel 4 and the Independent about Iraq.

AMW issued an Action Alert urging members and the public to thank Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and Channel 4 for an excellent documentary entitled "It shouldn't happen to a Muslim." AMW thanked Oborne also.

AMW met with the Guardian, Financial Times, a media studies lecturer from Cambridge University, several Arab embassies, and a documentarian doing a programme about the veil. AMW gave him relevant contacts, including Independent regular columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Press TV presenter Yvonne Ridley.

AMW liaised with the BBC, Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, ABC News, Arab News Broadcasting, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Standard Operating Procedure

Arab Media Watch: Analysis

(Cert 15)

By Peter Bradshaw
18 July 2008
The Guardian

The queasy apprehension of pure evil is what Errol Morris's new documentary appears to offer; it is a series of interviews with those people responsible - some of them, anyway - for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2003. Digital photos showed US soldiers clowning around for the camera while they brutalised and dehumanised Iraqi prisoners. And Morris's movie shows that it was not just a matter of humiliating these people and robbing them of their dignity. One picture shows a soldier grinning next to the ice-packed corpse of a man who died while in the "stress" position: in other words, a man who had been tortured to death. Eventually it was the responsibility of the US military police to decide which of the pictured events constituted torture, and which were "standard operating procedure". No one higher than the rank of staff sergeant was ever brought to book, despite the fact that a vaguely defined policy of "fucking with" the prisoners was sanctioned from the very top.