- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Yup, I was using "quibble" in its ordinary sense, which is how you took it. We could have a much longer discussion about this, which maybe we can pick up in a future thread.
My reservations about "threat", in brief: Caroline Faraj's story sort of demonstrates it. As I said previously, the opportunity for Hamas to agitate in areas where people might be receptive is pretty small. Likewise the opportunity for 'direct action', which has gotten smaller since the hotel attacks of a couple years ago. The security services for one, which are very good, are on it. The window is not non-existent ... but I don't see this as a 'threat' to Abdullah. Ditto in the Gulf states, where one size of monarchy does not fit all, nor the level of dissatisfaction.
Coupling this with ideas about 'the Arab street' makes it a bit more misleading; not so much your coupling as the way the concept is put to use to argue a variety of (western) positions which seem to follow a script ... and don't have any basis for representing 'popular opinion'.
My arguments about the 'Arab street' would probably be different than Electros. It isn't that such a thing doesn't exist, it's that it exists in superabundance relative to how its channeled in the media.
After working in the middle east during much of the 80s, and living and working in the region for the past several years (and having been professionally involved with Arab journalists and personally interested in public opinion), I've seen alot of 'Arab street' that does not go into that description when it gets channeled as Vox Pop by western media (or sometimes Arab or pan-Arab media, due to ownership structures, red lines, etc). Some of that is normal, but alot of it is either ignorant or intentional. The 'street' is so diverse you can get 'it' (which is, as you said, different in different parts of the Arab world, sometimes night and day) to say almost anything you want ... and this is precisely what so many outlets do. Hence my reservation.
(Maybe if we continue this discussion, I would also add some of the cultural, contextual, historical and linguistic barriers that seem to show up in our coverage of MENA ... I wouldn't want to go all Edward Said, some of my observations came via the inter-ocular trauma method ... )
BTW, a good stateside source for views on the Arab media is Marc Lynch's blog, abuaardvark.typepad.com ... also, Jon Alterman at CSIS, who doesn't focus on the media per se, is a smart guy who is sensitive to these kinds of issues. Others if you're interested.
