Arab Press Fans The Flames of Hate; The government-controlled media across the Muslim world consistently print stories with an anti-American slant, and the United States so far has failed to counter

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2003

Byline: J. Michael Waller, INSIGHT

Try these for fighting words: "Rumsfeld is a new Hitler" and "Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld are the Axis of Evil" and "Powell is even more stupid and deceitful than Mrs. Madeleine Albright." And they don't come from French antiwar protesters or San Francisco fringe groups, but from the pages of two of the top government-run newspapers in U.S.-allied Egypt.

With the State Department signing off every year on American taxpayers' annual $2 billion subsidy to the Egyptian government, the average citizen might think someone in Washington would be leaning on Cairo to stop inciting anti-U.S. hatred through the regime's mouthpieces. That citizen would be wrong. The controlled media in Egypt and across the Arab/Muslim world have loaded both their editorials and news sections with vitriol against the United States, providing legitimacy and political cover for ever-intensifying extremism.

That was the case well before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Just weeks after newly inaugurated President George W. Bush appointed Colin Powell as the country's top diplomat, a writer in the government daily Al Akhbar wrote, "The American secretary of state shed his skin, tore himself from his roots, and today he represents only himself and has no connection to the Black American community which led the revolution for democracy, equality and human rights in the world."

Bush administration officials say the United States has not leveraged its relationship with the Egyptian government and other Arab or predominantly Muslim states with similar press restrictions to prevent such officially sponsored, and arguably American-subsidized, statements from adding credibility to the propaganda of the terrorists and their state sponsors. That failure is damaging to U.S. interests, the officials say. Their view is reinforced by a major new survey of 16,000 people in 20 countries released June 3 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

"The bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim world," according to the Pew report. "Negative views of the U.S. among Muslims, which had been largely limited to countries in the Middle East, have spread to Muslim populations in Indonesia and Nigeria. Since last summer, favorable ratings for the U.S. have fallen from 61 percent to 15 percent in Indonesia and from 71 percent to 38 percent among Muslims in Nigeria.

"In the wake of the war, a growing percentage of Muslims see serious threats to Islam. Specifically, majorities in seven of eight Muslim populations surveyed express worries that the United States might become a military threat to their countries. Even in Kuwait, where people have a generally favorable view of the United States, 53 percent voice at least some concern that the U.S. could someday pose a threat.

"Support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism also has fallen in most Muslim publics. Equally significant, solid majorities in the Palestinian Authority, Indonesia and Jordan and nearly half of those in Morocco and Pakistan say they have at least some confidence in Osama bin Laden to 'do the right thing regarding world affairs.' Fully 71 percent of Palestinians say they have confidence in bin Laden in this regard."

The news and information outlets of those countries, most of which are state-dominated or government-controlled, have fueled anti-American fury, with no strategic attempts on the U.S. side to counter the constant negative messages. Surveys of the Arabic-language media, especially outlets controlled or censored by governments supported or defended by the United States, show just how destructive key Arab governments have been in Washington's all-but-vain efforts to counter terrorist propaganda.

Americans would know little if anything about how "moderate" Arab regimes are whipping up hostile public opinion were it not for a small, Washington-based foundation called the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which has earned widespread respect for its world-class translations from Arabic into English. With little or no editorial comment, MEMRI publishes the translations in English for public use.

MEMRI's collection of translations and quotes shows that for at least three years Al-Ahram and other Egyptian government newspapers have spread lie after lie about the United States, accusing it of "committing a crime against humanity by giving the Afghani people hazardous humanitarian products" such as genetically altered grain. Al-'Ilm, a government-sanctioned science magazine, wrote of "alleged U.S. germ warfare in Afghanistan" and recycled old Soviet disinformation about American biological warfare against North Korea. Al-Ahram ran a column on Jan. 26, 2002, saying that U.S. treatment of captured al-Qaeda terrorists was "unseen in history worse than what Hitler did." The paper's Website published a piece the following March that said, "What we have here is not an axis of evil under attack; rather, what we have is an axis of evil in the making." Earlier this year, Al-Ahram's weekly edition carried a piece comparing the Bush administration's policymaking to "the manner in which Hitler manipulated the German people to adopt the agenda of the Nazi Party."