Hugh Pope

Leafing through the summer 2009 edition of Washington’s “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas”, I stumbled across an interesting critique of the U.S. media performance in the run-up to, during, and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – a central theme of the last quarter of my new book, Dining with al-Qaeda.

In the article, Leslie Gelb and Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati made useful points in their survey of the failure of the “elite press” to be critical enough of U.S. policies. But as the only correspondent who reported from Iraq in the year before the war for one of the newspapers they refer to, the Wall Street Journal, I believe we should add other factors into the account.

As Gelb and Zelmati say, grand publications still have the resources, expertise and vocation to be key examiners of government policy; that Administrations and Congress cannot be trusted to give an unbiased version of their own role in events; that think tanks can be superficial and ideological; and that news stories often stress politics above understanding of policy, usually due to non-specialist writers’ lack of substantive knowledge. I also welcome the finding that stories by reporters in the field stand up better to the test of time than those written from cubicles in Washington DC.

The authors’ recommendations are also fine as far as they go: editors should support reporters to mount challenges to the system; news should be analysed more; field reporters should be rotated through Washington; and journalism schools should do more succinct, quick analysis of coverage. Still, as I try to explain in the caption of the accompanying photo, foreign correspondents like me faced more fundamental issues as we tackled the onrush of the Iraq war, problems that are endemic in reporting anything about the Middle East in a U.S. newspaper.

These include the fact that readers like, and editors look for, stories with American characters, transparent motivations and happy endings, which build a quite unrepresentative picture of the region. We often pulled punches in order not to disturb Americans’ comfort zones, minimizing the bloody side of the violence, caricaturing the boiling hatreds, and stepping lightly round the Western role in stoking up at least 15 major wars and revolutions that have devastated Middle Eastern societies over the last century.

We thus all played small roles in constructing artificial narratives instead: an Arab-Israeli “peace process” that has never proceeded anywhere, a misleading scenario of regional struggle between “moderates” and “radicals”, a myth of American neutrality and analysis confused by one-size-fits-all labels like “Islam”, “Arab world” and “terror”. Over decades, the “elite press” has thus helped build a wall of incomprehension between American readers and the realities of the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, the average American has a hard time understanding what’s going on anywhere in the region, let alone in Iraq.

Additionally, in the specific case of the Journal, readers’ and policy makers’ opinions in the run-up to the war were surely swayed by long, regular and prominent articles in the opinion pages by hard-line Israelis, making what soon proved to be fallacious assertions about America’s interest and duty to invade Iraq. At the same time, for much of the 2000-2002 period, the Journal‘s news pages didn’t even have a dedicated Israel correspondent.

It was hard to see all this while working in the field, and I only came to this fuller realization of what lay behind our 2002/2003 frustrations while writing Dining with al-Qaeda. At the time, being a reporter trying to alert the U.S. to the folly of the Iraq war felt like being a blade of grass flattened by a gale force wind of pro-war sentiment. I often just felt depressed, even emasculated, and understood how tempting and empowering it must have felt to be able to join the pro-war charge.

It is humbling to realize that this flattened-grass effect is how journalists in authoritarian regimes feel all the time. I remain thankful that, unlike them, and unlike the man from Mosul above, I was not trampled underfoot as well. In the Journal‘s news pages, my editors were honest and rigorous, and they did usually print my dissident stories, even if the problems mentioned above tended to distort, diminish and delay our coverage.

For instance, it was only in January 2003 that I started working up a full analysis of the historic folly of invading Iraq (or any other Middle Eastern country). It was two months before we could all agree that it was ready to grace the front page of the newspaper. That was on 19 March — the day before the tanks started rolling in.

John Ash writes poetry that I really love, and his new collection “In the Wake of the Day”, just published by Carcanet, once again offers great moments of hovering between East and West, ancient and modern, the personal and the historical.

Ash nearly drops his pose of elegant nonchalance once or twice when he edges close to the vicious sides of the contemporary Middle East and the insouciant West’s share of responsibility for the mess.  “Babylon” asks the reader to “remember the shattered windows of the stores,/the blood smeared on torn newspaper … tank tracks are driven over Babylon.” More representative of the typical Middle Eastern condition, perhaps,  is “The Cut,” as people rush home on a snowy winter evening and the lights go out – again. “The grid overloads. The power fails./It is like this often. We shift and change,/Slipping to a poor, third place.” And Ash has all his pithy poise at hand in this short meditation:

Olives

In the lands to the west of the Jordan

Olive groves were guarded by the soldiers of the kings

By night and day, and the destruction

Of a single tree was punishable by death

Or mutilation. This is no longer the case,

But I am not convinced of the improvement.

We’re neighbours in Istanbul, so I guess that it’s no surprise that we share many of the same perspectives, which I try to capture in down-to-earth, anecdotal prose in Dining with al-Qaeda. I wish I could get away with the grand historical sweep beloved by Ash, as here in “Difficult”, a poem in which he mocks his incurable name-dropping of ancient oddities, then unrepentantly wraps his poem up with the couplet:

Let us now consider with care the lost

Recital platforms of Sogdiana.

Sometimes I feel that for Americans, the dramas of the Middle East play out in parallel universe. It was with fascination, therefore, that I saw that the Berkeley Daily Planet in California had spun into an intergalactic war as it tried to bring debate about the region down to earth.

I bring this up because a principal idea I want to get across in my book Dining with al-Qaeda is how hard it is for reporters covering the Middle East to frame the story right. This is especially true when issues dealing with Israel, anti-Semitism, or terrorism come up.

The mismatch of perception and reality that has built up over decades can trip up even a local American newspaper. The Daily Planet, which published letters critical of Israel, was the subject of this story in the New York Times in November 2009.

BERKELEY, Calif. — For the last six years, The Berkeley Daily Planet has published a freewheeling assortment of submissions from readers, who offer sharp-elbowed views on everything from raucous college parties (generally bad) to the war in Iraq (ditto).

But since March, that running commentary has been under attack by a small but vociferous group of critics who accuse the paper’s editor, Becky O’Malley, of publishing too many letters and other commentary pieces critical of Israel. Those accusations are the basis of a campaign to drive away the paper’s advertisers and a Web site that strongly suggests The Planet and its editor are anti-Semitic.

“We think that Ms. O’Malley is addicted to anti-Israel expression just as an alcoholic is to drinking,” Jim Sinkinson, who has led the campaign to discourage advertisers, wrote in an e-mail message. He is the publisher of Infocom Group, a media relations company. “If she wants to serve and please the East Bay Jewish community, she would be safer avoiding the subject entirely.”

I assume that both journalist and the New York Times were acting in good faith, just as was the case of my experience in the Middle East. Yet this account showed again how successful lobbying groups have been in developing U.S. newspapers’ particular approach to Israel.

First the headline: “In a Home to Free Speech, a Paper Is Accused of Anti-Semitism” Note: not something neutral like “Paper in Home of Free Speech Attacked for Publishing Anti-Israel Letters.” An anti-Semitic slur is slung, and the mud sticks. A headline-hopping reader gets the message that anti-Semitism is taking root in America and must be stopped. It sets the tone for the whole article, legitimizing the idea that publishing material critical of Israel – apparently the main problem — is necessarily anti-Semitic, as does the choice of quote for the third paragraph.

As the story eventually points out in its concluding paragraphs, the local Jewish community in fact wants little to do with this campaign against the supposedly anti-Semitic Daily Planet. The community does rightly protest an unpleasant letter from an Iranian student in India claiming that Jews brought persecution upon themselves – the only item cited that backs up the anti-Semitic charge in the headline. Indeed, the Times points out that the Daily Planet‘s owner, Ms. O’Malley, later firmly distanced herself from this “nasty” view in her paper.

I’d like to stress again that I mainly want to draw attention to the way the Times article is constructed. Much of the information for a fully-aware reader to make a judgement is there, just lower down in the story. Better late than never, Ms. O’Malley is cited as pointing out (in print) her reason for making her readers aware that criticism of Israel is out there.

I still don’t think that keeping sentiments like [that of the Iranian student in India] out of The Daily Planet will make him or people like him go away.

Ms. O’Malley is quite right. Airbrushing out uncomfortable realities helps nobody. Israel’s overpowering conduct in its dispute with the Palestinians, and U.S. support for its actions, have stirred public opinion not just in California but to a far greater degree in Middle Eastern countries. Framing can also go too far the other way, as broadcasters like al-Jazeera spin scenes that inflame Middle Eastern viewers. This poisonous mix has fed distorted, sometimes perverted and disgraceful views of Jews, Israel and America. It certainly underpinned the motivation of several of the 9/11 hijackers.

My late Journal colleague, Danny Pearl – a Jewish victim of this wave of hatred, killed by real anti-Semitic extremists in Karachi in 2002 – had wanted to write a story after 9/11 that exposed the way Middle Easterners had persuaded themselves that the attacks on the U.S. were actually organized by the Israeli secret service, Mossad. He wished to explain how it was that the whole Muslim world was ready to believe conspiracy claims emanating from a small Jihadi group, not the clear reality of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States evident to the whole world. The Journal’s editors declined to publish it. Pearl was furious, believing that they avoided the story because it would inevitably have raised the issue of Israel’s conduct.

And so it was that yet another light mile was added to the outer space of ignorance that separates Americans from the reality of the Middle East —  a gap in public knowledge that that is policed by campaigns like the one reported by the Times against the Daily Planet.