I was born in Beirut but New York is my home by choice. For 25 years, as a reporter and student of American-Arab relations, I’ve played the role of cultural interpreter, attempting to explain each side to the other. There has always been a profound disconnect, a deep mutual suspicion and lack of trust. Now the rift is almost incalculably large.
Reason, moderation and sobriety are never more needed than in crisis. Yet seldom have such qualities been so absent, nowhere more so than in the media. Following the news in both my worlds since Sept. 11, I find troubling common denominators–a tenor of coverage that seems destructive in intent as well as effect, coupled with a partisanship that is as irresponsible as it is harmful. Whether it’s the sound-bite quality of American television or the “pontificator monologues” of Arab commentators, the result is similar: the erosion of the media’s role in learning and, then, educating. Its place has been usurped by a collective “us” versus “them.”
Blame for that is evenly shared. In some Arab media, venom has poured forth, alternately defensive and aggressive. A very few gloated at what happened to America, considering it a natural consequence of arrogant and cocky behavior. But even those who utterly condemned the terrorist attacks failed to take the debate over American policies in the Middle East to a new threshold. American coverage has been only superficially moderate, even after the first bellicose few days when journalists hastened to teach Americans all about countries, peoples and Islamic groups that they hitherto knew little or nothing about. I use the word “superficial” deliberately, because to me the lessons learned strike me as having less to do with real understanding than the (I hope unconscious) agenda of “know thine enemy.”
How disheartening that is. Confronted daily with the opposite mind-sets of opposing camps, I try to reconcile, defuse, explain. Maybe living in New York, this truly magnificent, multiethnic, multilingual, international city, has made me an idealist. Faced with “them” and “us,” I ask, “Where’s the ‘we’?” It’s as if I live two lives, torn between them. But I am a realist, too–enough to be impressed by the taxi driver who stared intimidation down by hanging from his front mirror Surat Assafar (Prayer for Travel) from the Holy Quran with the American flag next to it. I am aware of the magnitude of what has happened when my 11-year-old daughter prays, “God, please capture them and bring them to justice so that we can have a normal life again.” And I am concerned when an Egyptian vendor shakes with fright as I greet him in Arabic, for fear of being “discovered” an Arab. “Be careful,” says my mother, who deep down wishes I would not write or say a word, aware of the long hand of extremism. So I find myself careful not to carry an Arabic newspaper openly when walking the street. Worried about ethnic profiling, I decide not to fly up to Harvard University to teach a seminar in interethnic relations.
Fearfulness has never described me. Over the years I have received letter bombs and been put on military trial. The bomb was addressed to my office, not to me, but the trial, in Lebanon, was to silence me and deny my right to practice my profession freely. Throughout much of the Arab world, either the security apparatus or extreme fundamentalists rule. The public is lame, lacking the civil institutions or voice necessary to make a difference. But this majority, like the American majority, which in the past has not cared about foreign policy, must be heard and engaged.
To my American friends, in their confusion, I say that most Arabs do not hate them. They do, however, have legitimate issues with American policies–namely the unqualified support of Israel, even in the face of the terror it inflicts on Palestinians, from killings and the destruction of homes to the collective punishment of isolation and economic strangulation. Is that right? To my Arab friends, in their anger, I say Americans do not know you. They know only the extreme fundamentalists in our midst and mean the rest of us no harm or disrespect. Americans may act in the world, I explain, but they are not worldly. As for U.S. policymakers, they take Arabs for granted or channel support to some governments that are distrusted and despised by their peoples. This is not the arrogance of might so much as shortsightedness and ignorance.
We are both so much alike, in the end, living each in our worlds, disconnected, talking past one another. Lost in our own reflections, neither of us sees the other, or (too often) ourselves.
