Media still can't navigate fundamental issues when it comes to "us people"
When Iranian American Journalist Roxana Saberi was charged with espionage, I was contacted by several media local and national and asked to comment.
"How does the Arab American community feel when one of their own is detained and imprisoned?" one reporter from a major regional newspaper asked me.
"We don't feel very good," I replied. And then I quickly added, "Don't you want me to comment on Roxane Saberi?"
The reporter seemed confused and I cut to the chase. Roxane Saberi is not Arab. She's Iranian. I don't even know if she is Muslim, although I know "we all look alike."
It's a major problem in the mainstream media that they have to do a little more work to distinguish between Arabs and Iranians, and Arabs and Muslims. They're all different, unless it doesn't matter, of course. It's almost as if some reporters do not think it matters. But it does.
But it doesn't just involve broad stroke stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims by the mainstream media. There are internal ethnic and religious rivalries that fuel the problem. For example, the biggest critic of the Iranian Government of President Ahmedinejad is not Israel. It is Saudi Arabia and right behind them most of the Arab World. The "Arabs" are Sunni Muslim (the largest sect of Muslims) and the Iranians are Shi'ite Muslim.
The Iranian animosity against Israel, for example, is different from the Arab World criticism of Israel.
It spills over into our respective communities in the United States, too, with many Arab journalists trying to organize as an ethnicity, and others organizing with Iranian journalists as a "regional" grouping. Tragically, the many factions don't come together. Although if there is a good side to the conflicts, it does create some "diversity."
So how do I feel about the Saberi conflict?
As a journalist, I oppose the imprisonment of any journalists. I was against the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Saberi by the government of Iran. But, I was also against the arrest and imprisonment of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Baghdad.
Many American and Western journalists argued Muntazer al-Zaidi, who worked for the independent Iraqi television station Al-Baghdadia, was guilty of violating his journalistic principles. Some argued his act was one of "violence" that "jeopardized" all journalists. In fact, I read that argument in the SPJ Magazine recently.
Yet, no one seems concerned that Saberi, the non-Arab Iranian journalist had in fact obtained an Iranian government classified document that detailed the American plans to invade Iraq. Saberi was not a fulltime journalist but was in fact a freelancer. Was she as spy as the Iranian government alleged? The Western media would have none of that accusation and there was a huge media campaign to protest her arrest and her detention.
To many Arab journalists, the two incidents between Saberi and al-Zaidi highlight the hypocrisy that exists in coverage of the Arab World and the Middle East, and Arabs versus Muslims. You might think that taking a classified Iranian government document would also have put all journalists in jeopardy. Was she "spying" as it was alleged? Or, was she merely ferreting out information for an exclusive story?
I'm not sure. We won't really know. Saberi's celebrity will trump any attempt to examine the details. She's an American Iranian with strong Western ties who one might argue supports the American political position against the Iranian government.
Al-Zaidi is an Arab journalist in a conflict in a very contested war in Iraq and his challenge wasn't against an unfavorable foreign blowhard who spouts anti-Semitism, but rather a critic of an American President whose foreign policies most likely violated the Fourth geneva Conventions on torture and war.
A lot of issues that outside of this small little space in the world of American Arab journalism, you can be sure, will get very little air time, debate time or earn a place on our table of free discussion.
-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com