The Media And Hate Speech In The Arab World

By Sami B’aziz*

A culture of intolerance has become a nagging feature of typical interactions in Arab forums. Some media outlets cater to this culture by turning themselves into a kind of industry that supplies the tools of the trade: stereotypes, invective, fatuous pride, the manufacture of fear, and the debasement of truth. Its repeat customers are often outright racists and perpetrators of the worse form of identity politics, who ceaselessly seek to displace the dignity of other human beings with a range of disparaging tribal, familial, ethnic, and sectarian labels.

It is from this culture of intolerance that the region’s many internal conflicts, some viciously obvious and others seething in latency, metastasize like cancerous growths on the regional body politic. Media-hewn stereotypes nourish them, and too many leaders avert their gaze in hopes of greater opportunities for political manipulation and self-aggrandizement. One result is the intensification of suffering. Another, less painful but more embarrassing, is the resultant image of the region in the world at large as a toxic social cesspool in which no sane person would want to invest either hope or capital.

The Arab culture of intolerance has been deep-rooted for so long that few ordinary folk can remember that it was not always like this in the past, and so few recognize that it needn’t be like this in the future. This decay of memory, in turn, has led to a reign of fatalism crowned by mean-spirited paralysis.

Thanks to the oversized role of the media and their best customers in shaping Arab infospheres, many otherwise well-intentioned Arabs today resemble the denizens of Plato’s famous cave from Book VII of The Republic. In the dim light of the cave they see only indistinct shadows, and know nothing of the wider, brighter world outside. Their minds have been closed by the banishment of any awareness of other ways of seeing, of feeling, of understanding. Largely through no fault of their own, they have become a drag on their own futures and a reproach to the opinions of mankind.

Too long trapped in the dim light of the cave, the humanity of others has been reduced to distorted silhouettes on the walls. One Semitic tongue echoes in distortion when heard by those of a kindred Semitic tongue, turning every call for brotherhood and peace into a summons to hatred and war. Sunlit movements outside the cave dissolve somehow into gray figments that conspire to imprison their minds and bind their hands in shackles and chains. So dim is the light and so distracting the shadows that those within cannot find the cave’s exit.

The Allegory of the Cave helps us to understand the “imaginary world” created by Arab media. It has fabricated what Plato would consider mere shadows of the real world. And nowhere has this imaginary world been more harmful to its own perpetrators than in the cacophony of hate speech directed against the State of Israel.

The aim of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate speech has been to create a psychological abyss that restricts Muslim or Christian acceptance of Jews and Israelis, even though they are “People of the Book” whom Allah commanded us to love and deal with as friends of the spirit. In the cave the beauties of our own capacious faith have been blemished and torn. Instead of breaking bread and trading with our neighbors, we shun and vilify them as though they are tired of building their future, and long instead to join us in our dank and dusty cave. But they do not.

Arab media poisons have not harmed their targets, only their propagators and listeners. This is no surprise. Have not our wisest teachers always taught that in the end the will to exclude isolates the excluder? Have they not instructed us that to disrespect others is to disrespect our own humanity? Have they not shown us that schemes to harm others always come back around to harm the plotters themselves? And have they not warned us that to deserve honor ourselves requires honoring both God and our fellowman?

But what have Arab media done instead? They have deployed artistic and literary skills, from poetry to political cartoons, to savage the adherents of other religions—in particular Judaism—and by so doing they have breathed new poisonous vapors into the region’s myriad ideological, sectarian, and doctrinal monstrosities that mock our future and steal hope from our children.

Intolerance and Racism in Arab Societies

The spread of sectarian and doctrinal conflicts amid the reign of a culture of extremism targets the very social fabric and unity of Arab societies. It provokes strife, spreads hatred, destroys unity, and stirs conflict among the elements of dissolution. How did this come about?

On the whole, Arabs and Jews lived together, coexisting in peace, security, and stability for centuries in the Near East and North Africa. So on the whole did Arabs and Amazigh, Kurds, Turkomen, Armenians, and others. Certainly, whatever blemishes on social peace there were, no educated Jew would rank the experience of Jews in Christian Europe after the 10th century above that of the mostly Islamic Near East.

And then things changed. European empires encroached on the Arab and Muslim worlds. They brought much material and even intellectual progress, but they also brought humiliation and repression. They thrived by dividing subject peoples—divide et impera—so they could rule in greater ease and at less expense. They brought, too, new types of political thinking, including illiberal nationalism and fascism. That thinking also included new forms of prejudice based on their idea of “science,” including a form of anti-Semitism based on supposed “racial” criteria. This was something new within Dar al-Islam and, unfortunately, it gradually graphed onto and then displaced older forms of folk prejudice against Jews.

This European imperial civilization then proceeded to destroy itself in the wars of the 20th century, leaving the Arabs and the minorities in their midst with the arduous and protracted task of founding a new order among and within regional countries. In the process, Arabs and Jews, both struggling to come to terms with the wreckage visited upon them by the combination of European hubris, prejudice, and then sudden collapse, inadvertently backed into one another in Palestine.

That, in turn led to the exodus or de facto expulsion of hundreds of thousands Jews and other minorities from Arab countries over the course of the years and decades following World War II. This added to the confusion and instability within the region’s many countries, and generated new conflicts among them. Trying to come to terms with their own challenges, some elements in society turned their frustrations into a foul rhapsody of blaming only others for their distress.

Before long, too, the emergence of the many security, cultural, and political challenges suffered by the Arab countries began to contrast markedly with the recovery of most European societies. Chastened by failure, wracked with guilt, and resolved to reform, most postwar European nations strove to build societies where people could coexist and integrate harmoniously regardless of their affiliations and inclinations, whether related to religion, sect, nationality, color, or race. They began to rise above their own history, achieving much success just at a time when Arab societies were falling below their own historical norms of tolerance and coexistence. As hope and progress returned to the non-Communist parts of Europe, stereotypes and conflict enveloped the Near East and North Africa.

The civilizational gap between today’s Europe and today’s Arab world is hardly a stark one today. Much is in flux. Europe certainly has its unsolved problems, and, fortunately, we Arabs now increasingly remember that our ancestors devised political and cultural narratives that reflected a unity of goals, ambition, customs, and traditions at a time when Europe had yet to discover basic sanitation. There is no law that mandates which societies disintegrate into mayhem and which consolidate their unity and cohesion, no set fate as to which nations shall rise and which shall decline.

We see this flux if we look around the world. We remember with great pain the terrorist attack on in two mosques this past March in Christchurch, New Zealand by a right-wing extremist. But we also remember the widespread sympathy and popular cohesion that arose in support of the Muslims of New Zealand. We remember with special poignancy that the Jewish community decided to shutter its synagogues on its Sabbath—for the first time in its history—in solidarity with the Muslim community.

Germany also witnessed a series of demonstrations in solidarity with Jews last year after Jewish men wearing the “kippah” were attacked by youths chanting racist slogans. Muslims participated in demonstrations in Berlin and in other cities as well, with Muslim women even donning kippas on top of their hijabs in a show of solidarity. The Berlin demonstration was titled “Berlin Wears the Kippah.”

The Media and Hate Speech

Many Arabs know about these events, the good as well as the bad. But they do not know of the good from Arab media. Despite the importance of promoting a culture of tolerance by showing examples from around the world, such stories and messages were absent from the Arab media. Instead, Arab viewers got to see and hear the usual cascade of hate speech.

Hate speech has many definitions but it can be summed up as verbal abuse associated with an extreme discourse promoting intolerance, racial discrimination, and exclusion. Hate speech as a socio-political and communicative phenomenon has been exacerbated by the proliferation of new media forms that allow non-traditional platforms in cyberspace an almost absolute freedom without moral controls or deterrent laws. So we face a situation where some hate speech is sponsored by government control media and other hate speech exists despite government efforts to staunch it.

In one form or the other, we see no lack of investment in exploiting media platforms to strengthen the discourse of boycott and exclusion in Arab societies. Insecure egos, individual and collective, compete to feed each other rancid portions of self-serving propaganda based on tribe, race, sect, and ideology. Growing “armies of hate” have arisen to fight a long list of social, sectarian, and ethnic battles in cyberspace.

In sum, the People of the Cave, reactionaries, racists, and cowards all, have now built communications systems to spread the dim light among themselves, and even to project it beyond the cave. They preach systematic exclusion, not to exclude boycotting Israel and demonizing Jews everywhere, based on summary rejection of all forms of tolerance, cohesion, and a culture of coexistence and peace.

Consolidating a Culture of Coexistence

In the face of this new development, Arabs of good conscience cannot sit idly by. We need an active strategy to counter reactionary and extremist ideas that have produced extremist aggressive behavior. We need also to confront the policies of some Arab and regional regimes that have mounted geo-strategic projects based on principles of sectarian and ethnic division and spreading religious hatred among the peoples of the region.

We must therefore master the art of peacemaking, consolidate the values of coexistence, and devise methods to protect endangered communities. We must ensure a moderate message in the media, reviewing religious discourse, correcting misperceptions, adopting the language of reason rather than emotion, and build bridges of love, brotherhood, and peace.

Arab elites, particularly, need to hold an open cultural dialogue to deal with the state of “moral obstruction” in the sectarian political and religious discourse, and to develop a comprehensive strategy to eradicate the disease of hatred. Here is a set of ten recommendations that, taken together, constitute a framework for the eradication of hatred, extremism, and terrorism.

1. Launch specialized media channels, in tandem with cooperative print and digital institutions from Arab countries, to build a culture of tolerance and combat terrorist and extremist ideology in Arabic, Hebrew, English, Farsi, and Turkish, aimed at all segments of societies in the region.
2. Launch media and intellectual training programs for media professionals to enable them to successfully combat extremist thought through the adoption of a media discourse that defends the values of tolerance and coexistence and fights extremist thought.
3. Launch programs to attract international journalists and influencers to come to the Arab region and to Israel, so they can see first-hand the tolerance and coexistence in some of the honorable models in the region.
4. Modify university curricula in the field of media and communication to include important vocabulary in spreading tolerance and combating extremism through the media.
5. Establish media observatories to monitor Arab and international media coverage of extremist thought and public opinion trends based on modern analytical methodologies.
6. Build partnerships among media institutions and cultural, educational and social institutions to provide an intellectual flow from these institutions to the media space.
7. Conduct focused media campaigns through traditional, social and electronic media to raise awareness of the values of tolerance and warn of extremist ideology.
8. Utilize institutions and forums that adopt the principles mentioned above and disseminate their publications, including the preparation of talk shows and radio and television series, and encourage writers and thinkers to incorporate the principles in their writings.
9. Encourage institutions and individuals to produce cultural programs that focus on tolerance, moderation, acceptance of the other and to encourage dialogue among civilizations.
10. Insure that dealing with Jews, in Israel and outside Israel, is not criminalized, and that the efforts of those who pursue regional peace, coexistence, and normal relations with Israel are not obstructed by violence, intimidation, or legal chicanery.

We Arabs are not helpless. We are not caught in whirlpool of decline. We are not the subject of vast conspiracies, except the one we pawn off on ourselves. We can do these things. Indeed, they are easy to do compared to the prospect of holding ourselves in thrall to small-mindedness forever. That, we must realize, is truly hard.

*Sami B’aziz is an Algerian journalist and civic activist. He resides in Algiers.