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Power of English in ME conflict
NEW YORK- The Arabs, despite their fluctuating oil fortunes, have never invested their easy money grabbing either a slice of the American news media or even Hollywood.
The Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, not only owns and controls a New York newspaper but also a major television network in the United States.

The two most powerful communication tools in the United States - the media and the film industry - are controlled mostly by interests anathema to the Arabs and the Palestinians. For long, the Arab cause has been lost in the United States primarily because of the lack of articulate advocates. Every Arab leader who appears on American network television insists on speaking in a language alien to him - even as he is pitted against TV commentators whose wizardy with the English language makes the Arabs look pathetic. A good cause is invariably lost by a bad advocate.

The Chinese leaders are an exception because they insist on speaking in their own language both on television and at news conferences leaving the nuances of translation to their skilled wordsmiths. The speculation is that most Chinese leaders pretend they do not know the English language while highly-proficient translators give them enough leeway to collect their thoughts even while the questions are being fired in English at news conferences and television interviews.

A good ploy - and it works to the advantage of the Chinese. Edward Said, a professor of English Literature at Columbia University, is perhaps one of the few Palestinians who realises the power of the English language in countering the anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian propaganda so skillfully disseminated by pro-Israeli organisations in the United States.
In his weekly column in the Cairo-based Al Ahram, Said says there is simply no use operating politically and responsibly in a world dominated by one superpower - the United States - unless one is familiar with its history, its institutions, its currents and cross-currents and its politics and culture.

But most important of all, he says, is a perfect working knowledge of the superpower's language. "To hear our spokesmen, as well as other Arabs, saying the most ridiculous things about America, throwing themselves on its mercy, cursing it in one breath, asking for its help in another, all in miserable inadequate fractured English shows a state of such primitive incompetence as to make one cry," he said in his column last week.

Said says that a future Arab and Palestinian leadership should realise this as one of the basic lessons of modern politics in an age of electronic communication. "Not to have understood this is part of the tragedy of today." The Columbia professor also points out that what has enabled Israel to do what it has been doing to the Palestinians for the past 54 years is the result of "a carefully and scientifically planned campaign to validate Israeli actions and, simultaneously, devalue and efface Palestinian actions."

For Israelis, this is not merely maintaining prodigious military strength in their homefront, but of organising opinion, especially in the United States and Western Europe. Last week a single pro-Palestinian article in the Los Angeles Times evoked strong protests from pro-Israeli groups who launched a one-day boycott of the newspaper while hundreds of readers cancelled their subscriptions.

The newspaper office was inundated with 900 cleverly-orchestrated telephone calls on a single day complaining about the newspaper's coverage of the Middle East conflict.
The article by columnist Robert Scheer rightly compared Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - described by President Bush as "a man of peace - to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who is facing war crimes charges before the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague.

Last week the Israeli government and the Israeli media turned their guns at three senior UN officials who were outspoken in their comments at the Israeli atrocities in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin: Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN's Special Coordinator for the Middle East; Peter Hansen, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRAW); and Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. But Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stood by his officials virtually endorsing their views.

After a visit to the Jenin refugee camp, Roed-Larsen said: "Let me be very clear. I have not and am not accusing anyone of massacres; we do not have the full facts from Jenin. But what I saw yesterday was truly appalling. The destruction was massive; the stench overwhelming." Roed-Larsen also said that combating terrorism does not give the Israelis "a blank cheque to kill civilians." The Israelis are angry - and the next victim of a vicious media campaign may well be the United Nations.

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