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June 5, 2006

Middle East: Why Do Islamists Hate TV Stations?

Today, AKI, Reporters Without Borders, CBC.ca, Associated Press via Fox News and Toronto Star, and Reuters via ABC News report that earlier today in the Palestinian South Gaza Strip, Israel, gunmen stormed into the building which houses Palestinian Television, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The gunmen have been identified by employees in the building as Hamas members. The president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, is a member of Fatah, and recently there have been near civil wars on the streets between militia loyal to Hamas and those supportive of Fatah.

The gunmen arrived in a large number, dozens according to Reuters, 15 according to Fox, and proceeded to smash up computers and to fire at broadcasting equipment. They shouted that Palestine TV favoured Fatah. They also beat up two Palestinian TV employees. According to one person who worked at the building: "The whole place is ruined."

AKI stated that the attack on the building in Khan Yunis, Gaza, was a retaliation for a fatal shooting last night of the wife and brother of a local Hamas leader, apparently by gunmen from Fatah.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesperson, officially denied involvement. Later in the day, the station stopped broadcasting, as an act of protest against the earlier raid.

Mahmoud Abbas has given the Hamas leadership up until midnight to sign the accord penned by Palestinian prisoners, known as the National Reconciliation Document. Already, Al Quds, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, has agreed to the terms of this document. Abbas has said: "The document has to be accepted as it is. If we begin to change it, we will never reach a result."

The document agrees to accept Israel's right to exist, as long as it returns to the borders it maintained before the 1967 war, and allows part of Jerusalem to be the capital of the state of Palestine. Hamas refuses to acknowledge the state of Israel, which is why its elected government is being deprived of most of its funding.

Abbas has threatened to call a referendum in July if Hamas will not agree to the proposals laid out in the National Reconciliation Document.

So far, employees of the Palestinian Authority have not received proper payments since March. Today Hamas agreed to pay 40,000 of the lowest paid employees a month's worth of salaries, leaving 125,000 better paid (?) employees without their wages and relying upon their savings. A deal is being negotiated by the European Union on behalf of the "Quartet" of the EU, US, UN and Russia, to resolve the wages shortfall.

So why was the TV station attacked? It had not been broadcasting any specific program that could be deemed overtly controversial, but it was in the hands of a "perceived enemy". And Islam is built upon the founding notions that there is always an enemy, a kaffir, an apostate, a polytheist, who would threaten, and needs to be employed.

Normally Muslim threats and attacks against television stations are based upon perceived "obscenity", as happened to all cable station in Northern India. On Friday, May 12 Islamists threatened to make suicide attacks if cable TV operators did not curtail their supply to Indian Kashmir (Jammu & Kashmir State).

The "immorality" of television is blamed sometimes for problems in society. In the aftermath of Pakistan's earthquake last October, one imam ordered his followers to destroy their television sets. Shafquat-ur-Rehman of Eid Gaah, in Garhi Habibullah blamed the immorality of television and the arrival of cable TV six months earlier for the disaster. Four televisions were duly burned, but most of his congregation's homes had collapsed in the earthquake, and few intact TVs were to be found.

Recreational television is regarded as tabu for by members of the Sunni Deobandi school of faith. At the training center of Darul Uloom, students may use computers, but may not use the Internet. They are permitted to watch TV news, but may not watch movies. Many of the Taliban graduated from the Haqqania madrassa. Although under Mullah Omar in Afghanistan they shunned television, the Taliban's successors in Waziristan have employed DVDs and videos of their murderous exploits to promote their cause and bring in more recruits.

Arabic television stations such as Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiyah frequently broadcast scenes of carnage, and have been used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to promote their home-made snuff movies. Scenes of graphic carnage which would never be shown on Western television are served up on an almost daily basis on these channels. And while bare thighs and a lot more exposed flesh is exposed in Western media, the Muslim stations are totally censorious about such images. British television has recently depicted full penetration and erections in late-night films on its terrestrial channels, and the society has not (yet) collapsed.

Fundamentalists traditionally never allowed the depiction of the human form in the early centuries of Islam. The beautiful applied designs of mosques, such as the Alhambra in Spain, employ every conceivable expression of geometrical design, and all 17 possible examples of symmetry in their decor, but never a human face or figure. In some traditionalist cultures, such as Mauritania, it was only recently that rural villagers allowed themselves to be photographed without resorting to smashing cameras and assaulting tourists.

As explained in a February article in the Washington Post:

The earliest traditions of the faith do, at times, display a deep distrust of pictures, all pictures. "On the day of judgment the most terrible of punishments will be inflicted on the painter," is one warning to be found in an old collection of the sayings of Muhammad.

"There are many such sayings of the prophet," said Imam Talal Eid, director of the Islamic Institute of Boston in nearby Quincy. "He instructed his companions not to draw a picture of him, and this has been taken as a general prohibition. He also told them not to pray in places that have images. There also is a general prohibition against full statues. And -- though today, of course, we find photos in all passports -- many Muslims have felt some hesitance about permitting portraits of any kind."

Yet no such condemnation is explicit in the Koran. "It comes as a surprise to find," writes scholar Alexandre Papadopoulo, "that there exists in [the Koran] not a single interdiction against images, paintings, or statues of living beings."

The taboo against painted images was most strongly held by Sunnis, who are the predominant group in the Middle East.

Yet nowadays Sunni Saudi Arabia and in consequence the entire Middle East has wholeheartedly embraced images, as expressed in photographs, and more importantly in the power of television. Preachers such as Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris regularly use Palestinian TV to broadcast his sermons of hate against the Jews to his audiences. The victims of kidnappings, such as Margaret Hassan (pictured, top) are displayed and humiliated on Al Arabiyah and Al Jazeera TV throughout the Middle East, in an inverted pornography based on Islamist threat and fear.

In Haditha in Iraq last year, weekly decapitations took place on a bridge outside the town. Videotaped and sold in VHS form at local markets, the taped beheadings became more popular for children than cartoons of Daffy Duck or Spongebob Squarepants. No-one bothered to hide such images of horror from children.

But much as broadcast television has a seductive power, exploited by Islamist media, it is also seen as a potential threat when placed in the wrong hands. Today's attack upon Palestinian TV was a gesture more about politics than television, but today's events follow on from two particularly strong reactions to TV in the Middle East.

On Friday (June 2) in Syria, Islamists were killed when they tried to storm the premises of state-run TV. The story was carried by the Times, by Reuters, and the BBC. At least two assailants and a security guard at the station died in the incident. The BBC stated that four Islamists were killed.

Here perhaps the TV station was attacked because it was a symbol of the secular Ba'athist state of Syria. Though the authorities declared the group was "Islamist", the actual organisation they belonged to was not made known.

And the day before, on Thursday Jan 1, a TV station in Lebanon broadcast a comedy show which caused widespread riots overnight. The Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. - a privately owned Christian channel - had a spoof of the leader of Hezbollah. The event was covered by AP via Globe & Mail and by Haaretz, with updates from Khaleej Times and Naharnet.com.

The weekly satire program was called "Bas Mat Watan" and it regularly sends up the political events of the day. But when it showed an actor playing Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, complete with his trademark black turban, spectacles and beard, Shi'ite viewers felt that the program had crossed a bridge too far. The scene in the program (whose title can mean either "A Nation's Smiles" or "A Nation That Died", depending on how you pronounce it) which caused the outcry was where a woman asks if Hizbollah would lay down its arms if Israel withdrew from Shabaa. This is the region which is disputed by Hizbollah.

The "woman" in the sketch was played by a man in drag. The response of Nasrallah (the punchline) is that he needed the weapons for "liberating the house of Abu Hassan in Detroit from his Jewish neighbor". Many Lebanese Shi'ites live in Detroit, and this was seen as an offensive because it appeared to make a prod based on the UN Security Council's resolution for Iranian-funded Hezbollah to disarm.

Following the broadcast Shiites took to the streets, waving yellow Hezbollah flags, in southern Beirut, where Hezbollah has a stronghold, and in other parts of the country, particularly southern and eastern Lebanon. Carrying pictures of Nasrallah, they blocked the road to the country's only airport.

The hundreds who started to protest increased in number until they numbered thousands. Car tires were burned, and troops had to block roads in Beirut's commercial center to prevent hezbollah supporters on motorbikes from gaining access.

Troops were also deployed around the perimeters of Christian zones, to prevent the demonstrations ending up in sectarian violence. However, rioters managed to break through into the Christian district of Ain el-Rummaneh, where one person was beaten with a stick.

In another Christian district, Ashrafiyeh, four people were beaten with sticks. One of these, Sami Gemayel, is the son of the former President of lebanon, President Amin Gemayel.

On Friday morning, Nasrallah appeared on TV himself, and urged his supporters to desist from rioting. Charbel Khalil, the producer of "Bas Mat Watan" made a public apology. He claimed he respected Nasrallah and did not mean to offend.

Abdul-Hadi Mahfouz, chairman of the National Media Council, convened a meeting on Friday, in which he demanded an apology from the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. He said that if no apology was forthcoming, LBC could face prosecution. Satellite broadcasters announced that they would not carry signals for LBC unless the station made an apology.

Shiites comprise the largest religious grouping in Lebanon, numbering 1.2 million, out of a total population of 3.5 million.

Television has always provoked strong feelings. For many, even in the west, its seductive and beguiling familiarity has been seen as something to be monitored and restrained, and for dictatorships TV has been used to spread propaganda. Germany developed the first working colour TV transmissions during the Nazi era, as under Goebbels they understood the power of the medium.

Issues of morality affect Western policy makers and also Muslim policy makers. But what people in the West seem to find horrific, such as images of real-life carnage, are considered within Muslim media to be acceptable. But for the Muslim world, mild political satire or the dated jiggling bikini-clad boobs of, say, Pamela Anderson on Baywatch, can be enough to cause threats of death and acts of war.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 5, 2006 10:17 PM

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