by Ralph Dannheisser
Washington File (U.S. Department of State)
July 26, 2005
Washington – Over 100 university students and recent graduates from across the United States gathered in Washington July 22 to explore the dynamics of conflict in the Middle East, both in terms of government policies and media representation, in a conference sponsored by Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), an organization dedicated to raising awareness of global issues on college campuses.
AID, founded in 2002, was the brainchild of Seth Green, now a 25-year-old student at Yale Law School. Green told participants that the dual goals of the conference were “to engage in deep and well-informed conversation about America’s role in the world and to equip you with the skills to bring these conversations back to your campus.”
He said AID has employed town hall meetings, videoconferences and apartment parties in an effort to “bring the world home” and enhance understanding that “America can work effectively with other countries to solve mutual problems.”
“The next generation matters,” Green declared.
With the future of Western-Muslim relations providing the topical framework for the conference, participants heard from experts on the prospects for closer European-American cooperation in dealing with issues of peace in the Middle East and on the role that media bias can have on public perceptions.
The participants also received training on how to present their ideas in ways designed to raise public awareness about important issues.
DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES IN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE
Panelists at an opening session on “U.S. and European Perspectives on Conflict Resolution in the Middle East” saw what they described as encouraging signs that the two sides are edging toward a more cooperative policy.
Frances Burwell, director of The Atlantic Council’s Program on Transatlantic Relations, said that “after a couple of really tough years, the United States and the European Union are now closer together regarding the Middle East than they have been.”
But she said that differences persist in the priorities as well as the approaches. Europe is more focused on the Middle East peace process, while the United States sees terrorism and Iraq as the top priorities, she said. And Europe seeks solutions in economic reform and regionalization, while the United States stresses democratization.
In any case, she said, “The problems won’t be solved unless the people in the region want to solve them” and take advantage of the emerging U.S.-European cooperation.
Magda Gohar-Chrobog, president of the consulting firm Managing Global Communication, said closer coordination is needed to deal with the “intertwined” but “different” issues of terrorism, Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The latter issue must be given the highest priority, she says, because “Arab countries take it as an alibi” for deferring needed reforms.
She urged the United States to “build a relationship of greater trust between itself and the Arab world,” which perceives U.S. policy as unbalanced.
Leon Fuerth, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, called for greater American awareness of Europe’s role in dealing with the world’s trouble spots, at a time when continued cooperation cannot be seen as a given.
Most Americans have the misperception that “Europe is content to let the United States do the heavy lifting, and then move in for advantage,” he said.
Robin Niblett, executive vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cited transatlantic differences in the struggle against terrorism — Europeans seeing it as “a battle for legitimacy” rather than a “war” that can be definitively won.
Niblett predicted that the Middle East crisis would provide the key test of the transatlantic partnership in the coming years, and said, “We’re right at the cusp as to whether the European Union’s role in Iraq will work or not.”
MEDIA BIAS
Panelists discussing media bias agreed that bias is both universal and subjective.
Husain Haqqani, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said bias in favor of one side or the other “is not so much in what the media does, but how people perceive what the media is doing.”
When both sides seek to paint the world as black and white, then “anyone who is gray is seen as biased,” said Haqqani, also a journalist and one-time Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka.
Relating that comment to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said “there are sometimes situations in which two people have been victims, and you can sympathize with both.”
He called on young people to diversify their media sources rather than searching for a single outlet that is unbiased, to be wary of absolutes, and to “explore the truth that lies in the middle.”
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, concurred that “we are all biased” and said media reflects those biases rather than creating them. “I see the story through my eyes and I don’t see it through your eyes and I write it that way,” he said.
Although Arab media are clearly biased, he said, the same can be said of Western news outlets, which he contended fail to give equal coverage to violence committed against Arabs.
Salameh Nematt, Washington bureau chief of the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, said virtually all press outlets in the Arab world are government-owned. He said that, ironically, the press is free in only two places: “Iraq under American occupation, and Palestine under Israeli occupation.”
The American media, for its part, is “polarized along political lines to the point where the truth is lost,” he said.
With these two situations prevailing, he asked, “Can we really know what’s going on in the Middle East?”
Mouafec Harb, news director of Alhurra and Radio Sawa, said those two U.S. government-sponsored outlets attempt to counter bias in Middle Eastern media with objective reporting. But they, in turn, tend to be seen as biased in the Arab world because “We don’t call suicide bombers ‘martyrs.’ … We don’t sound like the others,” he said.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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