The Cultural Gap

By John Law

After many months of intense focus by Americans on the Middle East crisis, how much more do they understand about how Arabs live and how they think? No one really knows the exact answer to this question, but it's hard to imagine that they could have learned very much.

It's true that Americans have had an unusual number of opportunities to watch and hear "live" broadcasts of Arabs, many of whom answered questions from reporters from their homes and streets and marketplaces. This exposure surely helped many people in this country to see that Arabs are actually real people. But how much more did they learn? Of the 1,400 or so US media reporters who covered the war zone at first hand, only a handful had had enough experience working in the area to be considered knowledgeable about the culture. As a result, some of the worst stereotyping remained virtually unchallenged.

"Allah" Means "God"

A prime example is the continued use of the word "Allah" by even some of the more informed reporters, implying that Muslims worship a separate divinity from the God worshipped by Christians and Jews. The fact is, however, that "Allah" happens to be the Arabic name for "God." When a Christian Arab refers to his deity in the Arabic language, he uses the word "Allah." Although this surely is known to most readers of this magazine, it is not known to many Americans, apparently including many journalists. The use of the word "Allah," when the rest of the story is in English, helps feed the prejudice that Muslims worship a different God than the rest of us.

Even ABC's Peter Jennings, more familiar with the Middle East (he was once based there) than any other of the major network anchors, helped feed this prejudice, although almost certainly unwittingly. During his Jan. 19 evening newscast, he showed an American airman in Saudi Arabia writing a message on a bomb being put in place, and then read it out loud for the audience: "If Allah doesn't answer, ask for Jesus." Clearly, the airman was under the impression that Allah and Jesus were on two entirely different tracks. Jennings made no comment.

And how about the clever political analyst of the comic pages, Gary Trudeau? In a "Doonesbury" strip on Jan. 24, he shows a Saudi playboy beside a swimming pool telling an American war correspondent that "Allah" has been generous to both of them. The reporter replies: "Allah, hell! I'm workingbuddy!" Trudeau might well have refrained from passing along what some people would regard as a blasphemy, if he had realized he was really saying: "God, hell! I'm working!"

Because there was no way during the Gulf crisis for the major media to find enough good correspondents who were at home in Arabic—one of the more difficult languages to learn—even talented correspondents had to depend on interpreters to carry out their interviews with the non-English-speaking man in the street." Apparently ABC Jim Wooten took an interpreter with him on March 3 when he went out onto the streets of Kuwait.

Staying off camera throughout his report, Wooten interviewed some Kuwaitis who verbally bashed the recent Iraqi occupiers. Then he accosted two boys of about 12 or 13, whom he described as Palestinians.

Wooten asked, "What do you think of Iraqi soldiers?" One of the boys, looking toward the camera shyly, answered in Arabic "maa ba'rif" (I don't know), after which Wooten's voice cut in: "They are garbage, the boy says!" Could it be that Wooten's interpreter was an Iraqi-hating local who couldn't resist scoring another point for Kuwait by making up his own freelance translation? Perhaps Wooten should select his helpers more carefully. Other correspondents take note.

English and Arabic

The linguistic culture gap was also evident at the beginning of the air war, when many correspondents and editors readily accepted the view of US military briefers that any English-language signs in Iraq could not possibly be a normal part of the landscape, It started with the famous "baby-milk factory" which was bombed early in the war. According to the briefers, it did not really manufacture baby milk, as it claimed, but rather biological weapons, and the English words on signs and workers' T-shirts must have been designed to mislead foreign journalists into thinking that the facility was not really what it pretended to be.

Briefers said the same thing about the bunker in Baghdad in which hundreds of civilians were killed in an air raid. The US acknowledged that the civilians, unaccountably, had been using it as a shelter, but said it was actually a military command-and-control bunker. Once again, briefers pointed to signs outside saying "air-raid shelter" in English as well as in Arabic as an attempt to trick correspondents who would not have been able to read a "normal" sign written only in Arabic.

Hardly any of the media disputed this theory. Even political satirist Mark Russell seemed to think that English-language signs in Iraq were so outrageously out of place that he worked them into the script of his most recent TV program as evidence of a transparently amateurish effort to deceive, and his audience laughed uproariously.

Shelter For All

The fact is, however, that after decades under British tutelage during this century, most educated older Iraqis speak English quite well. It is common practice for city streets, highways, shops, businesses, post offices and other public buildings to have signs written in both Arabic and English. In Baghdad, in particular, it would have been unlikely for the city authorities, during a period of intense bombardment, to keep secret from the tens of thousands of foreigners who lived and worked there even during the war the existence of an emergency shelter by identifying it in Arabic only.

John Law, chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs from 1982 to 1984, was for 22 years the chief Middle East correspondent for US News and World Report.