“Terrorism,” as Interpreted in Media: The Pitfalls

By Newton Sibanda and Benedict Tembo

To quite many people, Islam and terrorism are synonymous. The media, too, has not helped demystify the perceived link between Islam and terrorism, thereby creating a misconception that Muslims are inherently terrorists. The situation has not been any better after the September 11 attacks in the USA. Contributors Newton Sibanda and Benedict Tembo take a look at the prejudices creeping out of media against the Muslims, and its effects.

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA—A Zambian Sikh sending off his family to Pakistan nearly died from embarrassment when a Zambian journalist usually respected but this time around drunk, scorned him at the Lusaka International Airport. The journalist had tagged him an agent of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network—in the presence of his wife, son, daughter in-law and several Muslims headed for Mecca for the annual pilgrimage.

Apart from the humiliation of being branded a Bin Laden agent on account of his physical appearance, the man believes he was taunted so because of his Asian descent. “We took it lightly because he was drunk,” said the target of the attacks, who preferred to be called Singh.

The family’s experience, however, is not an isolated one but a reflection of the counter-terrorism being played out in the media and how it has impacted on Muslims worldwide. “Those things are very normal. I have travelled the whole world, [and] in some cases, Muslims have been harassed,” Singh said.

The incident took place four months after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. The Zambian journalist’s outburst on, albeit in drunken stupor, illustrates people’s perceptions about Muslims since 9/11.

Prejudice by the predominantly Christian Zambian society against Muslims, most of whom are Asians has been a common and burning issue of the day in Zambia. Last year for instance, some young Muslim pupils and teachers at Makeni Islamic School in Lusaka were assaulted after some Zambians accused them of leading a secluded life which barred non-Muslims from their society. It was only government intervention that it was proved that in fact, the ratio of Zambian teachers to Muslims was about the same.

Most of the pupils on the other hand, although taught some Muslim norms are Christians. But the hatred by most Zambians towards Muslims does not seem to abate even when Zambia embraces all religions.To a number of Zambians, Muslims have been narrowed down to self-conceited Asians and Arabs whose fundamentalism has overtaken their sense of reasoning.

The overall perception that has been created is that Islam is synonymous with terrorism, and that most, if not all, Muslims are terrorists or supporters of terrorism.

Ibrahim Mamadou, a west African Muslim living in Zambia, decries such portrayal as it is fanning hatred against all Muslims. Media, he said, should strive to foster love between oppressed and oppressor. The more those who control the media build hatred, the more problems they create for the world, he added.

“It’s very unfair because not everyone can be a terrorist. Even a Christian can be an extremist but here (Zambia) fortunately, the constitution states (Zambia) is a Christian nation tolerant of other religions,” said Mamadou.

Much of the blame can be attributed to the ignorance of writers unfamiliar with the tenets of Islam, says Abdulah Aziz Kosa, national chairman of the Ahlibait Foundation of Zambia, a grouping of Shiite Muslims.

According to Kosa, one of the first indigenous Zambians to enter Saudi Arabia and who lived in the Middle east for nine years to study Islamic (Sharia) law, the powerful media controlled by the west has painted a picture that Muslims are terrorists. “Many writers are not well-versed in Islam, so, my appeal to Muslim nations is that they should accommodate journalists so that they can better understand Islam,” said Kosa.

“Islam stands for peace and a Muslim is someone who is at peace with God,” he said. “Islam does not promote terrorism. A fundamentalist is someone who adheres to principles of religion but we don’t condone extremism.”

The Islamic nations, on the other hand, are scared to react to the powerful west because they can be slapped with sanctions that would weaken their economies. “They can boycott their oil,” Kosa noted.

“My view is that Christians, Muslims and other religions must dialogue because our aspirations are all the same, to go to heaven. But we cannot go to heaven through the barrel of the gun,” he said.

Muslims are further consolidating as a result of a global attempt to demonise them, he said. “Those who want to eliminate terrorism are busy claiming to fight it while in fact they are perpetrating this.”

Sheikh Shaban Phiri, Director of the Islamic Propagation Centre in Lusaka, believes the word “terrorism” is a misnomer maliciously used by America and its controlled media as a shield to commit atrocities on Islamic nations.

Terrorism, according to Phiri, is a creation of the media through American intelligence so as to legitimise their persecution of innocent people. “No reasonable person of any civilised society will accept the suggestion that ‘terrorism’ is an act that causes great fear only to the lives of Americans and the Jews, to the exclusion of all others,” said Phiri. “It is fallacious to hold that proposition; it is repugnant to natural justice.”

But that is exactly the perspective that has been forced upon media, which has been conditioned to these unjust images, without regard for international law and human right, Phiri added. Phiri believes terrorism, as covered by and played out in media, has been used as a shield to diminish the strength of the Muslims and the spread of Islam worldwide. “The propaganda has nothing to do with either Arabs or Afghans. Anyone who supports Islam or opposes American policy is subjected to such hatred and cruelty.”

“One might ask why media has failed to maintain its independence and freedom in its approach toward issues of such delicate nature. The only possible answer is that media is funded and controlled by the same enemies of Islam,” he said.

“The globalised media has been used to deliberately destroy Islam, which is equated with terrorism simply because Muslims believe that success comes as a result of people’s submissiveness to Allah alone, and not to the American trinity of America the father, Israel the son, and Britain the holy ghost, all but one acting together against natural justice and order of God,” Phiri said. “There is one fundamental principle that the media ought to know about Islam: The more people speak against it, the more Islam spreads out like a bushfire.”

Another example is the biased use of terminology by the global media, such as the use of the word tribes for Africans and ethnic groups for whites, tribal wars for Africans and ethnic wars for whites. The global media quite often creates stereotypes through its biased selective use of terminologies for different groups.

Newton Sibanda is senior reporter with the Zambia Daily Mail. He holds a Diploma in Journalism from Lusaka’s Evelyn Hone College and a certificate in Diplomacy and International Studies from the Zambia Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies. Benedict Tembo is Zambia Daily Mail Assistant Production Editor. He holds a Diploma in Journalism from Evelyn Hone College and has attended several courses, locally and abroad.

Blaming the Victims: American Media and the Israel/Palestine Conflict

By Susan Muaddi Darraj

For the past ten years, I have listened faithfully to National Public Radio (NPR), a station supported largely through the financial contributions of its listeners. Many Americans bemoan the pits that most of our news agencies have sunk into in recent decades, but NPR’s in-depth coverage and accurate reporting have usually been like a lifesaving rope tossed into the depths from above. My ten-year-long faithfulness to the radio station, however, came to a bitter end a few months ago. I am now one of thousands of Americans who refuse to set her radio dial to NPR because it has subtly contributed to the growing anti-Palestinian bias already deeply entrenched in American media.

In March 2002, I first heard that Linda Gradstein, NPR’s Israel correspondent since 1990, had been accepting cash honoraria from the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful and influential pro-Israeli lobbying group in Washington. She had apparently been accepting these monetary gifts for years, despite the questions of professional ethics this raises. It was not much of a surprise when, in a report about the bombing in Israel by a Palestinian on 9 August 2001, Gradstein replied in this way when asked if Israel was likely to retaliate: “I think Israel has to retaliate. Israel has been saying from now on it will retaliate for every attack. This is the second largest attack in the last ten months of violence… I think Israel has no choice but to respond.”

In essence, Gradstein openly advised the Israeli government to attack the Palestinians by proposing this as the only option available. Would she have advised the Palestinians to retaliate after the damage and destruction recently done in Jenin by the Israeli military? I bet all the money in her bank account that she wouldn’t. It’s not that she has allowed money to taint her journalism, but the fact that she still reports on the air for NPR, that is most disturbing. Frankly, I am stunned that a reporter who accepted what are essentially bribes from a major political lobbying group, who casually incited violence against the Palestinians, and who compromised her integrity would still have a job at a national radio station.

However, for Palestinian- and Arab-Americans like me, the example of the Linda Gradstein/NPR/AIPAC triumvirate is one more example of how the American media sanctions violence against the Palestinian people by portraying them largely as bloodthirsty terrorists eager for a place among the houris* or virgins in paradise. An examination of the language is sufficient to illustrate my point: When a Palestinian blows himself or herself up in a Tel Aviv discotheque or in an open-air market in Jerusalem, he or she becomes a “terrorist.” When an Israeli soldier shoots a pregnant woman and kills her husband, who is driving her to the hospital to deliver the child, he is not a terrorist. He is merely following orders or reacting to the “suspicious” circumstances as any soldier would. When young boys are shot as they throw stones at Israeli tanks, the excuse given by the Israeli Defense Forces is that those children were plotting a terrorist attack. However, when the tread on an Israeli soldier’s vehicle snaps and he randomly opens fire on a family picking grape leaves, killing a mother and her two children, the American newspapers report that he was “spooked” by what he thought was a bomb. The deaths of the family are “regretted.”

Noted a study conducted by Hussein Ibish and Ali AbuNimah of the Opinion-Editorial (Op-Ed) pages of The Washington Post from 29 September 2000 (the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada) through the end of January 2001: “The Washington Post printed twenty-seven Op-Eds on the subject, of which twenty were strongly pro-Israeli, two were substantially sensitive to Israeli and Palestinian concerns, while only five were strongly sympathetic to Palestinian viewpoints. Of the Post’s thirteen staff editorials, twelve were strongly pro-Israeli, while only one was somewhat neutral.”

The study also analysed The New York Times’ Op-Ed pages: Of thirty-three Op-Eds, twenty-five were strongly pro-Israeli; of fifteen staff editorials, fourteen were also strongly pro-Israeli.

Ibish and AbuNimah conclude that 81percent of Op-Ed pieces and editorials published by major newspapers within this period were decidedly pro-Israeli. They also discovered that the American media consistently avoids referring to Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as “occupied territories,” though the rest of the world and the United Nations do; that it perpetuates the myth that Palestinian parents are to blame for sending out their children to “be martyred” by Israeli soldiers and weapons; and that Israel uses a tremendous deal of restraint and avoids harming civilians while hunting for terrorists (a myth easily belied by the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians killed in the conflict have been civilians, and of those, almost 40 percent have been children under the age of fifteen).

The media’s unbalanced reporting of the conflict only serves to underline steadfast American alliance with Israel. Despite George Bush and Colin Powell’s repeated demands for an “immediate withdrawal” and recent insistence on the creation of a Palestinian state (occasionally even using the word “Palestine”), it is American support that subsidises the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The greatest flaw of the “peace” process is the continued military support to Israel, to the tune of about US$3 billion annually, which undermines any claim by the United States that it is an “honest” broker of peace. One cannot be honest when one is arming one side of the conflict—the stronger side, even.

However, American influence goes beyond that of military support and extends to attempted censorship. When Al Jazeera, the popular Arab satellite news station based in Qatar, became a household term in the United States, the American government requested of the Qatari government that it curb Al Jazeera’s broadcasts. “Why? What was Al Jazeera showing on its broadcasts that could so deeply offend the Bush administration?” I wondered as I watched. But what I saw were professional newscasters, speaking flawlessly in Arabi al-fusha (classical Arabic); I saw Al Jazeera’s star journalist, Walid Al Aomari, wearing a beige vest and grim look as he reported from Ramallah; I saw the destruction of buildings and the holes in living room walls of Palestinian families; I saw the bodies of several men sprawled on the floor of Arafat’s compound, with bullet holes in their heads; I saw the aftermath, uncut, uncensored, of Israeli “attacks” on the West Bank, something the American media usually glosses over. (Once again, language becomes an issue here: CNN and MSNBC, for example, called these actions “incursions,” which has a more harmless connotation.)

For example, when a suicide bombing occurs, the American media is sure to detail the victims—their names, ages, what and who they left behind; we even get interviews with their families and profiles of the victims’ lives. This is as it should be when someone is violently killed; we, the public, should become familiar with their lives in order to more fully comprehend the horror and tragedy of their deaths. However, many more Palestinian civilians have been killed than Israeli civilians, and in equally horrific ways, but they are rendered as faceless, nameless “Palestinian casualties,” their lives crunched to mere numbers in a New York Times or Washington Post article.

In effect, then, the American media has managed to define “terror” more clearly than the Bush administration, which tends to keep the term conveniently vague and open-ended. According to CNN, MSNBC, and other news networks and programmes, “terror” is damage and death caused by Palestinians, never damage and death caused by Israelis. And even when the refugee camp of Jenin resembles an earthquake zone, with hundreds missing and feared dead under the rubble of toppled buildings and bulldozed homes, American media sources quibble about whether to call this a “massacre” (although the terrorist attack that killed 29 Israelis seated at the Seder meal in Netanya was swiftly termed the Passover Massacre).

Another tactic of the American media is to repeatedly spin the same, superficial rhetoric during its broadcasts and interviews. Lines like “Israel needs security” and “Israel is determined to root out the terrorists,” as well as overstretched comparisons between the conflict and America’s own “war on terror,” all avoid contextualising the conflict and ignore Israel’s very real role in contributing to the failure of the peace process and the violence in the region. The crux of the conflict is the illegal, military occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, despite frequent international condemnation over the years.

Interviewers in the American media, however, rarely ask in-depth questions that focus on the occupation, its illegality, its economic and social impact on the Palestinians, and its stranglehold on Palestinian culture. Instead of intelligent questions (such as “Why does Israel repeatedly call on Arafat to arrest suspected militants as a condition for withdrawal, but then make his police stations and security buildings prime targets of its air strikes?”), interviewers ask frustratingly simple ones such as, “Do you condemn suicide bombings?” (of Palestinian interviewees) and “Is the Israeli military doing its best to prevent civilian casualties?” (of Israeli interviewees).

I would like to see Israeli interviewees asked, “If Israel really wanted peace and always planned to eventually withdraw from the occupied territories, why did it build settlements at a rate that these doubled in the number during the decade since the Oslo Accords were signed?” This acknowledges that Israel is an equal contributor to the chaos and terror in the region. I would like to see Palestinian interviewees asked, “Save the suicide bombings, which are immoral, what other methods are being employed by the Palestinians to resist the occupation?” This acknowledges that suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians are reprehensible, and also that they are not the only methods of resistance. A Palestinian could tell the interviewer about the many decades of protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and other methods of non-violent resistance that the American media never covers.

Such questions are on the minds of many Americans, but they are rarely heard on CNN, MSNBC, and even NPR. If asked, they could stir real discussion and serious debate that could de-polarise the two sides and neutralise the stereotypes of “terrorist” and “terrorised.” Both Palestinians and Israelis have been terrorised throughout this conflict, but the terror endured by the Palestinians has not been as “dramaticised.” Rather, it has been a 35-year-long terror, endured in muted silence as American media crafts an image that blamed the victims and permitted the terror to continue.

Palestinian-American freelance writer Susan Muaddi Darraj lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Magazine’s METROGUIDE, Pages Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, The Monthly Review, Sojourner, Al Jadid, Mizna and elsewhere. She has two essays on Arab feminism forthcoming in anthologies from Seal Press and Northeastern University Press.

Footnote:
* In Islam, a houri is a beautiful maiden who awaits the devout Muslim in paradise. There are numerous references to the houris in the Qur’an describing them as “purified wives” and “spotless virgins.” Tradition elaborated on the sensual image of the houri and defined some of her functions; on entering paradise, for example, the believer is presented with a large number of houris, with each of whom he may cohabit once for each day he has fasted in Ramadan and once for each good work he has performed.

References:
Pregnant woman shot at checkpoint:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_ 1840000/1840809.stm
American papers says soldier was “spooked” when tread on tire snapped: http://www.user.dccnet. com/welcomewoods/sunshinecoastpeacegroup/spooked. htm
Jenin “massacre”: http://www. guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,689398,00.html
Passover bombing called “massacre” in CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2002 /WORLD/meast/03/27/mideast/

The Female Militant Romanticised

By Sarala Emmanuel

What is known of the woman militant or the woman suicide bomber? The relatively superficial accounts in the global and local media appear to reflect worryingly narrow and instrumental perceptions of these women. Within these, there appear to be two dominant popular identities that have been constructed for the woman militant and suicide bomber. One of these, promoted by media external to the militant movement or group, is the one in which the female militant’s actions are framed by the descriptions of her beauty or her suffering as a woman (experiences of rape, for example). Here, the “beautiful” woman militant is seen to be primarily seeking revenge or justice for personal grievances with only a secondary commitment to the broader political ideologies or visions that are attributed to her male counterparts. Her identity as a feminised woman overshadows her identity as a political being or actor. The other account of the female militant, found in the literature of the militant movement and sympathetic media, ascribes to her the identity of an unwavering fighter, a “liberated” woman who fights for her people’s freedom. Here the liberation of the woman is linked inextricably with the liberation of the land. The woman’s motivations are subsumed by the dominant political cause of the movement she belongs to, and notions of brave and selfless daughters of the community are used to explain her actions.

This article looks at the identities ascribed to women militants and suicide bombers and discusses the importance of remembering that these constructed identities do not really help us understand the individual motivations that drive each woman who takes up arms.

The WOMAN Militant
Of the first wave of globally recognised women militants of the 20th century, one of the most romanticised was Leila Khaled, a Palestinian liberation fighter who successfully hijacked a TWA flight in 1969 and attempted to highjack another plane a year later. The publicity these acts received was not due to the hijackings alone (and her demand for the release of Palestinian liberation fighters from Israeli jails) but also because one of the hijackers was a “beautiful woman terrorist.”

Interviewing Laila Khaled in 2000, Philip Baum, Editor of Aviation Security International, told her, “You were the glamour girl of international terrorism. You were the hijack queen. You had a very well known face.” Khaled responded to this statement by saying “I didn’t want to be known.” She said she didn’t want to be interviewed by the media at the time, but just wanted to be involved in another operation. Nevertheless, the media attention she received as a “beautiful” woman militant was used even by her own movement to publicise the Palestinian cause, and she was ordered to grant interviews to the press.

More recently, Palestinian women have again received special media attention for their part in violent resistance of Israeli occupation. In the flurry of interest in women acting as suicide bombers against Israeli targets, an article in USA Today (22 April 2002), described a Palestinian woman who has decided to be a suicide bomber as follows:

“Her nails manicured and hair pulled from her face, the Palestinian woman asks that she be called by an Arabic name for a faint star—Suha. She talks about her decision to be a suicide bomber…She is barely 5 feet tall, fair-skinned and pretty, with a quick smile and handshake as she greets a visitor in the West Bank town of Tulkarem. This 30-year-old, college-educated woman in a sweater, dark jeans and clogs is one of the newest and most effective weapons in the Palestinian arsenal.”

It is this focus on images of beauty, delicate and graceful movements, indeed of femininity itself, implicitly contrasting this with images of the devastation caused by a bomb that appears to typify media representation of women militants. The detailed romantic physical description given of the woman, rarely offered in the case of a male suicide bomber (certainly no account of his manicured nails would ever be given!), almost obscures her stated motivations for using her own body to deliver a bomb.

A recent article in a Sri Lankan newspaper referred to the women militants of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as ‘Armed Virgins.’ The author describes the motivations of one young woman to join the movement, claiming that the trauma of her parents murder had, “driven her to the (militant) Tigers who promised salvation through bloody revenge.” Although the author, herself, comments that female militants are trained to embrace androgyny and replace traditional forms of dress with combat uniforms and fatigues, she makes it a point to question these women about love and having boyfriends. These types of questions appear regularly in relation to women, whereas male militants are almost never questioned about their girlfriends or lovers. There appears to be a desire to represent feminine characteristics of women militants, whilst male militant experience is viewed exclusively in the context of the more masculine domain of politics, bravery, courage, violence, torture and brutality. Whilst both images are constructed, the identity of the male militant is strong and affirming (even when viewed as a violent perpetrator), whilst that ascribed to the female militant is framed in the context of femininity and/or victim-hood. It is popularly believed amongst the many communities in Sri Lanka that the suicide bomber Dhanu who assassinated the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 was apparently avenging the rape she experienced at the hands of the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF). Her actions within the militant LTTE were, therefore, connected to her being violated as a woman. Dhanu completed her mission under the guise of garlanding the man who had deployed the IPKF who had raped her. Eerily, brides also perform this ritual on their grooms at a wedding—an observation that has not escaped public attention.

The MILITANT Woman
Within a community engaged in an armed struggle where notions of the unequivocally political female militant dominate, there is often little space to articulate individualised identities for woman militants. Writing from Sri Lanka, Neloufer De Mel claims that in such situations, “for the militants, individuality can only be creatively fictionalised..… The politics of self-representation otherwise denies the militant a personality and emotional expression of his/her own; the reality of his/her driving impulses lies in complete obedience to the will of the militant leadership on whose behalf s/he struggles.” Even when individuality is given to a woman suicide bomber through fiction, this can often clash with strongly internalised ideas about female militants and their political commitment.

An example of this took place a few months ago at a screening of the South Indian Tamil film The Terrorist for a group of women activists in Sri Lanka. The film deals with a young LTTE militant woman’s preparations to assassinate an important political leader by exploding a bomb worn on her body. During this process of preparation, she develops unexpected relationships with civilians around her and realises that she is pregnant. Consequently she begins to waver in her determination to carry out her mission and finally does not explode her bomb when she gets her opportunity. At the conclusion of the film, many women in the audience dismissed it as unrealistic, stating that LTTE women suicide bombers would never experience doubt or weakness in their resolve to carry out their liberation struggle. Although none of these women could claim to have known the elusive suicide bombers hidden in the very heart of the militant movement, it was clear that they had all held a strong concept of the militant woman that did not allow for any possibility of wavering in her political commitment. It is also particularly interesting that their viewpoint was challenged by other women who argued that the woman suicide bomber’s change of heart was due to her burgeoning motherhood and the memory of the dead father of her baby—essentially feminised concepts. It is perhaps significant to note that the women who identified the militant as essentially a political being were from regions and communities where the movement’s ideology and influence was very strong. Perhaps not coincidentally, the women advocating for a more feminised individualised understanding of the female militant were from outside these communities.

These strongly held perceptions of female militants must be re-examined in the context of these women’s own experiences, resisting the viewpoints promoted by global, pro-militant or anti-militant media and propaganda. This is undoubtedly difficult in the context of an ongoing conflict.

In El Salvador, women ex-militants looking back on their lives as fighters, speak of experiencing some kind of liberation from social restrictions; new sexual freedom and liberation from conventional percep-tions of motherhood; hope of finding a means of overcoming poverty and oppression and bringing about a better future. However, the realities that peace and demobilisation brought were very different. The women were separated from their comrades, they lost their weapons, they had to suddenly go back to their families and reintegration was diffi-cult. They felt lonely and isolated. They needed emotional care and support (Ibañez, A. C. p117-130). The reason that the experiences of El Salvador are important is that they show that romanticised images and identities of women militants during armed struggles don’t necessarily match with the reality of these women’s experiences, and makes it harder for the women during post conflict peace situations to negotiate an identity for themselves. For women, demobilisation not only means having to go back to traditional roles and be stigmatised in the process, but also often involves feelings of being let down by the movement they fought for. On the one hand the identity created by militant groups themselves of the liberated woman who is ready to die for a cause is an identity that can no longer be sustained when the woman-weapon is no longer needed. Secondly, when the media tries to romanticise and feminise the woman militant, this is strongly linked to her sexuality (her virginity or rape or beauty), which also constrains her in defining her own identity once she has stopped fighting.

Women militants may strongly identify with the representations that are made of them in the media. However, these are identities produced for other purposes and are often problematic for women after conflict has passed. It is vital, therefore, that women activists or feminists should resist internalising these views of the woman militant without question and critique.

Sarala Emmanuel works in the area of psychosocial support provision to persons affected by armed conflict in Sri Lanka. She is also involved in feminist activism and research.

Bibliography
Baum, P., Leila Khaled in her own words, Aviation Security International, http:// www.avsec.com/leila_Klaled_frame. htm
Bulathsinghala, F., “Armed Virgins— Getting ready to celebrate life.” Sunday Observer, 21 April 2002, p. 29. Associated Newspapers of Ceylon.
De Mel, N. Women and the Nation’s Narrative—Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka. Social Scientist’s Association, Sri Lanka, 2001.
Hoole, R., Somasundaram, D., Sritharan, K., Thiranagama, R. The Broken Palmyrah: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka—An Inside Account. Claremont: The Sri Lanka Studies Institute, 1990.
Ibañez, A. C., El Salvador: War and Untold Stories—Women Guerrillas. Caroline ON Moser and Fiona C. Clark (eds), Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 2001.
Zoroya, G. “Woman describes the mentality of a suicide bomber,” USA Today, 22 April 2002, http://www.usatoday. com/news/world/2002/04/22

9-11, From a Different Perspective: Interview with Nawal El Sadaawi and Sherif Hetata

By Nicola Joseph

Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian novelist, psychiatrist and writer. Her novels and her books on the women in Egyptian and Arab society have had a deep effect on successive generations of young women around the world. Throughout her life, Nawal has faced fierce resistance from the Egyptian authorities. The Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, an organisation she founded, has been banned in Egypt, and she herself has been imprisoned. Nawal visited Australia recently, together with husband Sherif Hetata, also a doctor, writer and activist, for the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Nicola Joseph interviewed her at Radio Skid Row. Some excerpts:

Nicola: First of all, Nawal, I know that you came to know feminism as a young girl, as we all did in Arab families where brothers were given lots of privileges while girls were expected to make their brothers’ beds, but can you tell us a bit about this awakening because I think a lot of people will be surprised to know that there is this thing called “Arab feminism”?

Nawal: I think this point is very important because I think people believe that feminism is a western concept. Feminism, or the idea of the liberation of women, is embedded in the history of every country, in the east and west, in the north and south. So, to be a feminist—and to have these feelings of liberation of women—are universal. As you said, all female children feel oppressed when they are young. I have been teaching in the United States for the past ten years and all of my students and colleagues say they felt oppressed when they were children. The idea that feminism is
western is not true.

Also some people talk about Christian, Muslim or Jewish feminism, but I don’t agree to that because I think women are oppressed within all religions, and you cannot really liberate yourself within any religion.

Nicola: How successful has the Arab Women’s Solidarity been, given it has been shut down by the Egyptian government at different times?

Nawal: Since we started the association, we have had problems with the Egyptian government. First, it did not want to recognise us legally. It was only in 1985 that we were recognised legally. After we were registered, the harassment did not stop and we were eventually closed in 1991 because we stood against the Gulf War. You see, we did not make a separation between women and war, between women’s problems and military, economic and colonial problems. So Arab Women’s Solidarity [Association] (ASWA) was not just about domestic violence, or veiling or female genital mutilation. We connected female genital mutilation (FGM) to American foreign policy in our region. We connected veiling to religious fundamentalism, and neo-colonial powers and globalisation. This was the major problem because the Egyptian government wanted us to concentrate on what it called “women issues.”

Nicola: How much membership has AWSA been able to build across the Arab world?

Nawal: Despite the fact that the organisation has been banned in Egypt, we have a membership of thousands all over the Arab world and internationally. We are a Pan Arab organisation affiliated with the Economic Social Council of the United Nations. We are growing and have branches inside and outside Arab countries. Today there are many young Arab women active within the organisation. Women like my daughter, who is a member, represent a new trend in society. [We have] women who are thinkers and writers, they are educated. Some of them are single because the marriage code in Egypt is very oppressive. They live alone and they are happy.

Nicola: Sherif, you talk in your writing about the experience of breaking the “English shell.” You were brought up in with your English mother and growing up in the English school system in Egypt. Do you think that this experience of breaking the identity shell through your activism in Egyptian left-wing politics also helped you break the “gender shell” of male oppression?

Sherif: I think when you get used to breaking shells, when you get used to changing, then every change is a little easier than the one before. Although I also think as far as men are concerned, to become gender conscious and really believe in equality is a difficult process because [patriarchy] is very much ingrained in their upbringing, in their emotional and psychological makeup. I think it is very much up to women to be firm with men about their rights.

Nicola: It does seem like it is a struggle that we are not winning, especially for women in the South— with the new forces that are happening globally?

Nawal: I would say losing and gaining—we cannot say that women are losing. Of course there is a backlash against women’s rights in every country for many reasons, including political and economic ones. But in many ways, women are gaining. If I compare the life of my grandmother with the life of my daughter, it is a world of difference.

Nicola: You were in New York on September 11. What was it like for you?

Nawal: Well, I spent the whole year in fact between New York and New Jersey, and I witnessed the whole event. And I am going to write a novel about it. I have spent almost ten years living between Egypt and the U.S., and I have studied American society and how the U.S. government brainwashes the American people through the media. How George Bush the son, the father, and the holy ghost (laughs) really worked in a hidden way to oppress the American people through so-called security laws after September 11. The U.S. government has used the event to create a war for more economic benefits. The war has been an economic stimulus for [it].

Nicola: How did you feel being [when you were out in the streets] where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment was strong?

Nawal: They threw thousands of young men into jail without trial and they are still there. So the whole so-called American democracy and civilisation was exposed and everyone knew it was a big lie. Also, the way they inspect people in the airport when the traveller’s name is Mohammed or s/he carries an Egyptian passport is unbelievable. However, I don’t want to generalise here. At the same time, on many university campuses around the country, the anti-war movement and the wider anti-globalisation movement were active, organising demonstrations against the war in Afghanistan, against the massacres in Palestine, and against globalisation. So, what is really positive about the developments since September 11 is that groups like youth, feminists, students, peasants, trade unions and so on are all coming together against the U.S. government. This is the new resistance. These different groups are coming together, transcending their class, religion, nationality, ethnicity and colour, against the U.S. government.

Nicola: Sherif, do you agree that anti-globalisation movement is addressing all these issues?

Sherif: I think it is a growing movement. One reason for the war against terrorism that the U.S. is waging is economic—the production of arms and so on. But [it’s] also because when you have war, it is difficult for social movements to find their way. People are influenced by the xenophobic, racist atmosphere. So, in order for the U.S. to [contain] against the growth of the anti-globalisation movement, which it feels is growing everywhere, the “September 11” kind of psychology needs to continue.

Nicola: It is interesting to look at the way Christian fundamentalism has played a role in this so-called war against terrorism. The term fundamentalism has always been used in reference to Islam, and yet to many of us, it is clear that Christian fundamentalism is alive and strong in America. Jewish fundamentalism is also alive and well in Israel, if we are listening to Sharon. Why is it that there is tendency to just attach fundamentalism to Islam?

Sherif: Because the United States needs an enemy. When you want to wage a war, when you want to militarise, you have to mobilise people against an enemy. The Soviet Union is no longer there, and so you have to find another enemy. You have to prepare people for war, so you show them there is a dangerous terrorist—the Arabs, the Muslims, etc. That, I think, explains why there is this tendency to concentrate on Islamic fundamentalism. But when you say that there is also fundamentalism in Israel and the United States, where is the enemy you are fighting? The enemy is then at home.

Nicola: Nawal, Christian fundamentalism is strong in America today, isn’t it?

Nawal: Very strong. In fact, since George Bush the son came to power, he has increased the budget of the military and the Christian fundamentalist groups. You see the link between the two groups. In fact, the policy of George Bush’s administration is to increase also the dose of religion around the world, including Islam. You know that the American government increased the dose of the Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan. It created Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, which it began fighting when it was finished with the Soviet Union. When you listen to the language of George Bush, it is very, very religious, very Christian. Usually, we say Osama bin Laden and George Bush are two faces of the same coin.

Question from audience: What about Palestine, are you hopeful that we will see a just and proper [Palestinian] state?

Nawal: Yes, I am very hopeful. I think both Israel and U.S. policy lost a lot politically after the massacre in Palestine. What is happening in Palestine is not a war between two armies, it is a massacre because the Palestinian people have no army. They are fighting with their bodies. They are exploding their bodies, and they are called terrorists. They are calling the victims terrorists, and that’s exactly the class-patriarchal system based on punishing the victim. But the Palestinian people, and especially those young men and women who are ready to kill themselves, I think they
are freedom fighters, they are not terrorists. I think they have obliged the whole world to speak about the Palestinian problem. The consciousness of people all over the world is growing in relation to Palestine, and I think they will have their rights.

I would like to say that the people killed in Palestine were not only Muslims but also Christians. So the blood that was sacrificed in Palestine did not know religion. The resistance against oppression should not differentiate along religious lines.

Nicola Joseph is an Arab Australian broadcaster and trainer who is based at community radio station Radio Skid Row in Sydney. She has interviewed Nawal several times during her time as the producer and presenter of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s women’s programme. Last year she won the Australian Arab Women’s Media Award.