11 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
On Thursday, conservative New York Congressman Peter King held the first of what he’s vowed will be a series of congressional inquiries into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community,” a topic that has alarmed religious and civil liberties organisations in America for its narrow focus on one minority group and its inherent indictment of the entire “community”.
By the time King called the hearing to order, he’d already successfully wound up much of the country’s punditry. Muslim groups held a protest in New York’s Times Square on Sunday. Obama Administration officials were already trying to distance themselves from the suggestion that the US government – any arm of it – views Muslims with particular suspicion. And dozens of social-justice organisations had circulated petitions and press releases condemning what they likened to a political witch-hunt – as bad as anything Washington has seen since McCarthyism.
King, for his part, tried to sound bemused by all of the reaction on Thursday morning, as if he hadn’t worked so intentionally to provoke it. He was an easy target for the press leading up to the hearing, as a one-time vehement supporter of the IRA, it left him open to accusations of hypocrisy.
Some of King’s opposition was thoughtful, he conceded. But the rest of it – “both from special interest groups and the media – has ranged from disbelief to paroxysms of rage and hysteria,” he said in his opening statement. He appeared to relish ploughing ahead anyway.
“Let me make it clear today,” he continued, “that I remain convinced that these hearings must go forward. And they will. To back down would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee – to protect America from a terrorist attack.”
But his critics weren’t calling for political correctness; they wanted facts, which were in short supply on Thursday. King and his witnesses offered scant statistics, and no objective testimony suggesting Muslim radicalization is on the rise or Muslim cooperation in decline.
The hearing also failed to acknowledge that while every Muslim American is not engaged in terrorism, every terrorist act in America is also not perpetrated by a Muslim (consider, within the past two years, the gunman who tried to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords, the disgruntled software consultant who flew a plane into an IRS office, and the extremist who gunned down an abortion doctor in a church – all white US citizens whom many commentators have been loathe to label as “terrorists”). A true hearing on the problem of homegrown radicalization, King’s critics argued, would examine the threat in all its forms.
Such a broad-based hearing, undoubtedly, wouldn’t have inflamed people so. But King scoffed at that idea.
“This Committee cannot live in denial, which is what some would have us do when they suggest that this hearing dilute its focus by investigating threats unrelated to Al Qaeda” he said. “The Department of Homeland Security and this committee were formed in response to the al Qaeda attacks of 9/11. There is no equivalency of threat between al Qaeda and neo-Nazis, environmental extremists or other isolated madmen. Only al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation.”
The biggest fear, though, was that in antagonizing the Muslim community, King might actually achieve the opposite of his intended effect, making America less safe.
“I cannot help but wonder how propaganda on this hearing’s focus on the American Muslim community will be used by those who seek to inspire a new generation of suicide bombers,” warned Representative Bennie Thompson, the first in a string of Democrats to take the microphone during the hearing to denounce it. The event, in fact, had an odd partisan pallor, with Republicans uniformly lining up to praise the investigation and Democrats clutching their pocket-sized constitutions in fury across the aisle.
Keith Ellison, one of two Muslims in Congress and a Democrat, even began to cry during his testimony, as he recounted the story of a 23-year-old Muslim first-responder who was killed on September 11.
Muslims, “they are our neighbours,” Ellison said, delivering one of the most tweetable lines of the day. “In short, they are us.”
If King did sincerely want to unearth solutions to domestic Muslim radicalization – however disproportionate the real problem may be to his outsized congressional theatre – the hearing never yielded much in the way of thoughtful strategy. Only one law enforcement officer was called to testify. And some questioners wanted to know more about how uncooperative he found Muslims in his community, rather than what his officers did to work successfully with them.
King also spent much of the time asking the Muslim representatives he had hand-picked to speak to explain why they agreed that his hearing was so necessary. He had clearly sought cover for an investigation targeting Muslims by putting a few agreeable ones at the microphone.
Sheila Jackson Lee, a fiery Texas Democrat, called out the irony in this stagecraft.
“Muslims are here cooperating!” she exclaimed. “They are doing what this hearing is suggesting they do not do!”
10 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
Critics of net neutrality in the US have come up with a particularly ingenious talking point, one that borrows the loaded rhetoric of the Tea Party movement while casting communications regulators as the enemies of freedom.
Net neutrality, warned new Republican House Speaker John Boehner in his opening salvo last week, represents nothing less than a “government takeover of the internet“.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “there is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms.”
Marsha Blackburn, the conservative congresswoman leading the charge against net neutrality in Washington, went one step further. Offering to speak on behalf of the entire creative community of online content providers, she declared: “They do not want a czar of the internet to determine when they can deploy their creativity over the internet.”
Net neutrality is, of course, the exact opposite of the freedom-trampling “government takeover” as it is tarred by opponents in the capital. Net neutrality is internet freedom, not its adversary. The doctrine is designed to protect consumers’ rights to access information that is unfiltered and unrestricted by telecommunications companies that stand to profit from what could constitute, come to think of it, a “corporate takeover of the internet”.
“The only freedom they are providing for,” Democratic Senator Al Franken and several colleagues snapped back at Republicans in a recent letter, “is the freedom of telephone and cable companies to determine the future of the internet, where you can go on it, what you can attach to it, and which services will win or lose on it.”
The freedom bickering has intensified in the last week, as newly empowered conservatives in Congress began an effort to cut off funding for the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality plans. On Wednesday, they held another hearing on the topic in a House communications and technology subcommittee.
Conservatives are counting in the showdown on their pithy catchphrase. Net neutrality, as a concept, is a messy one to grasp. But a “government takeover the internet” it is not. In fact, it’s likely many of the politicians warning of such a future don’t truly understand the stakes themselves. But once they’ve been framed as an affront to individual liberty, many Americans won’t need to hear much more.
25 Feb 2011 | News and features
As the lone eyewitness to events that international news organisations have found difficult to access, Al Jazeera has been an inseparable part of the story in the Middle East and North Africa. For a solid month, US outlets have hummed with borrowed Al Jazeera content and content about Al Jazeera itself.
Meanwhile, the irony grows by the day: most US households still can’t get the English-language version of the network on their TVs.
“Our local cable-TV monopoly Comcast won’t carry Al Jazeera on its service but finds it newsworthy that Al Jazeera has been shut down in Egypt. What’s the difference?” asked a bitter subscriber on a lively Comcast community message board debating the inconsistency.
Comcast’s news site had, in fact, just published an Associated Press story on the closure of Al Jazeera’s Cairo office two weeks ago.
Americans haven’t paid this much attention to the Qatar-based network since Donald Rumsfeld was accusing it of inciting violence in the early days of the Iraq war. For many US news consumers, it’s the first time they’re seeing the network as a serious news operation – and one covering events about which Americans care deeply.
Old stereotypes, though, die slowly – especially those associated with 9/11 in the American imagination. Even as Al Jazeera proves its worth in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya, it continues to face a tough row with US cable distributors.
Providers like Comcast have long insisted that AJE, which launched in 2006, wouldn’t attract enough viewers to justify offering it. But the vast American cable menu makes that argument sound anemic.
“Why do we have Current TV but not Al-Jazeera?” laments a Kansas City Star columnist. Also on offer to most US cable customers: channels devoted exclusively to replays of decades-old sporting events, do-it-yourself home-improvement projects and country music videos. Surely live coverage of key global events could do just as well?
Cable’s aversion to AJE is undoubtedly more calculated. Many Americans have long associated the network with being somehow anti-American, or the go-to distributor of Osama bin Laden each time he puts out a new preachy home video. The suspicion runs deep – and, in the past, it’s run straight to the top of the US government.
George W. Bush singled out the network in his 2004 State of the Union address as a source of “hateful propaganda,” and Donald Rumsfeld called its coverage of civilian casualties in Iraq “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable“. In 2001, the US military even launched a missile at Al Jazeera’s Kabul office, later referring to the building as “a known Al Qaeda facility“. (The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has a fascinating timeline of the troubled relationship between Al Jazeera and the US government).
It’s little wonder, amid such dramatic official pronouncements, that many Americans became wary of the network, and many cable providers are skittish of associating with it. But the stereotype of Al Jazeera as a tool of anti-American terrorists hasn’t survived recent events. Oddly, the perception of bias has been undercut as much by strong reporting in North Africa, as by Al Jazeera’s own role as a victim of repressive regimes.
To critics who still brand the network as a propaganda arm for Middle Eastern strongmen, Wired wrote: “This might come as a surprise to Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who accused the channel of ‘fomenting unrest’. Or to embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi [sic] who in a rambling and defiant speech Tuesday said Al Jazeera was trying to portray Libyans as ‘bad people… a people of turbans and low beards,’ according to one translation.”
Hawkish American commentators may be forgiven for not knowing what’s actually on AJE these days – after all, they can’t tune in to it, either. Bill O’Reilly probably wouldn’t change his mind if he could (nor would the folks behind www.stopaljazeera.org, who push something that looks much more like propaganda than anything AJE airs). But for the rest of US consumers enthralled by events in the Middle East – people who have been rushing, in the absence of anything else, onto AJE’s web feed – things are changing. American news outlets can less and less afford foreign bureaus, and this is one legitimate news source already on the ground that can.
Sensing the opportunity, Al Jazeera has placed a prominent add on its English home page encouraging people to “Demand Al Jazeera in the USA“. Comcast, as of this week, may finally be coming to the table.
