February 10, 2006
Al Jazeera: Voice of Moderation?
Last night I had dinner with an old good friend, who speaks Arabic fluently, lives in Israel, used to work for the Israeli government translating Arabic newspapers into Hebrew. She now teaches Arabic to native Arabic speakers in Israel, and she's a liberal Jew and a zionist--and she pays through the root in Israel to get a satellite television with Al-Jazeera.
Her analysis of Al-Jazeera was profoundly shocking.
First (before we get to the politics) on the language: it actually turns out that the language used on Al Jazeera doesn't exist. Arabic in different countries is not like Spanish in Latin America of American/Australian/British English; they are different languages that are not mutually intelligble, if you can speak on you can't speak the others. But, they all share the same written language universally (Modern Standard Arabic)--Arabic written everywhere is identical but, to the average speaker, has little connection to the spoken language anywhere. As a consequence, there is a deep divide in each country between the spoken language and the written language. What Al Jazeera does is, turn this standard, universal written language into a spoken language--so everyone educated in the Arabic world can, without too much difficulty, figure out what they're saying--they all know that way of writing, they've just never heard it spoken before: they've given a voice to a known but unspoken written language. This has nothing to do with politics, but I found it quite interesting. (This may be connected to politics like this: this might be a contributing factor towards illiteracy; if our spoken language was that different from our written one, the bar for learning how to write would be much higher so illiteracy would be, too.)
Second, politics. My friend was surprised to learn that Al Jazeera is presented in the US as a radical and extremist station. She said that Al Jazeera is the most moderate mainstream media or publication in the whole arabic middle east. Yes, of course they still hate Israel and yes, of course they still want to kill the Jews--but they are fundamentally the liberal voice of enlightenment for that part of the world.
She gave me a few examples that shocked me. Here they are.
Every other Arabic publication in the entire middle east only ever refers to Jerusalem as "occupied Jerusalem." But Al Jazeera--and only Al Jazeera--refers to "East Jerusalem" and "West Jerusalem." She said that when she was listening to Al Jazeera for the first time and heard this, she was shocked, since she had never heard before an Arabic speaker refer to Jerusalem by anything other than "occupied Jerusalem." (She told me the actual phrases in the original Arabic but I don't remember them--sorry.)
She also made the point that Al Jazeera--also, alone among the Arabic publications in the middle east--gives a voice to the other side (even if they do have a bias). They will do things such as, actually interview people on both sides of different debates and questions. This is a contrast to the standard in the middle east media, where their side is presented as the only side.
It is for reasons like these that, within the arabic world, Al Jazeera is known as a liberal publication. It's just sad what our standards for liberalism are over there.
Posted by Morgan at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)
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