OPINION
14
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
THE LEADING INDEPENDENT DAILY IN THE ARABIAN GULF ESTABLISHED 1961
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YOUSUF S. ALYAN Editor-in-Chief
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issues
Who wins in US vs Europe contest? By Bernd Debusmann
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n these days of renewed gloom about the future of Europe, a quick test is in order. Who has the world’s biggest economy? A) The United States B) China/Asia C) Europe? Who has the most Fortune 500 companies? A) The United States B) China C) Europe. Who attracts most US investment? A) Europe B) China C) Asia. The correct answer in each case is Europe, short for the 27-member European Union (EU), a region with 500 million citizens. They produce an economy almost as large as the United States and China combined but have, so far, largely failed to make much of a dent in American perceptions that theirs is a collection of cradleto-grave nanny states doomed to be left behind in a 21st century that will belong to China. That China will rise to be a superpower in this century, overtaking the United States in terms of gross domestic product by 2035, is becoming conventional wisdom. But those who subscribe to that theory might do well to remember the fate of similar long-range forecasts in the past. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, eminent strategists predicted that Argentina would be a world power within 20 years. In the late 1980s, Japan was seen as the next global leader. The latest pessimistic utterances about Europe were sparked by a debt crisis in Greece which raised concern over the health of the euro, the common currency of 16 EU members. Plus US President Barack Obama’s decision to stay away from a US-EU summit scheduled for May in Madrid, with a new EU leadership structure that should have made it easier to answer then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous question: “Who do I call when I want to talk to Europe?” There are still several numbers to call in the complex setup, giving fresh reasons to fret to those crystal-gazers who see the future dominated by the United States and China, the so-called G-2. Pundits who see the European way of doing things as a model for the United States (and others) to follow are few and far between, not least, says one of them, Steven Hill, because most Americans are blissfully unaware of European achievements and, as he puts it, “reluctant to look elsewhere because ‘we are the best.’” As foreigners travelling through the United States occasionally note, the phrases “we are the best” and “America is No.1” are often uttered with deep conviction by citizens who have never set foot outside their country and therefore lack a direct way of comparison. (They are in the majority: only one in five Americans has a passport). Hill, who heads the political reform program at the New American Foundation, a liberal Washington think tank, has just published a book whose title alone is enough to irk conservative Americans: Europe’s Promise. Why the European
Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Future. It marshals an impressive army of facts and comparative statistics to show that the United States is behind Europe in nearly every socio-economic category that can be measured and that neither America’s trickle-down, Wall Street-driven capitalism nor China’s state capitalism hold the keys to the future. While China’s growth has been impressive, says Hill, the country remains, in essence, a sub-contractor to the West and is racked by internal contradictions. “When I talk to American audiences,” Hill said in an interview, “many find the figures I cite hard to believe. They haven’t heard them before. US businesses making more profits in Europe than anywhere else, 20 times more than in China? 179 of the world’s top companies are European compared with 140 American? That does not fit the preconceptions.” Such preconceptions exist, in part, because US media have portrayed Europe as a region in perpetual crisis, its economies sclerotic, its taxes a disincentive to personal initiative, its standards of living lower than America’s, its universal health care, guaranteed pensions, long vacations and considerably shorter working hours a recipe for low growth and stagnation. “In the transmission of news across the Atlantic, myth has been substituted for reality,” says Hill. He is in good, though numerically small, company with such views. The economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel prize winners, also have positive outlooks for Europe. In a recent column in the New York Times, Krugman said that Europe is often held up as evidence that higher taxes for the rich and benefits for the less well-off kill economic progress. Not so, he argued. The European experience demonstrates the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand. The relative rankings of countries tend to be defined by gross domestic product per capita but Hill points out that this might not be the best yardstick because it does not differentiate between transactions that add to the well-being of a country and those that diminish it. A dollar spent on sending a teenager to prison adds as much to GDP as a dollar spent on sending him to college. On a long list of quality-of-life indexes that measure things beyond the GDP yardstick - from income inequality and access to healthcare to life expectancy, infant mortality and poverty levels - the United States does not rank near the top. So where is the best place to live? For the past 30 years, a US-based magazine, International Living, has compiled a quality-of-life index based on cost of living, culture and leisure, economy, environment, freedom, health, infrastructure, safety and climate. France tops the list for the fifth year running. The United States comes in 7th. —Reuters
All articles appearing on these pages are the personal opinion of the writers. Kuwait Times takes no responsibility for views expressed therein. Kuwait Times invites readers to voice their opinions. Please send submissions via email to: opinion@kuwaittimes.net or via snail mail to PO Box 1301 Safat, Kuwait. The editor reserves the right to edit any submission as necessary.
Challenging ‘West versus Islam’ media paradigms By Gabriel Faimau
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t an international conference on “Islam and the Media” organised by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado-Boulder in January, many of the participants, including myself, examined the negative stigma attached by the media to Islam and Muslims, especially after 9/11 and various terrorist attempts made in the name of Islam by extremists and militants operating on the fringes of the larger mainstream Muslim community. In his influential 1981 book, Covering Islam, the late author and literary theorist Edward W. Said captured public attention regarding how experts and the media have determined the way we see Islam. At the heart of Said’s analysis is the notion that media coverage of Islam has closely associated Muslims with militancy, danger and anti-Western sentiment. In 1997, the Runnymede Trust, a UK-based think tank that promotes a successful multi-ethnic Britain, echoed the same idea in “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All”. A similar tendency was employed to read the events of 9/11 in 2001. Analysing these events, a good number of pundits, analysts, journalists and politicians believed that what we witnessed in the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath was a “clash of civilisations”, that is, a battle between Western and Islamic civilisations as predicted earlier by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. For the past three decades, scholarly studies on Islam and Muslims in the media have heavily relied on frameworks such as Said’s analyses, Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” theory, Islamophobia or cultural racism to analyse the questions regarding representations of Islam and Muslims in
the media. These frameworks still have a big influence on current studies. In fact, a good number of papers presented during the recent “Islam and media” conference were based on these frameworks. Of course, the use of such frameworks undeniably shapes the outcome of such findings and analysis. The problem, however, is that at the heart of the above approaches is a binary way of thinking which puts the West on one side and Islam on the other. Why is the media so obsessed with this binary approach? In my opinion, the binary style of thinking raises two issues. First, it provides no space for understanding the productive side of the encounter of people with different cultural and religious backgrounds. In a society characterised by increasing complexity, society cannot be just simply painted black and white. After all, society is not static. It has always been dynamic. Second, the binary approach, which includes the idea of “West versus Islam” or the civilised versus the uncivilised, has been developed upon the premise that media discourse has the power to control the unjust social representations of other cultures or religions. This premise assumes that people are basically trapped, or even imprisoned, in a fixed context of clash. As a result, the binary approach is inadequate for the complex challenges faced by a multicultural society. The news, however, is not that bad. As we move on to a new decade, a continued exploration of cultural or religious representation based on dialogue offers more hope to the encounters of people from different cultures and faiths than what is currently portrayed in the media. Indeed, people of different cultures or faiths are naturally strangers to each other. For the possi-
bility of recognising and respecting each other to occur, a courageous step should be taken through which must move toward the other and allow the unusual and strange to become internalised. In this way, as argued by Zali Gurevitch, Professor of Anthropology
at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, one’s uniqueness is recognised and differences are accepted without hostility. If studies of media representations of cultures and religions give more space for analysis based on dialogue-centric approaches, in today’s multicultural society, we would move forward with
more confidence and hope. NOTE: Gabriel Faimau is a PhD researcher, focused on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the British Christian media, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom — CGNews
MI5’s propaganda own goal By Richard Norton-Taylor
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n extraordinary spectacle is being played out with the head of MI5 publicly denouncing the media - and implicitly three of the country’s most senior judges - for reporting that officers in the security service were complicit in “at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, by the CIA. Jonathan Evans, in an article in London-based Daily Telegraph, referred to “conspiracy theory and caricature”, and to allegations that MI5 has been trying to “cover up” its activities. “That is the opposite of the truth,” he wrote. It all stems from an attempt by the government’s counsel, Jonathan Sumption QC, to suppress damning criticism of MI5 contained in the draft judgment of Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger, and endorsed by the other appeal court judges in the case. In a letter to Neuberger, Sumption complained that the draft judgment suggests that MI5 officers “deliberately misled” the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the ISC, shared a “culture of suppression” and “does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights”. In what Neuberger admits was an “overhasty” response he excised the offending paragraph, a move now being challenged by lawyers representing Mohamed, Liberty, Justice, Index on Censorship, the Guardian, the Times, the BBC, and other UK media. The criticism of MI5 officers, to which Evans and the home secretary, Alan Johnson, responded in remarkably intemperate language yesterday, came not from the media, as they suggest, but from a senior judge, supported by two others. It is based on evidence, including 42 unpublished CIA documents, collected over the past 18 months by two high court judges and described in six separate judgments. Their judgments are strongly critical of David Miliband, the foreign secretary. They show how MI5 withheld evi-
dence from the ISC, contrary to claims made by its chairman Kim Howells. “We can ask for absolutely any classified material we want to see and we do it all the time,” Howells said. The trouble is he does not know what to ask for. It was clear from the evidence “that the relationship of the UK government to the US authorities in connection with Mohamed was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing”, the high court judges said. Only last summer, well over a year after the hearings began, did MI5 officers provide fresh evidence revealing the extent to which MI5 co-operated with the CIA in Mohamed’s interrogations, including sending it a list of 70 questions he should be asked, while the CIA passed back Mohamed’s answers. Evans expressed the hope in his Telegraph article that the US will not now be “less ready” to share vital intelligence with Britain. The same concerns, repeatedly expressed by Miliband during the court hearings, were dismissed by the appeal court as “logically incoherent and therefore irrational”. While the political and security establishment hits out at the British judiciary and media over revelaing sensitive information, the facts of the case were clearly laid out already in a US court that accepted as true detailed allegations of Mohamed being “physically and psychologically tortured”. The US judge added: “His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food”. Rather than focussing on accusations of cover-ups, Evans and MI5 should address the more profound failings. Evans argument suggests that the media reporting the findings of senior judges is dangerous, helping our enemies use “propaganda” to undermine our ability to confront them. Better to remember the government’s more traditional argument: it is the failure to uphold our values, and the law, that is the greatest propaganda own-goal. — Guardian
Nostalgia for Mandela overshadows Zuma address By Clare Byrne
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t was a tall order for South African President Jacob Zuma to deliver a convincing State of the Nation address Thursday. Not only was antiapartheid icon Nelson Mandela present on the 20th anniversary of his release from prison, but Zuma also has a damaging sex scandal hanging over him. Key dates in the illustrious life of Nelson Mandela invariably create nostalgia in South Africa for his extraordinary leadership. Throughout Thursday, marked by a symbolic “freedom walk” and ruling party rally at his last place of imprisonment, Mandela’s voice rang out across the airwaves as broadcasters played and replayed his first historic address as a free man 20 years ago. Mandela gave that speech on the steps of Cape Town City Hall, a short distance from Parliament, where Jacob Zuma delivered his second State of the Nation address in a climate of nearly as much anticipation. One of the reasons for the excitement was Mandela’s attendance at the address. It was a rare public appearance by the frail statesman, who was greeted with ululations and
songs of praise by an admiring audience of parliamentarians and traditional, church and civic leaders, including Mandela’s former opposite number in negotiations on ending apartheid and co-Nobel-PeacePrize laureate, former president
FW de Klerk. Clad in a black silk shirt and trousers, a smiling Mandela entered the assembly through a back door with his wife, former Mozambican first lady and activist Graca Machel. Mandela, who became South Africa’s first
black president after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, upstaged Zuma, who received a more muted reception on arrival and appeared nervous, missing the first line of his speech. The address was avidly
Former South African president and Nobel peace prize laureate Nelson Mandela (left) and South African president Jacob Zuma share a laugh during a lunch for Apartheid former political prisoners at Genadendal, the official residence of the president, in Cape Town on Feb 12, 2010. – AFP
watched in homes and bars across the country for any mention by Zuma of the sex scandal that has raised questions about the security of his tenure as leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Last week, the polygamist father of nearly two dozen children was forced to admit he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman other than his three wives and fiancee. The 4month-old girl brought to 20 the number of acknowledged Zuma children and has made the president’s sexual appetite the butt of jokes and a source of national embarrassment. Ahead of the speech, South Africans joked about the “father of the nation” attempting to be “father to all the nation”. Renowned satirist Jonathan Shapiro - also known as Zapiro reattached his infamous showerhead to Zuma’s bald pate in his cartoons. The showerhead is an allusion to Zuma’s admission at his rape trial in 2006 to having unprotected sex with an HIVpositive woman, and then showering afterward in a bid to prevent infection. Zuma was cleared of the criminal charges but was forced to apologize for his poor judgement. The latest revelations have
cast fresh doubts over Zuma’s judgement, at a time when the country is struggling to shake off a recession and is still battling an HIV/AIDS pandemic that is fuelled chiefly by unprotected sex. Although Zuma has apologized for the latest affair, and the ANC had outwardly supported him, many women particularly have declared him an unworthy heir to Mandela and Mandela’s first successor, the controversial but reserved Thabo Mbeki. On Thursday, Zuma played it safe by focusing on deliverables and promising “harder, faster, smarter” government action as the country emerges from its first recession in 17 years. Zuma, who was accompanied to parliament by the first of his wives, invoked Mandela’s ideal of “a better future for all South Africans, black and white”. While lacking rhetorical flourish and being short on specific targets, Zuma’s sober tone was that of a man chastened. “I think that last week’s events had a sobering effect on Zuma,” one male viewer told the South African Press Association. “He knows that when South Africans get gatvol (fed-up), they get gatvol. This has woken him up.” — dpa