Racism and the North American media following 11 September: the Canadian setting.

• Author: Ismael, T.Y.
• Position: Part II. Realities: policy and practice

IN THE LIVE COVERAGE OF EVENTS in New York and Washington on the morning of 11 September 2001 Canadian media molded the immensely powerful imagery of the tragedy into a concise discourse for Canadian media consumers. Immediately following the World Trade Center's collapse, Canadian television broadcasts and newspaper reportage represented the sentiments of many Canadians by conveying an outpouring of emotional support for Canada's American neighbors--as well as the Canadian victims--in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. Within the first few hours, in an effort to provide explanation and context for the enormously emotional images transmitted into Canadian homes, trends began to emerge from the coverage as news producers and editors selected what they saw as "the story."

This article will examine Canadian mainstream media over the period of 11 September 2001 through 1 June 2002. Its goal is not definitively to quantify media coverage but rather to point out some major themes and tactics used by the Canadian media in its coverage of events in the United States and the Middle East, and in its analysis of Islam, both political and non-political, following the terrorist attacks.

Attention will be paid to the Canadian media's portrayal of events in Palestine and Iraq, and of issues such as "terrorism" and the politics of the "Islamic world". Primary materials will be taken from the two national daily newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post as well as from other major daily newspapers from across Canada.

COVERAGE PRIOR TO 9-11: CANADIAN MEDIA DEPICTIONS OF THE MIDDLE EAST

On 11 August 2001, under a large photograph depicting the bloodshot eyes and menacing gaze of a young Arab man wearing a red kafiya over his face, in an article entitled "Paranoid Imaginings: Hopes for peace infected by disease of conspiracy," the National Post's Alexander Rose examined what "drives the hate" of the Palestinian/Islamic uprising against Israel. (2) Using materials supplied by the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), which was identified as an "independent, non-profit organization" based out of Washington D.C., and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Rose proffered the National Post article as a "glimpse [at] what passes for normal, civilized, balanced, rational discourse" by the "cream of Muslim intelligentsia." (3) Evaluating the MEMRI translations of the Arabic press and selected speeches by politicians and clergy, (4) Rose found three major categories of discourse: anti-Semitic, conspiracy-centered, and holocaust denying. Critical focus was also brought to bear on Palestinian schoolbooks for their portrayal of Jewish people and a lack of recognition of the state of Israel. Rose concluded his findings in a resounding critique of the Arab Middle East:

... despite all the golden promises of their leaders ... Arab countries are poor, oppressed, nervous, pitiful places that can only stare enviously at Israel, a country which enjoys a standard of living approaching that of Canada. Unlike its neighbors, Israel is a thriving noisy democracy with a high-tech sector greater in absolute terms than any other country apart from the United States. Fifty years ago, that land was a desert. It has never lost a war. (5) Rose put forward a popular orientalist history of the "fall" of Arab and Muslim power from the Middle Ages through to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. He also asserted that an Arab/Islamic quest for a conspiracy theory to explain the lack of development, poverty and the rise of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East is evidence that the lack of such hallmarks of Western societal development is the fault of the Arabs themselves, and that it represents an intellectual and cultural affliction independent of any external forces.

The underlying analysis driving this reportage is a reactionary and ill-informed vision of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Public accountability has been edged out of the process as the Canadian media is increasingly immune to public review processes, industry or government ombudsmen, and civil society organizations. (6) This has distorted the coverage of complex events such as the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the conflict in Afghanistan, the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis, and threats of invasion by the U.S. government against Iraq. The events of 11 September were depicted through reductive and racist notions of 'truth' 'fact' and 'reality.' (7) The media in Canada, as reflected in the particularly rabid quote above, do not neutrally report facts and stories on the Middle East, but rather reconstruct reality based on the professional and personal ideologies, corporate interests, and cultural and organizational norms and values. (8) Journalists, editors and producers contribute, consciously or not, to the marginalization and denigration of Arab and Muslim people, and in the process undermine the political legitimacy of Arab people's human rights including the right to self-determination.

Following the end of the Cold War Western societies triumphantly espoused the dawn of a new age, proclaimed a 'new world order' and rapidly expanded existing economic and political programs in what came to be identified as a rapidly globalizing world. Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld (1992) and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1993) put forward a monolithic discourse modifying popularized Cold War notions of the West, and its newly minted adversary, the traditional and collectivist 'other' with special emphasis on the Islamic world. (9) Whatever the theoretical merit of such reductive theories, (10) they do reflect the paradigm of Western policy towards the Middle East for much of the last three centuries. While largely discredited in academic circles, at scholarly conferences and within publications, politicians and political commentators in the mainstream media have utilized and popularized these terms to frame the discussion of political motivations and actions in a classically orientalist fashion following 11 September. Analysis of policy alternatives regarding the Middle East, Islamic revivalism, and terrorism articulated in the Canadian media, offering counsel for either the Canadian or American governments, and elucidation for Canadians, has been filtered through the lenses provided by such esteemed pillars of Anglo-American intelligentsia as Michael Ignatieff (Harvard), John Ralston Saul, (11) Samuel Huntington (Harvard), Bernard Lewis (Princeton), and Fuad Ajami (Johns Hopkins University). The National Post in particular has also made use of American-based spokesmen, lobbyists and members of think tanks such as Daniel Pipes and Frank McCaffrey.

This narrow perspective, predominantly conservative and American in origin, has rendered to Canadians an immensely homogenized Islamic "Arab world" that is characterized by its poverty, dictatorial regimes, draconian human fights record, economic backwardness and social malaise. No mention of the legacy of colonialism is broached, and no analysis of the overt involvement of American and Soviet machinations during the Cold War is incorporated. The absence of such factors leaves the distinct impression that Islamic Arab society, as such, is solely responsible for the current state-of-affairs in the region. That such a succinct estimation could summarize the diversity of geographically heterogeneous societies from Morocco to Afghanistan, and from the Sudan to central Asia defies credible scrutiny. The corollary premises made to distinguish the West, harbor the enshrined hallmarks of advanced civilization. A strong commitment to democracy, human rights, a transparent legal system, liberal capitalist economies, ethical standards of business, and public discourse, are proclaimed as the enlightened and magnanimous societal legacies of the Western tradition. The Canadian media's promotion of the robust sentimentality, and chest-beating glorification of the facets of the Enlightenment (with additional meritorious pilfering from non-Western sources), is used to distinguish 'us' from 'them.' References to that which is most esteemed within the discourse of European and American societies is used as a discursive tool to dehumanize the subject, and thereby allow for the denigration and use of massive violence against the 'other.' Racist notions flourish, and discussion promoting the recourse to force-of-arms is accepted as a viable policy alternative in the face of intransigent societies, and peoples opposed to the dominant societal ethos. Bernard Lewis in particular has advocated a "get tough" policy with the Arab world. The mainstream adoption of such a framework in the discussion of political action is emblematic of the darkest legacies of Europe's imperialist past. (12)

Mark Steyn in a National Post cover story on 9 October 2001 advocated the colonization of Afghanistan, as well as much of the Islamic world, and for the return of the "white man's burden." (13) The implication, that American policies, colonization and military occupation within Arab and Muslim societies was a benign influence, and that further tutoring by the benevolent and advanced West would advance more civilized Arab and Islamic states, is paramount in Steyn's commentary. He further argued that 19th and 20th century European and American policies of indirect rule (as opposed to direct colonization like that in India), and the ongoing support of client governments, "did a great disservice to the populations of those countries." This disservice, he believes, could be rectified by the imposition of direct colonial rule in Arab and Islamic states today. To those who proposed a sophisticated examination of European and U.S. actions in the Middle East, Steyn countered that the "alleged mountain of evidence of Yankee culpability is, in fact, evidence only of the Great Satan's deplorable...