A friend sent in a formal complaint to the BBC regarding their Mecca suicide bombers controversy. FYI, here’s the response:

Thanks for contacting us regarding ‘Have I Got News For You’ broadcast on the 3 June.

We understand you were unhappy that a joke was made linking Mecca to suicide bombers.

We raised your concerns with the production team and they have replied as follows:

“Have I Got News For You has been running for over 20 years and is a topical and satirical news quiz, as such its viewers are familiar with the humour of the show. It tackles current issues in a comedic and challenging way and has made jokes about a wide variety of subjects. The show does not have an agenda for or against any political view or religion and makes fun of political parties of all persuasions.

In the case of the Mecca joke the starting point was a play on words and the over use of the phrase “is a Mecca for…” In this case a daily newspaper had lazily used the phrase “Dostoyevski metro station is a Mecca for suicides”. The joke was not meant to suggest that everyone who goes to Mecca is a suicide bomber, it was saying that ironically Muslim suicide bombers still regard Mecca as a holy place. The irony in this is that Islam is a religion of peace.

The programme is neither ignorant nor racist. Therefore we are all surprised at the level of outrage the joke has caused and to anyone who took the joke in the wrong way, we apologise, as it was not intended to offend.”

We would like to assure you that we’ve registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Regards

BBC Audience Services
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

]]> http://occidentalorientalist.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/the-bbc-responds-to-suicide-bombers-joke/feed/ 0 occidentalorientalist http://occidentalorientalist.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/ethan-zuckerman-on-ggind/ http://occidentalorientalist.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/ethan-zuckerman-on-ggind/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:48:36 +0000 occidentalorientalist http://occidentalorientalist.wordpress.com/?p=370 Continue reading →]]> MacMaster’s “apology” refers to “the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism”. Perhaps we’ll learn more about the target of his critique when he discusses his motives at more length. Part of the post-colonial critique Edward Said offered in “Orientalism” was a recognition of the danger of understanding the Middle East through the frames, accounts and preconceptions of Westerners, who consciously or unconsciously tend to define the Orient as “other”. As a response, we might choose to read western accounts of the Middle East with a critical eye, or to seek out more accounts from people of the Middle East to understand the region. But it’s hard to imagine a more orientalist project than a married, male American writer masquerading as a Syrian lesbian to tell a story about oppression and democratic protest.

Just in case you didn’t think so already.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the blogosphere for the past couple of days, you’ve probably heard all about Gay Girl in Damascus; the (fake) blog of a (fake) outed Syrian-American girl (not really) living in Damashq. The author, Daniel MacMaster, in an appalling display of fraud, duped his 2K+ followers into thinking that he, a white dude from Georgia, was actually a lesbian blogger. But he’s not, just in case that’s at all unclear:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

What an apology. I mean, what an entitled piece of crap.

KabobFest says it so much better than I do, so I’ll just repost their commentary on the article. Kudos to those guys for indicting “the New Orientalism”:

MacMaster, in all of his privileged splendor as a straight American white man, appropriated and “outed” his avatar Amina as a lesbian activist, and in doing so put numerous queer Syrians at risk. Writing from a cozy home in Georgia/Edinburgh/Turkey bares no risk, allowing for plenty of slack when it comes to accuracy and accountability. Yet the victims will ultimately not be the MacMasters of the world, the phony bleeding heart liberals, but the people on the ground that Amina fails to represent.

Since his first apology, MacMaster has taken down the banner header and put up “A Hoax” and a subtitle declaring how he “never meant to hurt anyone,” along with a self-deriding post in which he poses his self-loathing:

So, I invented her. First, she was just a name. Amina Arraf. She commented on blogs and talkbacks on news-sites. Eventually, I set up an email for her. She joined the same lists I was already on and posted responses in her name. And, almost immediately, friendly and solicitous comments on mine appeared. It was intriguing. That likely would have been the end of it; I’d just keep her as a nearly anonymous handle for commenting on issues that mattered to me but …

I didn’t. Instead, I enjoyed ‘puppeting’ this woman who never was. I knew what she looked like in my head and I grabbed photos of a woman whom I have never met who looked exactly like what Amina should look like. That was stupid and possibly evil of me and I’m really, really sorry about that. I gave Amina a facebook page; she soon had friends and admirers.

In case you didn’t notice, I don’t like this apology much either.

In some ways, what MacMaster has done is really quite unforgivable: he has really changed the game for good — and what’s sad is that it’s not a game. LBGT rights in the Middle East are practically nonexistent, and the bloggers — the ones brave enough to post, even anonymously — are few and far between. But the effect moves beyond the singular country of Syria — which has LGBT MENA issues of its own: it’s a global issue. Says Uri Friedman, quoting Alexandra Hinton in an Atlantic Wire post:

It must really be hard to be a white American man of a certain age. People keep giving you guys all of the jobs and such so some of you have to find a niche to set yourself apart. You could be the funny one, or the tech guy that only writes in haikus, but no you had to go and claim and identity that’s already facing an uphill battle. Now everyone who claims to be something other that a white American man of a certain age is going to have to provide photographic, video and audio proof.

Not content to write as a somewhat interesting white guy, you’ve got to appropriate someone else’s minority identity in order to get noticed? To be interesting? To break hearts?

I don’t agree with the “it-must-be-tough-to-be-a-white-guy” thing. After seven months of relatively productive unemployment, I’ve only just gotten a “real” job — and the American workforce is at 55% majority for women now. But I do agree that this was truly a destructive blow to both blogging as a literary practice and blogging as a form of citizen reporting. Anonymity is the blogger’s best defense. At the end of the day you can walk away from the Internet. You can unplug. And your words will remain. But it’s always under the assumption that you are writing only as yourself. You are writing under the terms of your blog: as yourself, or informing your readers of your own agenda. Not someone else’s. Because then, where is your authority?

The “why” is just what is so baffling.

For all its appeal, however, The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns’ sentimental vision and the romance of Foote’s anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film’s cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war’s most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20^th century.

Lundberg takes issue with what he deems the cultural romanticization of the Civil War in pop culture: an ethos of detachment and nostalgic longing that has produced not only Burns’ “Ashokan Farewell” -threaded documentary, but Gone with the Wind and Cold Mountain. Burns-like portrayals are problematic not only because they gloss over the important nuances of what was (to quote a good friend quoting Robert Penn Warren) one of the most “felt” conflicts in American history, but also because they perpetuate an illusion of the conflict within the collective of the American psyche:

The reality, far from the documentary’s ultimate message, is that there was no neat resolution or victory — and America is still dealing with the legacy of the Civil War in some form even today with ongoing struggles of civil rights, gender equality, and the perpetual play between federal and state governments. This is not terrible, but it is a reality; and a discussion of the Civil War might begin with the sentimentality and pro-nationalism of Burns’ documentary, but it certainly cannot end there.

About now, you must be asking yourself “What on earth does this have to do with the Middle East, OO?”

Absolutely everything.

Taken through the lens of orientalism, The Civil War is a classic case of Said’s textbook definition: the discursive displacement of an actual, nuanced reality (the East, in this case, the Civil War) with an “exotic” or romanticized portrayal (the Orient of literature — here, the documentary The Civil War) that glosses over the reality, while simultaneously presenting itself as authoritative.

We don’t generally look at our own national portrayals via orientalism, but we probably do so at our own peril. Power is at the center of the orientalist discourse, and while it doesn’t express the usual colonialist cultural-political dominance over a native people, in some ways, it does something keenly similar — it rewrites a national experience:

Too often, Foote’s grand pronouncements and anecdotes become substitutes for more serious consideration of difficult historical dynamics. In the first episode, “The Cause,” Foote nearly negates Burns’ careful 15-minute portrait of slavery’s role in the coming of the war with a 15-second story of a “single, ragged Confederate who obviously didn’t own any slaves.” When asked by a group of Yankee soldiers why he was fighting, the Rebel replied, “I’m fighting because you’re down here,” which, according to a smirking Foote, “was a pretty satisfactory answer.” In similar fashion throughout, Foote asks us to put aside the very troubled political meanings of the Confederate Lost Cause and join him in an appreciation of both its courtly leaders and its defiant rank-and-file soldiers.

The emphasis placed on the overarching top-down structure with brief nods to the “rank-and-file” glosses over the legacy in “the warm glow of nostalgia.” Nothing is said about the long struggle of the Civil Rights movement (which continues even today), or the real heartache of Reconstruction. Instead, the Civil War is ultimately, in Burns’ eyes, something redemptive in American history — something to be proud of, almost. What Lundberg takes issue with, I think, is this “pride” in the war’s narrative that Burns perpetuates — it should probably be looked at with more embarrassment than anything: embarrassment that half the country backed slavery and an anti-humanitarian view of non-white races to the point of going to war with the other half that backed emancipation. To my mind, this doesn’t really echo all that differently than colonialist narratives of conquered countries: where the victor’s virtues in the native population are extolled, and the presence of the colonizer is, in fact, a “liberation.”

Certainly there are heroes, proud moments: Chamberlain, Lee, the Gettysburg Address. American identity crystallized and in some ways brought us to a maturity. But suggesting this was national is dangerous. There was a whole other side to the war — a big side — and the world would be a lot different if the South had its way. There is a subaltern narrative that is regarded here as “quaint,” in that it was vanquished, but the image of the subaltern South — which once posed an enormous threat to national unity and the very existence of the United States — is made almost exotic.

If this is history, we should be careful. What does this say about us, when we endorse that narrative? Are we a war-glorying nation? Is this our best foot forward? Is this a biography of America we would not be ashamed to place before a foreign national, seeking a legitimate answer to the question of the Civil War?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is our tangent for the week.

Poor, poor, poor judgement. Also: poor choice of words. Also: poor judgement.

The host describes the (fictional) Dostoyevsky Tube stop as being “The Mecca for Suicides,” noting later on that this should not be confused “with the Mecca for Suicide Bombers, which is Mecca.”

Yikes. This was posted on Fadz’s FB feed in shock-and-horror, and while I agree it’s quite offensive, I’m not entirely sure it was meant to be. Rather, I’m almost certain that the shock-and-horror stems from an inherent grammatical misunderstanding: Mecca (in the black-out frame) should have been written mecca.

Just so I’m clear, I’m NOT by any means advocating the content or maintaining that the BBC should have aired this; it’s in poor taste, and the editors should have realized this was going to provoke a pretty visceral reaction if it was even misunderstood only a little bit.

mecca (small m) is described by the OED as:

3. A place regarded as supremely sacred or valuable, or where a faith, policy, truth, etc., originates. Also more generally: a place which attracts people of a particular group or with a particular interest; a resort of (also for) a certain group of people.

As a word, Mecca has taken on entirely secularized meanings in the English language; probably to the extent that crusade no longer exclusively means war of the Cross or pilgrimage, a holy journey (we might say one’s weekly pilgrimage to a Sunday brunch, for instance). The following examples are given as avatars of secularized usage, which, I think, is pretty common:

OED gives two forms — both the capital and the lowercase. Print journalism is gradually (when referring to the Holy City itself) giving more precedence to the form Makka or Makkah, which are technically better Arabic transliterations (like Qur’an v. Koran), reserving mecca for the metaphorical sense (a “shoe mecca.”) I think it’s also important to note that this metaphorical turn-of-phrase is present even in Arabic (I lived down the street from a “Mecca of Juice,” which was – as any denizen of Alexandria can tell you — is amazing).

I think that the grammatical context here was important: it should have been (written, and by no means do I endorse this): “[the station is a] mecca for Suicides…the mecca for suicide bombers is Mecca.” Logically, it’s reasonable (and again, I don’t endorse this, but am just clarifying the fallacy) — as suicide bombers are Muslims and look to Mecca with reverence, Mecca is (consequently) a “mecca” of bombers.

It’s important to note that she doesn’t actually say “Muslims.” I don’t think it necessarily meant that all Muslims are suicide bombers (think: Socrates is a philosopher, philosophers are good men; i.e., “all good men are Socrates”), but BBC should have understood that the fallacious nature of the logic makes it easily misunderstood, and that the implication that Muslims are the only ones gathered in Mecca itself (therefore “suicide bombers”) is pretty heinous. And they should have known they were going to send people into an understandable uproar. Bad taste, BBC.

Not sure who “DaggersofTruth” is — aside from a channel self-described as “defending the finality of the Prophethood” against the Ahmadiyya sect — but from the way the video is constructed (isolated clip, polemical bookends), it’s apparent that he’s provoking anger by overlooking what (I think) is an important grammatical note.

Map of "Starvania" from "Malice in the Palace"

This one, however, depicting the layout of Arab Spring, is pretty good too, and it’s been making the rounds on Twitter:

What’s interesting from a sociological perspective is the maps’ distinct familiarity; the whole thing is mapped out (and meant to be) according to Western sentiments regarding the revolutions. Hence, Syria is a place of “child butchers” (which received a great deal of coverage in the Western media) and the Levant is glossed over by  American cultural-regional counterparts (Israel as the US, the Occupied Territories as the familiarly embargoed Cuba, and French-speaking Lebanon a kind of Haiti). Others:

- “Big Bang”: what started it all — Tunisia.

- Libya as “Arab Yugoslavia” — a reference to the recent conflict in that country and the Western experience of it. Also: “Arab Drag Queen” refers to Muammar Qaddafi’s penchant for longer hair and crazy riffs on Arab dress. (See Vanity Fair’s take on it here.)

- Saudi “Texas”: i.e., the oilfields.

- iRaq: ha, Apple and iTunes.

- “Referee”: Turkey, which is perceived as a moderator of the East-West experience and an “experiment” in secular democracy in a Muslim-majority nation.

Iran's National Flag, according to this map

- “The Borg”: my personal favorite. Iran is this foreign, mechanized, terrifying entity that will take over the word a la the villains in Star Trek: the Next Generation. That is, of course, if the United Federation of Planets (a thinly veiled, cosmic UN) does not stop their evil.

- “Eutopia”: that is, the EU. Interestingly, this taps into the Greek pun that St. Thomas More meant to evoke to fellow humanist scholars when he published Utopia in 1516: first, the utopos (literally, “nowhere”), and eutopos (“the good place”). How very….pro-Western (and not so subtle).

Obviously a joke. But it’s an interesting example of cultural appropriation of foreign events and history made immediate to the “Western” experience and sense of humor by assimilation.

“We discovered the conspiracy, thank God,” says Abou Mahmoud sincerely, almost triumphantly, referring to the incredible notion doing the rounds here that the U.S., Israel, the satellite channels, the radical cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and others, are part of some unholy alliance to bring down Syria—the jewel of the Middle East.

He is not alone in his credulity. I’ve heard these stories repeated with approval by shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and university professors; by Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians; by Muslims and Christians. “When I watch these scenes that Al-Jazeera and others claim are happening in Syria, I feel like they’re happening in Libya. There must be exaggeration,” said one.

Do these people really believe what the Syrian media tell them? “Some do,” Dr. Adnan Hussein, an intellectual and historian from Aleppo, tells me. “But most believe it because they want to, because they’re afraid.”

We’ve seen this before: the Mubarak regime claiming that Israelis had infiltrated Egypt and were taking over the protests. It’s difficult to believe that kind of thing when Midan Tahrir is filled with thousands of people chanting “The people want to bring down the regime!”

But what you don’t know is that ordinary people believe these things.

When the Internet blacked out in Egypt — when the #Jan25 protests were at their height (I will always put a hashtag in front of that date) — I started to panic. I spent some of my best years in Egypt (I daresay that I learned how to really be on my own over there) and friends, adopted family (Faten, Mahmoud), and students were all still over there. Panic.

When the teargas cleared and the landlines opened up, things seemed fine. I got a hold of Rumi and Andrea. I spoke with friends in Alex and found out no one was hurt.

But then, the Internet came back online. And I realized that the panic was much, much worse.

As I started to chat with some of my students, I realized that many of them were very much pro-Mubarak –because Mubarak represented stability. To my knowledge, no one was party to the croneyism that the regime represented — I don’t think anyone was the recipient of bribes or NDP favors — but gunshots, riots, massive demonstrations in Alexandria made many people afraid. It made many of my students afraid.

I can’t say, because I wasn’t there. But the most shocking thing to hear was how — from their perspective — Al Jazeera was an illegitimate news source. While I was telling them I was watching AJE’s fantastic coverage of the revolution live, that I was glued to my computer throughout the course of the weeks that followed, they were telling me to turn on NileTV because (as they put it) AJE “likes to present a bad picture of Egypt.”

The same thing is happening in Syria.

Only now, AJE and other independent journalists are shut out.

And people are believing the state TV.