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Hunter,

we will discuss why our activity allows us to know much more than the
average pundit - even if a very well informed pundit.

Michael


>
> When ignorance is far from bliss
> By Simon Kuper
> Published: February 25 2011 22:06 | Last updated: February 25 2011
> 22:06
> On the airwaves, everyone is telling us what is happening across the
> Arab world. The truth (if only anyone would admit it) is that we
> cannot possibly know. Take the revolution in Cairo, says Joris
> Luyendijk, a Dutch former foreign correspondent and author of People
> Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, which examines how
> difficult it is for journalists to understand the region. Tahrir
> Square was packed with perhaps 250,000 demonstrators. Thousands of
> foreign journalists cheered them on. The world was watching. Yet we
> cannot answer a basic question: was this a popular revolution?
>
> As Luyendijk points out, “One per cent of the Cairo region was on
> the square. You do get curious about the 19.8 million people who
> weren’t there.” Perhaps most absentees supported the demonstrators.
> Alternatively, perhaps most agreed with Egyptian state TV: that the
> revolution was merely the latest foreign attack on Egypt. However,
> few western media asked about the absentees. Nobody reported, “And
> again today, 19.8 million people in Cairo decided not to
> demonstrate.” We cannot know what the 19.8 million thought, just as
> we cannot know how many Egyptians support the Muslim Brotherhood, or
> whether the Brothers are violent fundamentalists. Our ignorance has
> nothing to do with the old “orientalist” notion that Arabs are
> unfathomable beings. Rather, we cannot know partly because few of us
> have spent much time learning about Arab countries, partly because
> we usually ask only one question about Arabs, and partly because
> seeing inside these dictatorships is impossible.
>
> Our most basic problem is dumb ignorance. The poorer Arab countries
> haven’t been “news” for decades. The few foreign correspondents who
> remained (such as those flown in to cover Tahrir Square) rarely
> spoke much Arabic and mostly stuck to expat ghettoes. Few western
> pundits today are equipped to interpret Tunisia or Algeria, says
> Francis Ghiles, expert on north Africa at the CIDOB think tank in
> Barcelona. John Chalcraft, historian of Egypt at the London School
> of Economics, says that if western citizens and media knew more
> about the Middle East, they could have dismissed certain recent
> claims made by their governments: for instance, that Saddam Hussein
> was in league with his enemy al-Qaeda, or that Iraqis would welcome
> Ahmed Chalabi as president. But western ignorance goes right to the
> top. George W. Bush pressed for elections in Gaza but was astounded
> when Hamas won. President Obama’s White House appeared surprised
> almost daily by the Egyptian revolution. We galumph around the Arab
> world blindfolded.
>
> Our next problem is the prism through which we see the Arab world.
> Since 9/11, western governments and media have asked one main
> question about Arabs: “How can we stop them from blowing us up?” If
> your question is security, then your answer is likely to be
> stability. So Egypt’s President Mubarak was understood as our
> bulwark against crazed Islamists.
>
> Olivier Roy, a great French expert on Islam, writes: “European
> opinion interprets the popular uprisings through a grille that’s
> over 30 years old: the Islamic revolution in Iran.” Instead, we
> might just as well see Arab countries through the prism of another
> non-Arab country: Turkey, a democracy headed by peaceful Islamists.
>
> The uprisings are nudging us towards seeing Arab countries through a
> Latin American prism. Luyendijk says: “Mubarak is the new Pinochet.”
> If you place Mubarak in the long parade of corrupt American-backed
> militarist thugs, then the key to understanding Egypt ceases to be
> Islam. Western media have long depicted the Arab world as a
> chessboard, with Islamic fundamentalists playing in black. But
> perhaps it’s more like a poorhouse run by mafiosi. Luyendijk wrote
> five years ago that the story about Arab countries was not so much
> religion or Israel as dictatorship, corruption and poverty. Now, to
> general amazement, we’ve had non-religious revolutions against
> dictatorship, corruption and poverty. It turns out the people in
> Tahrir Square were asking different questions from us.
>
> But Luyendijk thinks our ignorance is even more profound. He says we
> cannot know what is happening inside dictatorships. Arab countries
> are short on free elections, free media and opinion polls. Hardly
> anyone living in these places could speak freely. Academics in Arab
> countries serve at the pleasure of the secret police, which is one
> reason I’ve only quoted western pundits here. As Ghiles describes
> fear in Tunisia: “Parents would send their children to bed before
> daring to utter home truths.”
>
> Consequently, we can only guess at Arab public opinion. When Dick
> Cheney said Iraqis would welcome American troops with flowers, there
> was no way of knowing. In this climate it’s hard even for Arabs to
> know what their own countrymen think. Egypt’s revolution didn’t only
> surprise Obama. It surprised the Muslim Brotherhood too.
>
> Journalists get paid for saying what they know, not what they don’t
> know, and so they are now telling us what Egyptians want. Perhaps
> it’s time to admit: we don’t know. When I asked Ghiles for
> predictions about voting in Egypt and Tunisia, he said: “At this
> stage it’s completely pointless.”
>
> But thanks to these revolutions, we might now actually find out
> something about Arab countries. Democracy is an information system.
>
> simon.kuper@ft.com
>