ALADDIN’S SERVER

One of the most enduring fables that ever came out of the mid-east was the story about Aladdin and his magic lamp. Rub it and out came a genie who granted all your wishes. Once out of the lamp, however, the genie had a mind of his own and was difficult to control. The moral of the story is “Be careful what you wish for.” Fast forward thirteen hundred years and one can see a striking modern analogy. Al Jazeera and the whole Arab and Persian establishment may wish they never started down the road of non-state controlled media.

When the larger Arab world emerged from the ashes of WWI, its nascent governments swiftly brought the sole medium of information, print, under state control. The dissemination of news and opinion to the reading classes in Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad was subject to strict state censorship. All news and opinion was doled out by ministries to the publishers and then fed to the public. Little other news filtered in as the language barrier and the economics of publishing did not foster foreign news sources. Television’s few channels and radio were never independent of the state. Broadcasts served to reinforce the party line.

This censorship continued unchallenged until Al Jazzera utilized the revolutionary idea of using satellites to bypass the regime-controlled broadcast spectrum allotments. Once they did this, all sorts of stuff happened. Quickly the mono cultural TV diet of foreign dignitaries paying homage to the king, the sultan visiting a new dam or hospital, or his viewing endless parades were revealed to be as they always were…totally irrelevant and often absurd.

Youthful citizens from Rabat to Ramallah wanted real news, real information, real footage of actual events without the states’ dose of spin, and they got it from the Arab satellite channels, whose ability to influence “the street” became a potent threat to the existing regimes. The Arab newspaper Al Hayatt estimates that the top four satellite channels are watched by over seventy percent of viewers. For example, the endless images shown of the Palestinian intifada, including the definitively faked footage of Jamal al Durrah being shot by Israeli troops in Gaza, inflamed the Arab world. Oddly this too was destabilizing to the military regimes because it showed them to be impotent in confronting Israel and thus helped the radical militant religious parties gain popular support.

If anyone reading this thinks that Al Jazzera doesn’t have their own propaganda mission, that it is an impartial news source, that its Whabbi financiers relish real debate, please stop reading now and do something else with your time. For it is clear that Al Jazeera’s mission is to destabilize the moderate regimes by using the radical idea that the truth is not limited to what is printed in Cairo’s Al Ahram or Saudi Arabia’s Al Watan. Thus, there is tremendous Arab State backlash against Al Jazeera’s reporting, including bans on their reporters entering countries. Advertiser boycotts were tried as a way to counter the broadcaster’s destabilizing effects.

Now, as with Aladdin’s emergent genie, the Arab world has rubbed the lamp of the internet and server-hosted video content. Things will never be the same. Some recent downloaded examples:

• The unvarnished footage of Hamas gunmen throwing Fatah fighters off the roofs of Gaza City buildings;
• The cell phone video taken in a Cairo police station of a bus driver being tortured by a nightstick in his anus;
• A judge in Saudi Arabia doubling the number of lashes a gang rape victim should receive as punishment for her trying to “use the media to influence public opinion;”
• Recent, and as yet unverified, video of Hamas gunmen slaughtering Fatah members against a wall and then firing into their lifeless bodies;
• The cell phone video of Ahmadinejad revolutionary guard goons shooting at protesting students.

There must be countless others being watched by Arab youths everywhere. The net result is that for the first time in Arab and Persian history, the dark underbelly of lies, corruption, and incompetence that is all governments cannot be censored. The official lies, the foibles, the misjudgments, the brutality of the police (think Rodney King) that make up the daily news cycle in the west are now being delivered to the followers of Mohammad for the very first time! The anti-Semitic anti-Zionist state media dogs that have herded the Arabic public like sheep from pasture to pasture are now barking discordantly.

It’s still very early, but you can feel the Arab street changing, the baby steps of realization that the Jews and Israel are not responsible for their misery. The realizations of their lack of opportunity and their dearth of freedoms are blowback from the newly available uncensored video, now only a click away. The Egyptian government is so terrified of uncontrolled opinion that it is jailing youthful bloggers. This generation of Arab youth are no different from other youth in every epoch and county. They demand change.

Iran can try to suppress the truth as received via Cisco, but everyone knows this is a losing proposition. The truth has a nasty habit of finding its way into the world. It just may be that the most revolutionary thing to ever happen in the Mid-East will resemble Aladdin’s genie. It will be wireless.