All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And like I told you before, I got one window open here to Al Jazeera English's live stream.
And our first guest on the show today has a piece in foreign policy called the Al Jazeera Revolution.
The satellite television station is seizing the message away from the bland propaganda of Arab autocrats.
It's by Lawrence Pintak.
He is the founding dean of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communications at Washington State University.
He's been a journalist for more than 30 years.
His website is pintak.com, P-I-N-T-A-K.com.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Not bad at all.
It's a busy and amazing time.
It really is something else, isn't it?
I got to tell you, it reminds me when I was a little kid.
And I forget, was it Hungary first opened up their border to the West, and the Soviet government didn't stop them, and it was on.
Absolutely.
That's how it feels to me.
I don't know.
I guess I'm not trying to make predictions, because then I'll be wrong and stuff.
Don't want to be wrong.
Yeah.
Well, as your article points out, it's a different world.
Everything has changed now.
And of course, there's Anonymous, the band of hackers up to their necks in these revolutions across the Middle East.
Great piece about that in The Guardian today.
The April 6th Movement, that's the genesis of the revolution in Egypt right now, is simply a Facebook group.
They don't even have their own website.
It's a Facebook group called the April 6th Movement.
And as you're writing about in your piece here, Al Jazeera is available to pretty much the entire Muslim world.
They're watching this while they're eating their dinner every night.
And this is something that's actually really brand new in the Arab world, right?
Yeah.
20 years ago, you couldn't have had this.
Al Jazeera was launched in 1996, and it was the first semi-independent, shall we say, because it's not completely independent, Arab satellite channel in Arabic.
Back in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saudis didn't even know about it for three days, because the state media didn't mention it.
So that gives you some sense of how completely controlled information was.
Now you've got 500 satellite channels, and the information is pouring in through every pore.
Right.
And so, as I always say, life is like skateboarding.
It's all about the precedent set.
If you can ollie down 10 stairs, you know you can always do eight.
And so this is what's happening here is, well, jeez, the Tunisians went outside and demanded that their government cease to exist, and it worked.
Let's see if we can do it, too, guys.
Yeah, I mean, the Egyptians, you know, the level of frustration and anger and just complete disdain for the regime has been there an awful long time.
But the fact that they watched this all play out on television from Tunisia, they looked at each other and said, hey, we can do this, too.
I mean, there really would have been a time not long ago where they could have kept the revolution in Tunisia secret.
That's how clamped down information has been in these countries.
Absolutely.
I mean, I'm an old guy.
When I was CBS Middle East correspondent in the 80s, Syria quite literally leveled, I mean leveled, one of its own cities in a confrontation with Islamists.
And most of the world didn't even know about it.
I mean, we heard rumors about it.
We picked up bits and pieces from Beirut.
But we couldn't go and see it.
We couldn't talk to anybody that had been involved.
So it basically happened.
It's the old, if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there, well, that's what happens in the Arab world.
Right.
So now we have headlines coming in from Syria, from Sudan, from Algeria, and Kuwait even, from Yemen.
A couple, the only thing I've read from Pakistan is, don't worry, that's not going to happen to us, which is exactly what Mubarak said.
And it's already, in just a matter of a couple of weeks, there are, I don't mean to demean them, but I guess copycat protests and semi-uprisings, at least across the Muslim world.
Oh, absolutely.
Again, social media has played a very important role, as you mentioned in the beginning.
It links together the activists.
It allowed them to say, OK, guys, let's get out there and protest.
And now that the internet is back on in Egypt and cell phones are back on, it is again playing an important role.
I'm getting constant direct tweets from various activists on the ground there telling me what's going on, and they're linking each other, et cetera.
But that's the cognizant.
That's the young, digitally aware activists that are being linked by this.
The ordinary Egyptian is not in this digital circle.
It's a relatively closed circle.
Where they are being affected, where Arabs across the region are being affected, and the broader Muslim world, is television.
The fact that they watch this play out.
And so even last week, literally a week ago today, when we had the day of rage in Egypt, and the government cut the internet, they cut cell phones, et cetera, it went forward because everybody was still watching this on TV.
Right.
And yeah, it's interesting.
I think it's in your article you point out that they actually just pirated in Al Jazeera on a bunch of other networks, and basically went right around the Egyptian police state when it came to that.
And it kind of reminds me of really the internet itself.
And I guess all technology is like this, right?
It comes as a double edged sword.
And so like, for example, this foreignpolicy.com website where you wrote this great article that I got to read about what's going on with the spread of TV from different directions out there in the Middle East, is all really because DARPA wanted to be able to create a system where they could effectively wage a nuclear war, and for that matter, keep tabs on all of us.
And yet here you and I get to use this very same technology, the internet, in a sense, back at them, at least.
I'm assuming maybe too much.
But the reason there's a foreign policy website is because there are things written on that website that you don't get to hear on the nightly news channels.
We get to participate in this conversation without having to go to the top, just like the Egyptians are now being able to do.
Sure.
Obviously, the web is giving us all kinds of new information we never had access to.
But that's true of us.
But that's true in spades in the Arab world.
Because in the Arab world, you had all television, until Jazeera came along, all television was controlled by governments.
So it was a mouthpiece for the regime.
And Egyptian television has fallen back on those old ways.
And the 10 channels of state TV continue to be nothing but a mouthpiece for the regime.
Though I'm looking literally at a Facebook message somebody just sent me from Egypt.
And she's saying, it seems, though, that the government owned media are learning a lesson.
And they're starting to invite some supporters of the uprising onto television to speak to them.
But up until now, it's just been nonsense shots showing how calm things are in the country, or showing some of the violence as an example of why we need to end this whole thing, and speaking only to those who support Mubarak.
And I'm also distracted because I'm looking at something on television that says, even the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters was just swarmed by thugs from the regime.
So the regime is fighting a pitched battle on the information front and on the ground.
But it's a battle they're going to lose.
Because on the information front, you have, as I said before, 500 TV stations beaming all of this into Cairo.
Not every one, but many of them are covering this.
And people are getting the information through all sorts of other means.
I forget now, I'm sorry, Lawrence, whether it was in your piece or something else I read last night about how, in Belarus, there is a big uptick of protests going on.
And how that's obviously about as far as you can get from the Muslim world.
And yet, this idea is spreading like a computer virus, apparently.
It wasn't my piece, and I'm so consumed right now with focusing on the Arab world, I've missed that.
But it wouldn't surprise me.
Certainly, any time there's a revolution or an uprising, there's copycat efforts anyway.
You look at, you go back to what we name these revolutions now, different colors and flowers, et cetera, et cetera.
By the way, I saw a tweet from someone from Cairo the other night saying, somebody's trying to call this the Lotus Revolution.
Give me a break.
But we started with the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, and so then everything got to- Well, it was the Rose Revolution in Georgia.
Right, right.
See, and most of those color-coded revolutions were dastardly CIA plots rather than legitimate revolutions, like we saw in Kyrgyzstan, for example.
Well, and a lot of them never went anywhere.
I mean, it was the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon that did, at the time, drive out or cause the Syrians to withdraw from Lebanon, but Syria still controls things.
We heard all about the Twitter Revolution in Iran, and the Iranians are still looking around to see where that revolution is.
Right.
Yeah, that one I wouldn't put in the same category with the Orange Revolution and all that.
That one was legit, like we're seeing in Egypt here.
And the Human Rights Watch just came out with a brand new report about widespread torture in Egypt, and now I can't get them on the show because they're in Egypt, and apparently some of them have been kidnapped by the secret police there.
Hopefully they'll be released.
I found out the hard way just reading through the headlines that this is why I can't get them on the show.
They've actually been abducted.
But they have this report that just explains the widespread use of torture by the 15 different police agencies that rule over those people.
It's amazing to me it took this long.
I thought that being tortured was the fate worse than death, the most objectionable thing in mankind.
In Egypt, torture has been a tool of the state.
There is absolutely no two ways about that.
And these young digital activists have been at the forefront of exposing that.
A couple of years ago, really one of the first big impacts that the Egyptian bloggers had was a blogger named Abbas, who's very active in what's going on right now, posted on YouTube cell phone footage of police torturing a taxi driver and literally sodomizing him with a nightstick.
And the police themselves had shot this.
This gives you some sense of the mindset of this regime.
The police themselves had shot this cell phone footage of them torturing this guy and then circulated it among other taxi drivers to intimidate them.
And while managed to get a hold of this footage, he posted it on YouTube, and then that created the safe space for the mainstream, the more independent of the mainstream media organizations in Egypt, to report that the bloggers are reporting about torture, because they were never able to before because of censorship.
And so that actually led to, miraculously, led to those policemen being convicted of torture by the regime, by a regime in which torture was endemic.
So the impact that these...
Which is more than what would have happened to him here.
Well, we'll get into that.
The degree to which these digital activists are having an impact is profound.
Yeah.
All right, now, it says in your bio here that you've been writing and lecturing, I guess it implies here, sort of a broad, in a broad sense, about America's relationship with the Muslim world, kind of in general.
And I wonder if you can comment on this kind of, I guess, Frank Gaffney-driven, neoconservative meme.
They're trying so hard to push that this is a necessary clash of civilizations, that once your belief in Islam gets to a certain level of extreme, then you go to war against things that are good and beautiful.
And so we must defend ourselves from this Islamofascist caliphate juggernaut coming this way.
They are inherently, because of their religion, incompatible with the future existence of liberty and freedom in the world.
Seems like a lot of people really believe that.
And I was wondering if you know so much about the Muslim world, if you can address even degrees of truth in that or anything, please.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you set up a clash of civilizations, and you act, you impose policies that are based on the idea that we are in a clash of civilizations, you create a clash of civilizations.
So the radicalization in the Muslim world, and I want to emphatically say that the radicals, the hard-edged Islamists, represent a small percentage of the population.
But if you impose policies that alienate the broader populations, you do begin to set up a clash of civilizations.
I mean, one does not exist.
Despite everything that's happened in the last decade or despite American policies that were seen in the Muslim world as being anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, et cetera, et cetera, you still have broad support for or favorable attitudes toward the American people in the Muslim world.
Not American policy, but the American people.
And this is true of the public at large.
This is true of journalists.
I've written a number of books about US-Muslim world relations, but my newest book that literally is out coming in the stores this week is called The New Arab Journalist, Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil.
And it looks at the role that this Arab media revolution in the last decade or so and the role that media plays.
And media in the Arab world, we did a big survey of Arab journalists, and 75% of them said that they see their primary mission as being that of creating political and social change.
And while they had antipathy for US policy, the favorability ratings and how they felt toward the American people were very, very high.
We just replicated that in Pakistan, found exactly the same thing.
I have a piece going on, Columbia Journalism Review, cjr.org, today or tomorrow, about a similar survey we did in Indonesia, and we found the same thing.
So attitudes among the opinion drivers of the Muslim world, the journalists, are very pro-American people.
And we share, it's ironic that they see political and social changes as their primary goal.
Well, you know that, and democracy is at the top of the list, political rights, human rights, et cetera, all of which track what we say about US policy that we want to democracy and human rights.
And so there's broad levels of overlap.
The issue is when the rubber meets the road, is US policy actually doing what we say we're doing?
And are we communicating that well enough, or are we doing one thing and saying another?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it couldn't have escaped their notice that the autocracies were bent on overthrowing in the Middle East were the ones that we didn't already control.
Nobody except Lawrence Mirwak, maybe Richard Pearl, wanted to actually have a war against Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Those are our friendly puppet dictatorships.
We don't mess with them.
It's democracy.
We want democracy in Iraq because we don't like Saddam Hussein.
We want democracy in Syria because we don't like Assad.
But we have a huge opportunity now.
The Obama administration has a huge opportunity.
Obama, when he came into office, there was widespread rejoicing is too strong, but sympathy, good feelings in the Arab and broader Muslim worlds.
And he came in saying the right things.
One of the first interviews he gave when he arrived in office was with Al-Arabiya, a satellite channel in the Arab world.
He came to Cairo in June of 2006 and talked about the fact that he wants to rebuild relations, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, from the Arab world standpoint, the rubber never hit the road.
We never followed up on that in terms of policy.
But right now, there is a huge opportunity because the US can take the leadership of this inevitable wave of reform that we'll see in the Arab world.
I'm not saying we're going to dump over the dictatorships, dump over the allies tomorrow or anything like that.
There's real politics here.
But we have the opportunity to reach out to these forces of change and to work with the governments in the Arab world to begin the process of reform.
Because if you don't do that, we get left looking like we're going along for the ride against our better judgment.
And you end up with radicalization on the ground.
Right.
And as you say, there's so much overlap.
I mean, like John Kennedy said that one time, we all breathe the same air, look up at the same stars.
We're all people here.
Our interests aren't that different.
We can get along.
I believe that.
Absolutely.
All right, everybody.
That is Lawrence Pintak.
Find him at foreignpolicy.com and at pintak.com.
He's the founding dean of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communications at Washington State University.
Thank you.
