The US loves listening to its Arab/Muslim 'reformers'. And they love telling the US just what it wants to hear.
Brian Whitaker
June 5, 2006 12:00 PM
For a long time now, I have been meaning to take a cool, reflective look at Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji. The ordeal of keeping calm long enough to write about them and avoiding serious damage to my blood pressure at the same time was mainly what prevented me.
Now, thankfully, someone else has done the job. There's a long essay about them in The Nation magazine and, considering the subject, its restrained tone is admirable.
Hirsi Ali and Manji ("the Muslim refusenik") are the most prominent among several "reformers" of Arab or Muslim origin lionised by the American media and in Britain by the likes of Melanie Phillips.
Editors and TV producers love 'em. Their strident views make for entertaining television and, of course, the things they say are generally what the US public wants to hear. The trouble is, their approach is so simplistic and confrontational and so insensitive towards the culture they are trying to change that it does more harm than good. Among ordinary Muslims - the people they are supposedly seeking to help - their credibility is virtually zero.
In the academic world, people like Hirsi Ali and Manji are known as "native informants", though Issandr el-Amrani of the Arabist blog has another term for them: "courageous reformist Arab personalities (CRAP).
Being a CRAP is quite lucrative - Manji reportedly charges $7,500 (£4,000)an hour for giving a talk. If you fancy joining them, there's a bit of advice here on how to do it. From a media point of view, it helps if you're a woman. And the latest female addition to the CRAP stable is Wafa Sultan, an ex-Syrian who shot to prominence as a result of some shrill remarks on al-Jazeera television that were then brought to an American audience via Memri.
It is the male native misinformants, however, whose advice is more often listened to by the Bush administration. Prominent among these are Fuad Ajami (an associate of Bernard Lewis, the neocons' favourite historian) and Iranian-born Amir Taheri. Last month Mr Taheri wrote an article saying the parliament in Tehran had passed a law that would require Christians, Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing: "Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red."
This, echoing the practices of Nazi Germany, was a classic piece of anti-Iranian propaganda - and sections of the media readily lapped it up. Unfortunately for them, the story was wrong.
Unfazed by that, less than a fortnight later, Taheri and Ajami trotted along to the White House to give President Bush their views on Iraq. White House spokesman Tony Snow described their meeting at a press conference:
full: <http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_whitaker/2006/06/native_misinformants.html>
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam