[New York Times] Frank H. Stewart - The BBC World Service plans to start an Arabic television service this fall. The BBC has been broadcasting in Arabic on the radio for more than 60 years and has a huge audience. But if the BBC's Arabic TV programs resemble its radio programs, then they will be just as anti-Western as anything that comes out of the Gulf, if not more so. They will serve to increase, rather than to diminish, tensions, hostilities and misunderstandings among nations. The authoritarian regimes and armed militants of the Arab world get sympathetic treatment on BBC Arabic. When a State Department representative referred to Syria as a dictatorship, his BBC interviewer immediately interrupted and reprimanded him. By contrast, the words and deeds of Western leaders, particularly the American president and the British prime minister, are subject to minute analysis, generally on the assumption that behind them lies a hidden and disreputable agenda. The writer is a professor in the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting scholar at New York University.
2007-03-16 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive