Surprises take different forms. There are the events that one never thought would happen. Then there are those one did expect, sooner or later, although the timing itself was a surprise.
Mistaken descriptions have consequences- Ranier Fsadni
Identifying a surprise correctly is an important function of those employed to tell us the state of the world.
Unfortunately, many news reports on the recent killing of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi haven’t fulfilled that function properly.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got many things right in her public statements. The film was malevolent. Though there is plenty of evidence that the film-makers planned to provoke the kind of violence that did occur, that did not excuse the violence.
However, when Clinton stated that, like many Americans, she herself wondered how Stevens could have been killed in a country that he and the US befriended... at that point, she was spinning.
In the earliest days of the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi, it had been Clinton who had argued for careful consideration before the US gave the rebels its backing.
She pointed out that, in per capita terms, eastern Libya provided al-Qaeda with its largest pool of recruits. The fact that many had returned, and more were bound to return from places like Iraq and Afghanistan, was taken for granted.
The issue was whether the al-Qaeda link would persist. It is no coincidence that more foreign diplomats now posted to Malta, beginning with the current US Ambassador, have a background in security analysis.
So, for journalists to report the armed attack on US personnel in Benghazi as an “irony” is to go a step beyond the show of solidarity that the US deserves. It becomes collusion with spin.
That a US ambassador was so vulnerable is a shocking surprise. But the deadly hostility of certain factions in the Arab world to democratisation in general, and to the US (and Europe) in particular, is no surprise or irony.
For Clinton to spin the event is understandable. In an election year, questions are being raised about whether security was adequate. In a world of sound bites it’s not easy to explain how something may be a surprise in one sense but expected in another; how in taking the decision to back Libya’s rebels you knew it could result in more US body bags.
Politicians are in the business of trying to run the world, not explain it.
Journalists, on the other hand, are in the business of trying to report and explain it properly. When they don’t, they’re letting down their readers.
The problem goes deeper than the bad description of one event.
It has roots in the overexcited parallels of the Arab Spring with Europe’s 1989.
One of the big mismatches lay here: eastern Europe viewed the US, western Europe and Nato as allies; the Arab world has, at best, an ambivalent attitude.
Nato won the war for the Libyan rebels but in western Libya it also pushed many people fed up of Gaddafi’s rule over to his side, leading to internecine killings and grievances still active today.
It is not just bad analogies that are making it more difficult to know what’s going on and why.
When extremist, violent Muslim groups are described as ‘ultra-orthodox’ – as violent Salafists were described by an international agency this week– the impression is given that they are stricter Muslims than others.
In fact, all other Muslims consider them heterodox at best.
We don’t need to join the theological debates and take sides. It’s enough to be told that Salafists are disciples of marginal Islamic thinkers.
Calling Salafists ultra-orthodox is as misleading, in journalistic terms, as describing a Quran-burning pastor as an ultra-rigorous Christian.
Mistaken descriptions have consequences. They easily lead to a problem being located in Libyan ingratitude and to some supposedly inherent violence within Islam’s creed.
And if there’s popular misunderstanding of the dynamics of a region, politicians will find it more difficult to win support for difficult but necessary international decisions.
That difficulty is exacerbated by under-reportage.
Some of the online comments beneath the Malta reports on the killing of Stevens claimed to find no Muslim condemnations and regret.
Well, maybe that’s because we heard practically nothing in the local media on the public demonstrations in Libya condemning the attack (just as we didn’t hear about Facebook-organised demonstrations in Tripoli, Misrata and Benghazi, against the Salafist destruction of two popular shrines).
We also didn’t hear of the condemnations issued by such centres as the Al Azhar Mosque.
Such events do not change just the details. They change the very story in which we find ourselves entangled.
Getting the story right is about getting the hard-headed analysis right.
ranierfsadni@europe.com