THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 25 l WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2017
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Political Science Professor Speaks on Protest Politics Ariana Lee ’20 Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Faith Wen ‘20
Lebanese journalist and senior lecturer Zahera Harb spoke on the flaws in British and American media coverage of Arabs and Muslims on Monday, April 17.
Journalist Analyzes Islam in Media Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor Zahera Harb, a senior lecturer of international journalism at City, University of London, gave a talk titled “Reporting Muslims and Arabs in Anglo-American Media” on Monday, April 17. Harb worked for Lebanese and international media organizations and was a producer and news anchor of a number of Lebanese broadcast programs before becoming a review editor for the Journal of Media Practice. She has also worked on several political and social documentaries and reported for BBC Arabic and CNN World Report. Harb began by discussing the ways in which media representations of Islam and Muslims have been reductive. “Muslims are homogenized as backward, irrational, unchanging, fundamentalists, threatening and manipulative in the use of their faith for political reasons,” she said. For many British and American journalists, Harb said that “Arab” equates to “Muslim,” and to use either word in a story presents readers with a set of preconceived, mostly negative stereotypes. After the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, “Islam was used to demonize enemies,” she said. After the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, the BBC incorrectly called Egyptian Waleed Abed El Razeq one of the perpetrators after French magazine Le Point reported that his passport was found near the site of a bombing. Twitter went viral with
hoaxes as he was lying critically injured in the hospital, Harb said, until the Egyptian ambassador said the French police had filed no charges against Razeq. “BBC … admitted that they took Le Point’s statement as fact, face value, without verifying with police before broadcasting,” Harb said. “Just because an Egyptian passport was found at the scene, it was automatically assumed and taken for granted by BBC reporters, who usually in their everyday work have to verify their information with three different sources before broadcast.” Harb also discussed an instance in November of 2015 when The Sun, a UK newspaper, published on its front page the headline “1 in 5 Brits Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis.” Harb said that The Sun, which contracted a separate company to conduct the survey, had interpreted the survey results for its own gain. “Even the people who conducted the survey said, ‘We did not ask about sympathy with ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]. We did not ask about sympathy with jihadis. We asked about sympathy with those fighting against the Assad regime in Syria,’” Harb said. A lack of context, either on purpose or out of ignorance, is a common feature of Anglo-American reporting on Muslims, said Harb. She concluded by emphasizing that journalistic texts are products of a variety of cultural, social and political factors. Many Anglo-American jour-
nalists, however, often apply their own personal perceptions of Muslims and the Arab world in their coverage. “The urge to rush to publish or broadcast makes them omit context,” she said. “Lack of specialized knowledge makes it easier for many to actually retreat in their coverage to preconceived concepts and understanding of the ‘other’ — and, in this case, Arab Muslims.” A Q&A session followed, during which students asked about the role of law in holding journalists accountable and Hollywood’s negative portrayals of Arabs. The talk was sponsored by the Middle Eastern Students and Studies Association (MESSA), the Five College Lecture Fund and the Department of Religion. MESSA Co-President Mohamed Ramy ’18, who attended the talk and helped organize the event, appreciated Harb’s analysis of the way media often overgeneralize Arabs and Muslims. “In the Arab world, we have 28 different states that are insanely different, that want different things from different countries, that have different stances on Israel — one of the falsehoods is that all Arabs are against Israel,” Ramy said. “I think journalism ... is consistently and tragically missing all the nuances that pertain to the Arab people as individuals ... [Harb] really highlighted it well when she was discussing how you can devise a statistic basically to sell your own version of truth.”
Manuel Barcia Discusses ‘White Cannibalism’
Isabel Tessier ’19 Managing News Editor
Atlantic and Slavery Studies Professor Manuel Barcia gave a talk at the college titled “White Cannibalism in the Slave Trade” on Monday, April 17 in Pruyne Lecture Hall. Barcia is a Latin American history professor at the University of Leeds in England and current visiting fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Barcia has also written for publications such as Al Jazeera English, The
Independent and The Huffington Post. His academic focus is on slave resistance and rebellion in Brazil and Cuba. In his talk, Barcia examined the story of the Portuguese slave-trading ship “Arrogante,” which was captured by British forces off the coast of Cuba with more than 330 African slaves aboard in 1837 after the slave trade and slavery had been abolished by Portugal. After being freed, many former slaves reported that while at sea, the Portuguese sailors had killed an enslaved man, cooked him and served the meat to them. They also accused the sailors of eating the man’s
heart and liver. Local British authorities investigated, but the sailors were never found guilty. “[Cannibalism] has consistently been considered as a marker for so-called ‘uncivilized people,’” Barcia said. “By focusing on the events of a slave ship, it is possible to offer ... a reversal of roles, one in which the Europeans appear as flesh-eating savages and the Africans as the civilized party.” After discussing accounts of violent and inhumane treatments by the Portuguese sailors
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Nikita Dhawan, a professor of political science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, spoke on the importance of social movements for transnational justice and the role of protest politics in a talk titled “Death of Leviathan: Protest Politics and State Phobia” on Wednesday, April 12. Manuela Picq introduced Dhawan as a friend and talked about the conversations she and Dhawan frequently have about the state, which is, according to Picq, “something that is growing in the United States in the Trump era.” Dhawan began her talk by noting how the world has become more interconnected and international due to globalization. Because of this, issues from “business to agriculture, from human rights to the relief of famine, call our imagination to venture beyond narrow group loyalties and to consider the reality of distant lives,” Dhawan said. She referred to theorists of cosmopolitanism — the theory that human beings belong to a single community with shared morality — who “argue that suffering elsewhere affects us. It is also our responsibility and our duty to, in a certain way, be accountable to the pain of others,” Dhawan said. “Cosmopolitanism is an antidote to apathy and indifference by realizing that we are not immune to the pain of others,” she said. Dhawan also discussed the power of street protests in the last few decades. These types of protests, she noted, “seem to have transformed the way power, agency and resistance are being perceived and performed.” “There is this idea that street politics in a certain way embody counterpublic spheres, where groups and collectivities who did not have access to public spheres now have access to political legitimacy,” she continued, mentioning groups such as queer people and women. “Here I draw on Foucault who says [that] where there is power, there is resistance,” Dhawan said. “I would add to Foucault and say where there is resistance, there is power.” Following her talk about protest and the state, Dhawan showed a short clip about a case that involved the rape and fatal assault of a woman on a bus in New Delhi, India in 2012. “The Delhi gang rape case incited spontaneous nationwide protest against sexual violence and the abysmal failure of the state to ensure the safety of its female citizens,” Dhawan said. She continued, “When I first saw images of these protests, I was extremely excited and empowered about the role of the civil society in addressing … the silence on sexual violence in India. [However], a few weeks later … I found out that parallel to the Delhi gang rape, 19 [Untouchable] women were raped in the neighboring state … and this was not even reported in the national media.” “Untouchables” are people in the lowest caste of India’s caste system. They still face discrimination despite such treatment being illegal. “This demonstrates the point I was trying to make earlier — how subordinate groups are marginalized by both the state as well as civil
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