The Arab media has presented the latest hostage crisis in Iraq as just another element in the bloody and chaotic pattern of violence in the country. The latest developments have been reported and often broken on Arab television channels, but they have soon been superseded by bloodshed elsewhere in Iraq or in the Palestinian territories and Israel. There has been little sign of the outrage that greeted the kidnapping of two French hostages last month and none of the soul-searching prompted by the Beslan siege.
The issue of foreign hostages in Iraq was examined this week on the most heated discussion programme on the Middle East's most-watched television station, al-Jazeera. In the programme The Opposite Direction a fiercely anti-American political analyst, Talat Rumayh, faced off against an Iraqi politician, Karim Badr. Mr Rumayh claimed that the kidnappers were Iraqi resistance fighters and compared the number of their victims to the thousands of Iraqis, who had been killed: "Two thousand people have been killed since the beginning of the attack on Falluja, which was dismissed in one report, one line or just a couple of words... while we keep hearing about the hostages. It's the hostages and the terrorists, always the terrorists," he said.
Karim Badr responded by saying all Iraq was disgraced by the beheadings. "We have to prove our humanity. I am addressing my brethren in Iraq: These are masked creatures that resemble humans, who I am certain are uglier than their deeds," he said. "Is the killing of people and exploding cars in the streets an act of resistance? Is the kidnapping and murder of people in this manner an act of resistance? I am certain they do not represent the Iraqi conscience in any way at all." |