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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

WAR OF IDEAS: SCORE ANOTHER ONE FOR THE BAD GUYS
JAN 3, 2007 - 10:05AM PDT
Posted by Lawrence Pintak
All posts by this author

(Cairo) Sunni-Shia power politics and U.S.-Egyptian relations have come head-to-head in a dispute over a satellite television station that is the latest weapon in the arsenal of Iraq’s insurgents. Al-Zawraa, a television version of the now-infamous jihadi websites, is being broadcast across the Arab world by Nilesat, a satellite provider answerable to the Egyptian government. The Iraqi station features non-stop scenes of U.S. troops being picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and targeted by missiles. "We find the channel utterly offensive," said one U.S. diplomat. Getting the Egyptians to pull the plug is “at the top of our agenda.” But the Egyptian government insists it’s all just business. “For us, it means nothing,” Egyptian Information Minister Anas el-Fiki told me. “It is a channel that reserved an allocation on Nilesat. They had a contract, paid the fees. There is nothing political for Nilesat. It’s pure business. We have no concern what the channel is doing.” But, as is often the case in the Middle East, much more is going on beneath the surface. The diplomatic tug-of-war over the station comes as Sunni Arab governments in the region, increasingly worried about a resurgent Iran, are more overtly lining up behind Iraq’s Sunni minority. Just last month, a Saudi close to his government wrote in the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia would take steps “to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.” Those militias have something in common with the U.S. and Iraqi governments; they, too, want the Egyptians to pull the plug on al-Zawraa, which laces its anti-American programming with attacks on the Shiites. In one montage, the Iranian flag is superimposed over the faces of Iraqi Shiite leaders – including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Graphic “crawls” at the bottom of the screen contain such messages as, “The natural place for criminals and thieves is with the mafia of Muqtada Al Sadr,” a reference to the most militant Shiite militia leader. El-Fiki says Egypt received “a warning from certain Iraqis” that if they don’t stop broadcasting al-Zawraa, the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Baghdad will be attacked. “We don’t accept this type of warning,” he insists. “In other words,” I asked the information minister, “even if you wanted to shut it down, you wouldn’t because it would look like you were backing down?” “Exactly.” Despite Egyptian protestations that there is nothing political about their involvement, Cairo is doing more than just re-transmitting al-Zawraa’s signal. In early November, around the time Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, the station shifted from pushing a hard-line Sunni political message to serving as an overt arm of the Islamic Army of Iraq, said to be dominated by former Baathists. Using a mobile transmitter, it began playing a cat-and-mouse game with Iraqi and U.S. military authorities. In mid-December, according to Nilesat chief Salah Hamza, the signal went dead. Since then, the Egyptian satellite company has been retransmitting the same few hours of tape at the request of al-Zawraa officials. “They asked us, please…... FULL TEXT
 
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