It has been a dizzying week trying to watch most of the speeches at the DNC while they are talked over by network anchors, then sliced and diced by their "best political teams." CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Company took center stage in the arena like sportscasters, while other network anchors reported from skyboxes, each offering his or her take on the performance of the speakers in a party-like atmosphere.
Arab media was no exception. Several Arab networks dispatched their best anchors to Denver to beam a sliver of American politics to more than 300 million viewers in the region.
"Will Obama end the nightmare that Bush created in the Middle East?" debated their own pundits and "best political teams" on television. Al Jazeera promised its viewers an in-depth coverage of the US election, but it always comes down to the Palestinian-Israeli litmus test. Arabs no longer question U.S. support to Israel. They no longer have illusions that a new American president would somehow do a 180 degree turn and change U.S. policies in their favor. Instead, they now measure things based on "how pro-Israel" the candidates are.
In the U.S., Obama's choice of Biden as a vice-presidential running mate was seen by some critics as tacit admission that he lacked sufficient experience in the area. Not in the Arab media. This was seen as a shrewd maneuver to woo American Jewish voters and pro-Israeli groups in the U.S.
Within minutes of last Saturday's announcement that Democratic senator and former presidential candidate Joe Biden would be Barack Obama's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, I started to receive emails linking to an interview Biden had on the Jewish cable television network Shalom TV in March 2007. The Senator from Delaware expressed strong support for Israel, calling it "the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East" and emphatically declaring that "you don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."
Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter's "no speech" at the DNC was a big story in the Arab press.
According to several Arab pundits, democrats were determined not to allow the former president to spoil their Denver party with talk of evenhanded policies in the Middle East. So, after a video of Carter's work helping to rebuild homes in Gulf Coast areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was screened, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, holding wife Rosalynn's hand, did a quick stroll on stage and waved without a word. Carter spoke at the 2004 convention. However, this was before the publication of his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and his subsequent claims that pro-Israel activists were trying to silence him and any efforts to debate U.S. support for the Jewish state.
"Did the self-proclaimed Zionist, Biden, pull the plug on Carter, or was it Obama?" argued an Egyptian analyst on the Iranian Arabic-speaking Al Alam TV. When asked about why he did not speak at the convention by Amy Goodman, Carter simply replied, "Well, I was on the program."
Jamal Dajani produces the Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV
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