JEDDAH, 12 February 2006 — Foreign media experts urged yesterday at the Jeddah Economic Forum (JEF), the importance of having stronger Arab media participation in the West in order to eliminate culture misunderstandings.
“If you don’t come and show your part of the story, don’t expect others to do it for you,” said Lawrence Wright, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Wright was speaking at a session entitled “The Middle East in the American Media”. Key speakers also included David Andelman, executive editor at Forbes Magazine, and Fatina Salaheddine, CEO, Al-Sahafa Ohio Newspaper.
Wright said there is a need for a culture dialogue between the West and the Middle East. Wright stressed the importance of objective writing in the two cultures.
Wright said that the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia, has no movie industry to help exposing its culture. There is also a lack of novelists writing about Arab issues in the West.
Regarding the controversy surrounding the cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that were published in Europe and elsewhere, Wright said that this illustrates the potential danger of humor. He added that the West should be sensitive to Muslim sensibility and likewise the Muslims should to be more restrained and cautious with their reactions.
“We have to allow room for different religious beliefs, without that we’ll go back to the time of the bloody crusades,” said Wright.
He highlighted that since 9-11, the West has garnered more knowledge about differences among countries in the Middle East.
Andelman stressed the importance of having a regular dialogue to create a better understanding between the West and the Arab Muslim world. “If we don’t have journalists on both sides reporting on what happens, on how people are living on both sides, no one will understand each other,” he said. “The cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammed certainly do not reflect what most people in the Christian and the Jewish communities feel about the Arabs and the Muslim world.”