If radio had headlines, then the overall message today would be ‘Fox News journalists freed; Hamas takes credit’, as New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark thanked the Palestinian National Authority for its help freeing Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and Kiwi-born cameraman Olaf Wiig. I don’t profess to know that much about the situation there, but I do know (admittedly via the mainstream media) that the New Zealand Government has a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, and that Hamas has said it knew the kidnappers and that it did not know the kidnappers. I began to wonder what was really happening.
   The journalists’ release was covered as a front-page news item in The Dominion Post—for a small country like New Zealand, it was Wiig’s welfare, not Centanni’s, that kept the kidnapping on Kiwis’ consciences. Fox News’s connection was downplayed, but Wiig’s wife’s attempts to negotiate with various politicians were covered reasonably heavily—English-born Anita McNaught was a fixture on New Zealand network news programmes for years.
   Missing from the National Radio broadcast this evening was the fact that Wiig and Centanni had been forced to convert to Islam, at gunpoint.
   I’m delighted these two gentlemen have been freed. I can’t comment too much about the media coverage, other than to point out what I see as contradictions.
   I am a simple man when it comes to the Palestinian militants’ situation. I had read that a Hamas faction (the Holy Jihad Brigades) was behind the kidnappings, which suggests to me that Hamas did, in fact, know of the kidnappers’ identity. I also understand them to be part of the Fatah movement, according to Time, but when I watched the Palestinian elections, Hamas and Fatah were rival parties. Were these kidnappers members of both?
   Meanwhile, Hamas is split into both a political and terrorist wing—at least that is the impression I get living in the west, much like Sinn Fein and the IRA. If Prime Minister Clark says that her position is never to negotiate with terrorists, does Hamas count, with all its terror acts since 1987? And did Israel have any part in the release—a country which New Zealand actually recognizes?
   Maybe I am an overly trusting coot, but it’s likely that everyone who has commented on the situation was telling the truth. Maybe the Palestinian Interior Minister, Saeed Seyam, had no knowledge of the kidnappers, or inside connections with Fatah. But that other officials inside Hamas did. Having met the Prime Minister here, I can see her biases, but that she would not thank the Palestinian Authority if there were not a legitimate reason for doing so.
   Which brings me to my point. Even in the media, it is so very convenient to brand one side the good guys and the other side the bad guys. The truth is usually way too complex, and till one corresponds with people from the region—on both sides of the conflict—we can only claim to know the situation in a cursory way.
   Would I be on my high horse branding one bunch ‘terrorists’ if my country were occupied, and my people denied basic rights of citizenship? I am bringing an occidental viewpoint that I got through studying international law at university—but I also grew up with stories of how Chinese guerrillas fought the Japanese using tactics that were unconventional at best. So if these Hamas militants were of my own race, would I go and call them freedom-fighters?
   Maybe, maybe not. Japanese civilians never got into China during the Sino–Japanese war—we only had to fight the military. Had they advanced that far, would we have succumbed to killing civilians? For I do not believe we are any better as people—Mao Tse-tung managed to kill 70 million of us through his sicko policies. Who needs the Japanese army to commit mass murder?
   To keep things simple, the media—the MSM and other outlets—will give one side the black hats and the other side the white ones. Israel has been portrayed as overreacting militants in the New Zealand media over the 32-day conflict with Hezbollah; and Amnesty International statements against the Israeli army have managed to make the network news headlines here in prime-time. It is a different story in the United States.
   Here, anchorman Mike McRoberts interviewed a Hezbollah leader, while John Campbell—fairly liberal in his Campbell Live show—took strong issue with the Israeli position on TV3 in the earlier days of the conflict.
   We never really heard a position where the Israelis had white hats, or one where both sides wore grey.
   I was little the wiser till I asked a new Lebanese acquaintance of the situation—he is still there, incidentally—and the real story of the different groups has yet to be told by our media. But it is not as simple as black hats and white hats.
   And when we come to the capture of Centanni and Wiig, in another part of the Middle East, it is too easy to put a black hat on Hamas, branding all of them terrorists.
   But it remains tempting to do so with occidental eyes, and even oriental ones, because we haven’t been occupied to this degree. I realize Hamas has set up extensive welfare programmes in its neck of the woods, but on the other hand, it hasn’t dropped its anti-Semitic rhetoric. And if this year is indeed part of a period of tahdia, then these kidnappings serve to remind us that the situation is far from calm.
   Since I am a simple man, with little real understanding of these issues, the news has left me dissatisfied. Surely there is more? Maybe the TV news tonight will reveal more. But the black hat–white hat model is hard to break away from, and that is what the media will serve up.
   Throw away the hats. I think we are smart enough to take the complexity. On television today, we see not McCloud or The Streets of San Francisco, where we know who the bad guys and the good guys are. On TV are dramas like 24. It is no longer clear who the heroes are. The news media need to understand that if we can follow Jack Bauer and his exploits, then we can follow the different sides in these conflicts.
   News should not be about branding people and creating sides. News can distil the issues into easy-to-comprehend chunks, which is just what the likes of 60 Minutes and Campbell Live are meant to do with their longer running times. Sadly, even there, as Rathergate showed, some journalists still want to make the news, and not report it.

Which brings me on to branding. What? As a footnote, Hamas does have a real problem communicating what it is about. Little wonder that we foreigners are confused.
   Obviously, Hamas was able to bring this kidnapping to a peaceful end. Negotiations would have taken place, probably about how the ruling party would look after the interests of the faction, the Holy Jihad Brigades. That strikes me as Hamas’s brand not being communicated clearly enough at the outset, especially when it won the Palestinian elections, creating disaffection. Someone was evidently hard done by, or felt that the spoils of political power didn’t get to him.
   If the brand were clear, then Hamas could unite all factions, in an ideal situation. This would make an interesting project—we have gone on about nation branding in this blog, so how about creating a new vision and direction for a group that wants to be seen as legitimate, despite its terrorist origins and alleged funding from Iran? What would such a project reveal? Would it actually get the group to a point where it no longer needed funding from a state sponsor of terrorism, and find it via more legitimate means; and then could that brand not influence the overall image of the Palestinian terrorities, and strengthen its tourism, enterprise and individual liberties? It could be a tempting goal, the grounds for a new beginning and a new confidence for the Palestinian people—another small step in delivering independence from Israel.
   This may be as controversial as the times I have tried to simplify al-Qaeda and turned it into a virtual organization with an overarching brand. But at least I cannot go as daft as rebranding the war on terror. That deserves a blog post all its own. Posted by Jack Yan, 05:55  permalink

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