Word: arabism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...MAKE SURE PEOPLE AREN'T JUST TELLING YOU WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR? Right now, if we walked down [to the State Department's new media-monitoring unit], you'd see live what's happening on Arab TV. We have a young man who's watching the blogs, the Web chats. So when I walk in, I instantly can know what's being said. That unit publishes a daily rapid-response report. It goes to all the Cabinet Secretaries and all our ambassadors...
...Middle East today. In that sense, the crisis may also offer a useful if sobering glimpse of the raucous, religiously infused brand of democracy that is emerging in the Muslim world. Says Joseph Bahout, a professor of geopolitics at the National Foundation of Political Sciences in Paris: "The Arab world keeps hearing the U.S. speak of democracy as one size fits all--but they don't like the size the Americans wear...
...publishing them in the first place--media outlets in France, Germany and Spain ran some of the drawings in a defense of press freedom. Many Muslims say the republications exacerbated their belief that the cartoons' sole purpose was to humiliate them. Meanwhile, the most violent reactions in the Arab world came after a Copenhagen cleric appeared on al-Jazeera in late January and mentioned rumors that Danes planned to burn copies of the Koran in Copenhagen's City Hall Square. No copies were burned. In early February, almost three months after refusing to meet with the 11 Muslim ambassadors, Rasmussen...
...depiction of the Prophet blasphemous. But the Danish cartoons stirred outrage among moderate Muslims less because the cartoons depicted Muhammad than because of the way in which the Prophet was portrayed. "Eleven of the series were problematic but not outrageous," says Antoine Basbous, director of the Observatory of Arab Countries in Paris. The cartoon that showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, however, "was simply far beyond the pale. The direct link between him, and Islam, to terrorism acted like a bomb among Muslims...
That may be true. But why did it take so long to detonate? It's worth noting that reaction to the cartoons among Muslims in Europe and Asia, while negative, has been largely peaceful. In the Arab world, the cartoons were accessible as early as October, when three Egyptian magazines and a newspaper published them to call attention to what it perceived as a distorted Western view of Islam. No one noticed. "We attacked the cartoons and said that this deepens the culture clash and does not resolve it," says Adel Hamouda, 55, editor of al-Fagr, a liberal Cairo...