Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Malcolm X once said, “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

The power of the media can be an incredibly liberating force, in stirring the collective conscience of its readers to do good in the world; unfortunately, in the hands of the glib and superficial, the power of the printed or electronically transmitted word can cause unspeakable suffering in the world—as we see today. More often than not, the media frequently perpetuates problems often for pecuniary gain, rather than fight for truth or integrity.

This past week or so, a remarkable story came out of the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, where a mysterious blogger criticized the Islamic faith; he wrote in his blogs that the God of Islam as having the attributes of a “primitive Bedouin.” Walid Husayin, age 26, added, Islam a “blind faith that grows and takes over people’s minds where there is irrationality and ignorance.” Walid’s success as a blogger was quite impressive: he attracted over 70,000 Arab visitors, who had no problem listening to a little bit of irreverent humor.

With the help of Facebook, they revealed the heretic, who may either be sentenced to death, or spend out the rest of his days in prison. One outspoken and liberal Palestinian commentator, Zainab Rashid of Ramallah, wrote in an online opinion piece that Husayin had made the important point that the authorities of the West Bank are sending a strong message that “criticizing religious texts for their (intellectual) weakness can only be combated by … oppression, prison and execution.” I can feel the ghost of Hans Christian Anderson tapping her shoulder, saying: “Have you read my short-story, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’?”

Who exactly is Zainab Rashid? In one interview with MEMRI, she explains, ”I am a Palestinian who experiences and endures the same things suffered by any Palestinian woman… The suffering [of the Palestinian woman] is two-fold: she lives in a chauvinistic society, which continues to treat women as immature and incompetent beings… and she suffers [both] from the occupation and from the rule [of the Palestinian Authority], whose methods, until some three years ago… resembled the methods of gangs rather than institutions…”

This is one brave woman, who is willing to risk her life to speak out for the oppressed of her society. She adds, “What exists is an Arab-Israeli conflict, not a struggle as the resistance front’s media continuously claims. The Arab dictatorships use this conflict… as a pretext [to avoid reform] whenever questions arise regarding democracy, pluralism, and government turnover. This is the truth, and there is much evidence to support it . . .” [2] One gets the impression that the media is more invested in maintaining the status of the Middle East conflict, rather than proclaim a struggling people’s new heroes and heroines who truly personify the voice of hope.

The fact that these oppressive regimes execute its “heretics” does not surprise me; but the fact that a Western media outlet like Facebook would fight to snuff out an individual’s right to dissent is abominable. We have a right to expect more from the media, and unless we challenge it to become a moral voice that values the voice of freedom of all people—we are guilty of complicity. We can do better than that, and so we should. Even Palestinian liberals are outraged at the extreme penalties being considered for this young son of a Muslim scholar. Impeding the flow of free ideas is not something Facebook should take great pride in; it has no business serving the interest of any State that oppresses the freedom of thought itself.

So what does this mean for the Palestinians? Sooner or later, more progressive voices within the Palestinian community will demand an end to their government’s corruption. In time new patriots will chart a different course for the Palestinian people based on a respect of human rights. The press has a moral imperative to give birth to this new kind of political reality.

In closing, Winston Churchill summed up in one epigram as to why Adolf Hitler amassed so much power, “The malice of the wicked was re-enforced by the weakness of the virtuous.” Martin Luther King, Jr’s words offer us guidance how to combat this problem: “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it. We must never feel that God will, through some breathtaking miracle or a wave of the hand, cast evil out of the world. As long as we believe this, we will pray unanswerable prayers and ask God to do things that he will never do. The belief that God will do everything for a man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself.”