By Manal Abdel Fattah
Ambassador Abdullah Al-Rahbi, Ambassador of the Sultanate of Oman to the Arab Republic of Egypt, and its Permanent Representative to the League of Arab States, participated in a symposium organized by the Cairo International Cultural Salon entitled “The Media Elite and Arab National Security.”
During the symposium, Ambassador Abdullah Al-Rahbi highlighted the relationship between media and national security. As one of the factors in achieving security at the national and Arab levels, reviewing many examples of the media role that constituted a tool for the destruction of countries during the past ten years, as well as in many Arab crises.
Regarding the current situation and the challenges it poses to Arab national security, Al-Rahbi said: “What we are witnessing today in occupied Palestine, especially in proud Gaza, is a genocidal crime in which the media contributed to the same extent as bullets, and the rhetoric of hatred with which the Israeli narrative is filled constitutes the largest part of Fuel for the fire that burns people, trees, and stones in the steadfast sector.”
Al-Rahbi added that the Israeli narrative uses misleading and incitement mechanisms whose structure indicates the role of Israeli laboratories in formulating them to achieve predetermined goals, especially in Western societies, and the first goal is to sustain blind official Western support for a package of crimes that include: collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the destruction of all components of life in Gaza. . The attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States of America were quickly brought into Israeli discourse, and the Israeli aggression was placed in the context of a vocabulary that has great influence in the West, such as the “war on terrorism” and confronting the “axis of evil.”
Al-Rahbi pointed out that the dark side of the potential uses of new media should not prevent us from taking a balanced view of its positive roles, which the war on Gaza reflected in the clearest way. The role of traditional media in both the East and West has indisputably declined, and influential bloggers here and there contributed to providing a “parallel media” that played a major role in mobilizing vast audiences in various parts of the world in support of Palestinian rights.
Al-Rahbi continued, “In the face of this major shift in the relative weight of the two distinct types of media, the loose, non-hierarchical nature of the structure of social media requires moving from the stage of restricting and issuing legislation that punishes more than it contributes to the maturity of the phenomenon, to the stage of crystallizing an ‘Arab code of honor’ that will be the nucleus.” A broader structure of ethical and professional traditions that make the work of Arab influencers constructive and consistent with the nation’s identity.”
The ambassador went on to say: “It is no exaggeration to say that social media can – in the future – succeed in achieving what traditional media has not succeeded in accomplishing with huge financial budgets, generous official sponsorship, and large bureaucratic structures. By that, I mean changing the equation of global media, where the flow path has remained for decades.” “Tawila – a unilateral path from north to south. The horizon is open with realistic reasons for optimism, and the desired fruit is great, and our success on this path depends first on balancing our values with media practices in which those responsible have true freedom of expression, in return for which they bear their moral responsibility.”
It is noteworthy that journalist Mohamed Hamida moderated the symposium, and Dr. Azza Fathi, Professor of Sociology at Ain Shams University, and an elite group of journalists and media professionals participated in it.
