Matthew Cassel, assistant editor of Electronic Intifada, has recently been reporting from Egypt where he witnessed first hand the revolutionary upsurge that toppled the Mubarak dictatorship and continues to reshape the region.
Cassel will be speaking at the Resistance Conference May 6th - 8th, Redfern Community Centre, Sydney. For more information or to register visit: www.resistance.org.au/conference2011.
Resistance activist Patrick Harrison spoke to Cassel about his experiences and the revolutionary movements in the Middle East.
What inspired you to become a freelance journalist and travel the Middle East?
I never planned to be a journalist based in the Middle East. It all happened after I visited occupied Palestine for the first time in 2003.
I had been somewhat familiar with the news coming out of the region during the 1990s and at the start of the uprising or intifada in 2000, but the situation was usually only portrayed through incidents of extreme violence and never with any real context.
What we didn't see were the roots of the conflict, like the millions of Palestinian refugees forced from their lands decades ago, or Israel's occupation that is violently oppressive toward every Palestinian forced to live under it. It all changed when I crossed my first checkpoint.
There I saw the young Israeli soldiers, armed with machine guns and other weapons, controlling Palestinian civilians — old, young, men, women — and treating them as less than human.
It was then I understood how inaccurately our media in the US is portraying the situation in Palestine, and so I began to write about it.
First I wrote to friends who, like me, were shocked to learn about something other than suicide bombings. Many had no idea that it was Palestinians living under occupation and not the other way around.
Then I began writing and photographing for independent media like The Electronic Intifada.
Do you feel you've been able to increase awareness about the region's conflicts and issues? What barriers exist that prevent such voices from being heard?
When I was planning one of my trips to Palestine I got in touch with a mainstream US newspaper about photographing for them when I arrived. I sent them my portfolio and they expressed interest in working with me.
Soon after a positive first meeting, one of the photo editors contacted me and told me that he had googled my name and found that I was critical of Israel's occupation and treatment of Palestinians.
I didn't deny that I was, but reassured him that as a journalist and photographer my main priority is to provide an accurate image of what's happening on the ground.
He responded that because of the "controversial" nature of the situation, he didn't think the paper could use my images since a reader might see my name and complain to the paper that its photographer is biased.
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times has a son serving as an occupying soldier in the Israeli army, but that's all completely kosher for US media.
Like anywhere, and not just in the Middle East, the mainstream media is often filled with the narratives of the powerful and the elite. I prefer to find out what's happening on the ground, and how politics and wars are affecting the poor and oppressed.
That is why I've seen it as essential to my work that I speak Arabic. I'm able to travel on my own and go to places where you won't find many English speakers and spend time with folks and get to know about their struggle. It's those people who I try to represent in my work.
This work has definitely increased awareness because it's not the typical coverage that most people get from mainstream media outlets. So, even if a handful of people are reading my work compared to millions in the New York Times, I'm fine with that.
The truth is contagious — once you start putting it out there, it's going to spread. And this is what has been happening with the emergence of alternative and social media in recent years.
How much do you think the political climate of the Middle East has shifted in the past few months, and what role has alternative and social media played in the uprisings?
People are no longer as scared as they once were living under their brutally oppressive autocratic governments. People have risen up to demand their rights, and to everyone's surprise actually won some of them.
It's an incredible display of people power, the most recent wave of which began in Tunisia, and has inspired not only other Arabs, but movements around the world. It's an ongoing process though, this is only the beginning.
The alternative and social media have certainly played a crucial role. To quote George Orwell: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
The despots who have been overthrown thus far, and the others who have heard calls for their ouster from their people, have long tried to control the media and keep their populations ignorant to the real issues.
This is not unlike the US and Europe, where we don't have dictatorships in the same way, but we certainly have deceitful media.
Alternative sites, blogs, and social media like Twitter and Facebook, provide platforms for people to tell the truth and thus perform a revolutionary act. But this is only one act and a revolution takes many.
People taking to the street en masse, unfearful of state repression and calling for the government's overthrow is also a revolutionary act. The alternative and social media aren't doing it alone, but they have definitely become a revolutionary tool.
Describe your experience on the ground in the middle of the Egyptian revolution and the period afterwards. What has been the political impact of the uprising?
The Mubarak regime spread propaganda through its media that foreigners were somehow behind the uprising. The regime also blocked networks like Al Jazeera, so most people only had access to either state media, or other Arabic media sympathetic to Mubarak's regime that wasn't blocked.
But many people bought into the propaganda and the government's lies, and it was quite dangerous being a foreigner during the revolution in Egypt. It was hard for us to travel elsewhere outside Cairo, so that's where most of us stayed.
The now famous protest at Tahrir Square was for the most part incredibly welcoming to foreigners and especially foreign journalists.
Much has changed in Egypt. Three decades of the Mubarak dictatorship is over, that's huge. People on their own made it happen.
Democracy has become something tangible in Egypt, and it's not only felt by activists who have been protesting for years, but also by workers and other Egyptians who would've never considered themselves politically involved. That's also pretty incredible, and not something I would say is felt by many Americans.
But Egypt is not in a post-revolutionary state yet, the revolution is ongoing. And that's why we're seeing continued protests in Cairo and elsewhere to protect the revolution and be sure that the country doesn't return to how it was under Mubarak.
In some ways the army, which took over control after Mubarak left, has been more repressive than Mubarak's security forces were. But people are resisting, and it's important to keep a close eye on what happens next.
The campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel has recently taken off in Australia, and it's already incurred the condemnation of the corporate media. Do you think the BDS campaign is actually having an effect on Israel, either economically, politically or socially?
BDS has proven to be an effective tactic used against Israel's occupation and other unjust policies towards Palestinians and other Arabs. It's hard to gauge the exact impact of this movement, but if nothing else it has re-energized Palestine solidarity activism and given activists around the world practical targets for their campaigns.
Artists are canceling shows in Israel, Israeli products are being removed from shelves around the world, and Israelis themselves in violation of the BDS call are finding it increasingly difficult to take part in events and collaborate with groups and individuals outside Israel.
All of this is putting pressure on Israel to end its occupation and recognize the rights of the Palestinian people.
What do you see as the relationship between grassroots activism, like the BDS campaign, and alternative and social media in challenging the narratives of the powerful?
The powerful keep themselves that way by keeping the majority of people down. They do this through a number of different ways, one of them is by hiding the truth.
When the people rose up in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and other places, some of the first targets of state repression were journalists and media outlets, including social and alternative media.
It's the same in the US with Bradley Manning, the brave young soldier who is suspected of being behind the millions of embassy cables leaked to WikiLeaks, and who is now being tortured in prison.
The powerful need to keep people ignorant of the real issues that concern them, and using alternative and social media outside of their control is one way of resisting.