Certainly, however, journalists today can use hefty crash courses in Middle Eastern politics, culture and, most important, language. The absence of a functional knowledge of Arabic among most correspondents in the region is a handicap whose disastrous consequences have yet to be properly gauged. That’s where media should put their weight—not in altering the terminology in articles or translating Arabic terms more accurately. Such steps may be welcome, but they are also, at best, superficial remedies for the deeper problem of inadequate knowledge.

Having said that, knowledge is not enough to be a good foreign journalist in the Middle East. Common sense can be a useful antidote. As many alleged specialists have repeatedly shown in the United States, too much cultural sensitivity can be an obstacle to understanding, or highlighting, the unpleasant realities of the region. Hillel Fradkin worries about this in the case of Muslim journalists. I’m far less worried about them than I am about Western journalists or academics who inject their indignation or parochial dislikes into the debate over events in the Middle East. Most disturbing to me are those who will breezily use a liberal template to analyze and predict the behavior of Islamist groups that, both in their actions and rhetoric, openly express the most violent intentions.

From my own experiences here in Lebanon, for example, I’ve repeatedly found that the most perceptive, curious, and critical, even brutally critical, analysts of Hezbollah have been young Shiite journalists who don’t have a cultural chip on their shoulder when it comes to discussing the party.

In contrast, rare are the Western journalists or academics who apply a critical eye to Hezbollah (critical not in the sense of criticizing the party, but merely in evaluating, unpacking and analyzing its motives). Instead, many will assess Hezbollah on the basis of a deep-seated perception that Western states, particularly the United States, have historically behaved unjustly in the Middle East. In the shadow of such Western cruelty, even radical Islamists come out looking good—unfortunate victims of Western intolerance. In fact, there is a cottage industry manufacturing that particular tendency with respect to Hezbollah, whose devotees never bother to ask the easy question: Why it is that Western media outlets, which supposedly mirror a corporate culture innately hostile to justice and emancipation for Muslims, are so hopelessly fascinated by Hezbollah, to the detriment of other Lebanese subjects of equal importance?

For example, when was the last time you saw a report in a Western outlet on Lebanon’s Maronites—or at least one that didn’t use the word “fascist” to describe the community? When was the last time you read something on the transformation of the Sunnis in Beirut? Or about youth emigration from Lebanon? Trust me, probably never. But a Hezbollah story will sell in a second. So much for the perceived Western inclination to deny giving the party a voice. Rarely has an autocratic, armed, religious group been so well covered by the secular, democratic, largely pacifist West.

How does this relate to Philip Bennett’s argument? The real problem is that news editors will instinctively eliminate a wide variety of fascinating topics from Middle East coverage because these are deemed not important enough for a U.S. audience. Americans don’t understand the region not because there aren’t enough Muslims in newsrooms or because “hijab” has been mistranslated; they don’t understand it because (a) they usually don’t need to, and (b) media are selective in what they address.

I have no great illusions that things will soon change. As I noted earlier, it’s not up to media to offer us a syllabus on the Middle East. I believe in the functionality of news, and if most Americans don’t see a need to follow up on regional politics, then it might very well be useless to force the issue. But I also think that markets create themselves. Among the things that would help interest more readers is to push journalists to be better informed about what it is they’re writing about, to learn Arabic, which would forcibly expand the range of topics covered, and to get rid of that perennial sense of Western guilt that makes many of those writing about the Middle East hesitate to call a spade a spade.

Michael Young is a member of MESH.

Increasingly, we have come to realize that the Islamists themselves would rather just be called Muslims since, to their minds, they are merely professing true Islam. So while the demand for Muslim journalists to cover Islam is about the notion that only like can represent like, the business of the terminology is about not imposing external categories on those who are represented in scholarship and the media. Of course, if we were really to do that, we might as well throw out the social sciences altogether.

Politically, though, this has more to do with the intellectual effort to separate Hezbollah and Hamas from Al Qaeda. This is because Hamas and Hezbollah are (supposedly) social movements, whereas Al Qaeda is (supposedly) just a terrorist group. Having one term that puts them in the same category is a problem, since some in Washington would like to “engage” Hamas and Hezbollah.

In fact, even Al Qaeda has a social base, and Hezbollah and Hamas both practice terrorism. A real distinction is that Hezbollah and Hamas kill mostly Israelis, whereas Al Qaeda kills mostly Americans. But this does seem like a rather thin reed on which to rest an entirely different vocabulary of categorization. Hillel Fradkin is right: “They still retain enough in common to be describable with the same term,” with nuance to follow. If the media do ever jettison Islamism, the effect will be to privilege political considerations over analytical ones.

Martin Kramer is a member of MESH.