A View From Both Sides (Page 1 of 4)

A sociological theory called “the limits of empathy” suggests that human beings are only empathetic to other humans most like them. The theory further states that humans least like us in culture or background garner less compassion and less understanding.

Viewing a 60-inch projection screen in the main room of the University of Tennessee’s International House, around 50 people watched as bright-eyed Marine Corps media liaison Josh Rushing’s limits of empathy expanded.

The screen, flanked with the multihued flags of eight different nations, plays a scene from the 2004 documentary, Control Room. An earnest Rushing recounts scenes he saw on the Arabic network, Al-Jazeera.

“The night they showed the POWs and dead soldiers... it was powerful, because Americans won’t show those kinds of images. It made me sick to my stomach,” he told documentary makers.

In a stark moment of realization, Rushing then debates his feelings the previous night when Al-Jazeera showed images of the mass civilian casualties of U.S attacks in Iraq during the early stages of the war.

“I just saw people on the other side, and those people in the Al-Jazeera offices must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn’t bothered as much the night before,” he said earnestly. “It makes me hate war.”

Just two years after the on-screen epiphany, now ex-Marine Rushing is being called everything from  “traitor” to  “pawn” by mainstream American media for his gutsy decision to leave his 14-year military career—including his pension and healthcare—to become an on-air personality for the fledgling Al-Jazeera International network. The English-language broadcasting agency spawned from the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, which became infamous with the Bush administration for broadcasting images of war casualties from both sides of battle.

Though criticized for his decisions to leave his military duty and step into the media limelight, the 33-year-old Rushing is touring the U.S. to promote Al-Jazeera International and clear up some of the misconceptions about the Arabic news network, which has been labeled a “mouthpiece for Osama Bin Laden” and a group of “liars” by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration.

An unlikely celebrity

Al-Jazeera has a pretty incendiary reputation for its broadcast decisions. During the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the station has been almost universally derided for broadcasting footage of hostages, burning corpses, and the ravaged bodies of American contractors.

Al-Jazeera, however, has also given airtime to U.S. officials and their explanations of war tactics, Rushing said in a recent interview.

“It’s never an easy interview with these guys [as a U.S. military spokesman],” he said after the UT screening of Control Room on April 18. “But they were always eager to have us on.”

Rushing knows what it’s like to be under the hammer of an Al-Jazeera interview: As a press envoy under Gen. Tommy Franks at the U.S. Central Command media headquarters in Doha, Qatar, Rushing was chosen in what he called a “lottery” to handle Arabic press relations. One of these news agencies was Al-Jazeera.

“Just prior to the beginning of the war, six of us were chosen from CentCom to go on camera,” he said. “There was kind of an NFL draft, the Arabic media was the last and I was chosen to be their liaison.”

Within 24 hours, Rushing, who spoke very little Arabic and had undergone no formal Middle Eastern studies, became the “face of America to the Arab people.”

“I really cannot believe we did not put more strategic thought on who we put into that position,” Rushing said, laughing. “But I was the only guy on the planet to be inside the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and Al-Jazeera. It was a unique vantage point.”

It was at that point that Rushing began to realize the crux of the U.S. media’s failure in the Middle East: a lack of information access to the more progressive journalists at agencies like Al-Jazeera.