UMaine Students Debate Politics with Arab Counterparts in Egypt
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — The first of several live videoconference debates between a group of UMaine students and a group of Arab students at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, took on a tone of diplomacy as they discussed different views on the United States’ Middle East policies.
The April 21 videoconference, arranged by Prof. Bahman Baktiari, director of the UMaine International Affairs Program, was the inaugural teleconference for the new Collaborative Media Lab at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library.
Students in Orono and in Cairo faced off in real time on two large screens, one bearing the images of the Orono students, the other showing the classroom in Cairo.
Students were polite, but divided in their political views, which symbolized traditional disagreements over world politics and middle-east conflicts. Participants also argued within their own ranks about American interests in the Middle East, specifically Israel and Palestine and Iraq.
A common immediate Arab reaction on the street to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers, according to several Cairo students, was that many Arabs were pleased that the event represented a piercing of the perception that the United States is invulnerable. The American reaction of defiance after the Sept. 11 intensified “massive” Middle East anger toward the west, one Egyptian woman said.
Americans seem preoccupied with money and tax cuts, instead of the killing that happens on a daily basis in the Middle East, the woman said. The Sept. 11 attacks, another Arab woman said, was “just another (group of) people who are dying,” but when Americans die, “it’s such a big deal” compared with the death of someone in the Middle East.
Several Arab students, who expressed displeasure with unilateral U.S. support of Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, also said they did not trust the motives of the United States’ commitment to democracy to Iraq, even though establishing a democracy there would be positive, one acknowledged. “It’s impossible for us to really buy it, that they want democracy,” she told the UMaine students.
A UMaine student noted that there is great division among Americans over the nation’s foreign policy in the Middle East, and wondered if the Arab world differentiates between American people and American government.
An Egyptian student said that regardless of how the American people feel about the foreign policies of their government, “at the end of the day, it is this coming from the west to the east,” she said, referring to the turmoil for which many Arabs blame the United States.
Although there was little agreement in points of view, the discussion was productive, according to UMaine graduate student Nathan Burns, who served as a debate moderator.
“The cultural dialogue is good for both sides,” he says. “It’s good for both sides to actually sit across from each other and talk with real people.”
He hopes the dialogue will continue by email between the first session and the next, scheduled on April 28.
Baktiari says the students at American University in Cairo regularly videoconference with American students in any one of three universities here, University of Washington in Seattle, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California at Los Angeles. He hopes to make the University of Maine a member of the educational consortium, which he says “provides a unique opportunity for our students to participate in international student policy debates.”