Who the Hell is Murtada Faraj?
The reporting of a minor anti-US, anti-Israel demonstration in Baghdad, orchestrated August 4 by America’s long-time enemy Moqtada al-Sadr, provides an excellent window into how the anti-war press manipulates public opinion.
On August 4, 2006, Murtada Faraj, a “writer for the Associated Press,” reported:
Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting “Death to Israel’ and “Death to America” marched through the streets of Baghdad’s biggest Shiite district Friday in a show of support for Hezbollah militants battling Israeli troops in Lebanon… The demonstration was the biggest in the Middle East in support of Hezbollah since the Israeli army launched an offensive July 12 after a guerilla raid on northern Israel.
The rest of the article deals with the specifics of the demonstration: the ritual burnings of U.S. and Israeli flags, the pledges of martyrdom by day laborers, etcetera.
Googling the article, one finds that it became the basis for literally hundreds of other news stories in print and on websites, not only in the United States, but internationally. The August 4th demonstration entered the public debate on Iraq in precisely the terms that the Associated Press reported it.
The same day, the Public Affairs office of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq (MNC-I), issued a contrasting statement. It read:
BAGHDAD – Based on imagery, an estimated 14,000 Iraqi citizens gathered in Baghdad’s Sadr City today in a peaceful demonstration to show support for Lebanon. The crowd marched through the streets of northeast Baghdad to Al Firdos Square, while 6th Iraqi Army Division soldiers and the Iraqi National Police provided security. There were no reports of violence or injuries during the demonstration.
Now, there’s quite a difference between “hundreds of thousands” and “14,000” – between a large neighborhood demonstration orchestrated by Muqtada al-Sadr, and “the biggest [demonstration] in the Middle East.”
How did other news organizations report this?
Reuters reported, “State television said a million people had gathered for the rally, but this could not be independently confirmed.”
Beneath the headline “Shiite Rally in Baghdad Supports Hezbollah,” New York Times reporter Damien Cave wrote:
Tens of thousands of followers of the Shiite cleric Moktaka al-Sadr rallied in support of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah on Friday, denouncing Israel and the United States for ingniting violence throughout the Middle East.
According to the NYT, “The peaceful, highly organized show of force by Mr. Sadr – who called for the rally earlier this week – started near a mosque after Friday Prayer, when Muslims typically gather in large numbers.”
Cave returns later to question of numbers:
Mr. Sadr’s organization claimed that a million people had attended; the United States military said it had counted 14,000.
Fourteen thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, one million….
What are we to infer from these conflicting descriptions of this demonstration? Was it a mass uprising against the U.S.-led coalition, or a minor, highly-orchestrated neighborhood event staged by a faction of Iraq’s Shi’ite community?
The only press release that describes its method for estimating crowd size is that the of the MNC-I. The military observers used aerial photography to assess the crowd size.
In “Protests and mobilizations: how do we know how big they are?”, Michael Alverez describes the science of crowd estimation:
The basic approach involves only two simple numbers: an estimate of the square footage of the space occupied by the protesters and the density of the protesters… If you have these two numbers, you just divide the square footage by the density and you have an estimate (without any confidence intervals!) of the size of the protest. The trick is estimating the density… [T]here are some common estimates that are used: for densely packed crowds, it is estimated that each person occupies about 2.5 square feet; in moderately-dense crowds that each person occupies 5 square feet; and in very loosely packed crowds that each person occupies 10 square feet.
An aerial photo of the demonstration yields the square footage more accurately than any reporter on the scene can hope to achieve. The density should be roughly calculable from a good aerial photo – but the range of variability might explain the difference between a crowd estimate of 14,000 and one of “tens of thousands”. However, differing estimates of density do not reconcile the MNC-Iraq’s 14,000 with Faraj’s “hundreds of thousands.”
The claim of “a million demonstrators” is sourced in the New York Times: it comes from the al-Sadr camp – i.e., the group that organized the protest. For readers who believe that protest organizers are a reliable source for crowd size, DD suggests that you read “Michelle Goldberg’s “The protest-crowd numbers game” in Salon.
Now, Damien Cave is a known entity in American journalism. An obvious liberal, he is not without his critics. (see: The Blue State Conservatives — TBSC – edited by Brian Scott)
Nonetheless, Cave’s description of the August 4th protest in Baghdad is certainly more nuanced than that from “Associated Press writer Murtada Faraj.” Cave chronicles the orchestrated nature of the protest, the circumscribed area in which it occurred, and its limited turnout, as well as the strident anti-American rhetoric of al Sadr’s followers.
But if you google these articles, you see immediately which had the greater impact. “Associated Press writer” Murtada Faraj was cited everywhere on the subject of the August 4th protest, Cave rarely. And the one organization that claimed a scientific basis for its estimate – the MNC-Iraq – was ignored.
For example: Faraj was quoted on left-wing web sites like The Huffington Post and Salon; on the network web pages of CBS and ABC, and in innumerable MSM papers – for instance, the Seattle Times and the Chicago Sun-Times. But you also found Faraj cited word-for-word in conservative-leaning sources like the New York Post, Forbes.com, and freerepublic.com
The across-the-board acceptance of Faraj’s account of anti-American mass protests among Iraq’s Shiia is a total win for the anti-war movement. It implies that regardless the weight they attach to the threat of Islamo-fascism, the Left and the Right must agree that our attempts to win friends in Iraq are useless.
But this is a damned lie.
DD has a number of questions regarding Mr. Faraj..
First what is the basis of his claim of “hundreds of thousands” of protesters – a number confirmed by no other on-site source.
Second, what is the basis of his assertion that the August 4th protest was the largest such protest in the Arab world? This is a sweeping claim. By MNC-Iraq’s calculations, al-Sadr’s pea-sized crowd was about a half of that generated by the May 6th “Romania Day” celebration in New York City.
Either Faraj is overstating things a tad, or the organized protests in Tehran, Cairo and Damascus weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
Third: Who the hell is “Associated Press writer” Murtada Faraj?
A computer search on “Murtada Faraj” yields hundreds of references to the Aug. 4th article. But beyond that, it yields virtually nothing. DD found one other Faraj article: a story about an al Qaeda bombing in Bagdad, published in April, 2005, in the Seseret News of Salt Lake City.
Otherwise, DD could find nothing on Faraj – no books, no biographical info, and no other articles.
By contrast, a computer search on “Damien Cave” yields dozens of articles, many of them on Iraq. Damien Cave is a well-known, and extensively published, journalist of the Left.
Who is Murtada Faraj, this one article-per-year wonder? What does he do for a living? Is he stringer, or a trained journalist? What is his relationship to the Associated Press?
And why is his unsourced account of the August 4th crowd size assumed to be authoritative?
Finally, DD has a question for the MSM:
Why was the first-hand MNC-Iraq account of the August 4th protest ubiquitously ignored?