Conference

The conference aimed at examining the boundaries of free speech in the growing divide between the Western and the Muslim world. As a geographical crossroads within these dynamics, Israel provided the ideal site for debating and exploring these urgent questions. It brought together for the first time leading Palestinian, Israeli and German journalists, foreign correspondents, editors, webloggers and media experts. This conference took a novel look at both the mainstream written media and alternative media, such as the web as a new source of information. It took place in Feburary 14th-15th 2007 and was sponsored by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the Alexander-Rita-Besser-Stiftung and the Heinrich Boell Foundation and organized by a team of young German and Israeli media professionals.

We applied a cultural angle: The shaping of reality through journalism is in itself a process that, because of its power, encounters different limitations and restrictions. Recent events, such as the Danish cartoon debate shows that through the media, new divisions and conflicts between the Western secular world and the Arab world are being reinforced and hardened. Not only do these dynamics influence journalism between the two worlds, but they have an impact on free speech within the Western world itself. There are restrictions that journalists or editors come across in their every day work in Germany – Israel encounters.

Whilst these journalists, foreign correspondents and editors shape thoughts and understandings according to their profession and their newspaper or network, perhaps independent sources (web blogs in particular) on the internet deliver a much broader diversity of views. The Danish cartoon debate or the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust demonstrated how, alongside mainstream media, new powerful forms of media such as internet blogs, discussion boards and newsletters are playing a growing role in both the delivery of information as well as the shaping of public opinion. German and Israeli realities are no longer independent of these forms. Where does the alternative media, like German and Israeli web blogs, start with their delivery of information? Are there differences at all? Are they independent of or do they even undergo the boundaries of freedom of speech?

While media structure and frame ongoing conflicts on the level of representation, taboos contribute to the hardening of divisions. Both the Danish cartoons as well as the recent war in Lebanon show how, through the media, new frontiers and conflicts between the Western (secular) and the Muslim world are being reinforced. Reality is shaped by the way media deals or respects taboos. This conference wants to examine: How do Israeli and German media differ on the same side of the divide? How do Palestinian media represent the German and Israeli world? Whereas the Western media talk about the democratization of the Middle East, the Islamic media often see the same process as colonization or deprivation of the regional traditions. The examples are numerous. Contemporary boundaries of free speech had to be analysed not only through a new angle but in a joint discussion between both sides.