Kareem Shaheen in Beirut Wednesday 11 March 2015
In Guardian interview, al-Jadeed presenter who cut off Islamist guest says she had a duty to stand up for herself
Rima Karaki. Photograph: PR
When Rima Karaki cut off the microphone after her guest, Hani Sibai, an Islamist sheikh, ordered her to “be silent”, little did she expect it would become a viral video sensation in Lebanon and around the world.
Supporters online have hailed her for standing up for women’s rights against a patriarchal religious establishment that sought to subjugate them. But for Karaki herself, it was a simple question of self-respect.
“Had I not answered, I would have hated myself, and I don’t want to hate myself,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “When he said shut up, it was no longer possible to shut up because I would be insulting myself and would lose everything.”
During the television interview, Karaki, donning a veil at Sibai’s request, asked her guest a question about how Islamic State managed to attract Christians to its ranks, after reports emerged that two Christians had joined the militant group. Sibai then launched into a historical monologue that the anchor felt was not relevant to the question.
Rima Karaki was interviewing Hani al-Sebai for Lebanon’s Al Jadeed channel when she ended up asserting her authority as he grew increasingly irate and told her to shut up
“I asked him to focus on the current era so we don’t lose time,” she said. “This caused him to get angry and he thought I was cutting him off, and I tried to calm him down and tell him not to be angry, and that I want to get the most out of your presence in the programme. I told him it’s up to you.”
Sibai got angrier, telling his host that he could say whatever he wanted, and told her to be silent. When she asked him how a “respectable sheikh could tell an anchor to shut up” and said she was in charge of the show, Sibai said he was respectable regardless of her view and that he considered it dishonourable to be interviewed on her programme.
Karaki stopped the interview after three minutes, saying: “Just one second. Either there is mutual respect or the conversation is over.” And she cut off his microphone
“The studio is like a courtroom, someone has to moderate the conversation. The only difference is that it’s not in the core of my profession to judge people,” Karaki told the Guardian. She said she brought Sibai on to the programme because she believed in constructive dialogue regardless of the individual’s background.
“But it’s my job to moderate the conversation, and I felt it was my right to say that I was in charge and I decide what the subject is, and that it could not go on this way.
He decided to speak in a disrespectful manner and I had to cut off the interview,” she said.
A version of the segment with English subtitles, posted a few days before International Women’s Day, has had more than 5m views on YouTube.
Sibai published a letter on his Twitter feed demanding an apology from al-Jadeed, Karaki’s TV station. He said the channel was biased because it attempted to portray him as a fundamentalist and a friend of the al-Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
“As if the friendship of Dr Zawahiri is an insult!” he said in the letter. “But I am proud of it and every Muslim is proud of it! But they mentioned it as slander.”
The London-based sheikh said that when he told the anchor to be silent, it was as if “a demon took over her”. He said she spoke “deliriously”.
According to a 2009 Wikileaks cable, Ashraf Mohsen, then Egypt’s coordinator for counterterrorism, said Sibai left Egypt for the UK before 1999, when he was convicted in absentia for “terrorism-related offenses”.
Sibai’s recent sermons suggest he is anti-ISIS, but in a recent commentary on the video of the beheading of Coptic Christians, he also said he believed the footage had been fabricated by intelligence agencies.
Karaki said she did not want to blame Sibai’s behaviour on sexism, saying she could not discern his intent – only that he was being disrespectful to her.
“I can’t go into a person’s inner intent, but what I do know is that the tone was very authoritarian, but maybe this is the way he talks, and his overreaction was inexplicable,” she said. “I don’t know if perhaps if it was a man, he would not have told him to shut up, but I took it as being disrespectful, whether it was with a woman or if he was a sheikh or whatever his background is. To me it has nothing to do with religion, or political line, it has to do with manners and ethics.”
She said she felt insulted when the cleric told her to be quiet, and she felt she had a duty to stand up for herself.
Karaki said she had not expected the video of her standing up to Sibai to cause a furore. But it did, bringing her an avalanche of support online and in the local press. She said she believed it had had a positive impact, particularly in patriarchal societies, where she said female journalists faced many more challenges than their male colleagues.
“Some people think men have a birth right to exert control over women, but there are a lot of women now who are breaking this image and a lot of men who support this, although more so for women because we have a patriarchal society,” she said. “I don’t feel like a hero, I feel like any man or woman with self-respect.
“I don’t think any man would accept that his wife gets insulted and doesn’t respond, or his mother gets insulted and doesn’t respond, or his daughter. He doesn’t have to respond on her behalf, too. She can do that. If he gets out of the way, he would be surprised that she can stand up for herself.”
Karaki said the positive response to the video gave her hope that these patriarchal tendencies could be controlled, and that women in the media in particular could play a strong role in reversing them.
“The media in our countries focuses on appearance, especially for women,” she said. “Men can continue working in the Arab world forever, but most of the time women are judged by their looks.
“I don’t want to say that it felt like a vindication, but it maybe gave a good image, that women are capable, because our nations are full of capable women, and I’m the least among them, but the only difference is that I’m lucky to have a platform and a screen,” she said. “Our women’s dignity is high, and all the difficult times they have gone through are testament to this. They give you this strength.”
She singled out in particular the mothers of Lebanese soldiers, who for the past few years had endured the loss of “our men” in battles against extremism. “Great women are those who raise great men,” she said.
Karaki criticised what she felt was the hypocrisy of some religious guests demanding that she wear the veil in interviews, but speaking to uncovered journalists outside the studio. She said that as a journalist she treated the story as a priority.
“I object out of respect for the veil, because the veil is not a game we put on or take off according to the whims of some religious men,” she said. “God’s will is more important than theirs, and they have no right to give themselves that power.”
Karaki said she would soon raise the issue of female journalists being pressured to wear the veil in interviews. “But because I respect the veil, it pains me,” she said. “I put it on in order to meet them halfway.”
