10 Years of the "Arab Street"

I'm on a Philistine news watch today.

I recently noticed something about MSM coverage of the Middle East.  The Arab Street has vanished.  It seems that for years we've been reading and listening to people talk about the Arab Street as if this vast wave of angry, pitch-fork wielding Arab proletariat was going to rise up from the sand and take over the Levant in one, last great Revolution. 

I never bought it.  The Arab Street never existed.  It was the fantasy of an aging leftist intellectual class that refuses to give up.  Philistines may come in all shapes and sizes, but there is one general characteristic: a cosmic longing for the Revolution.  Unfortunately, lefty intel analysts I've worked with in the past (especially the ones educated in Middle East Studies departments) bought into the idea of the Arab Street.  Some are still waiting for it, like an analytical Second Coming.

However, I have unscientific evidence that this revolution, too, is vanishing. 

 

I went on to an excellent commercial online database called Factiva and performed two types of searches on  the exact phrase "arab street."  I restricted my dataset to four Philistine newspapers:  The New York Times, the L.A. Times,  the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.  I further  restricted my search to exclude republished news, pricing info, etc.  I then did two sets of searches. 

I'll start with the second search because that's what's represented above.  I searched the phrase in these four newspapers for a full year of each year since 1995.   I then recorded the number of "hits" (results) that were returned.  This isn't scientific because the results could include duplicates or unrelated articles that happen to have those two words in succession.  It also doesn't read for context , and so articles and columns that have to do with the Arab Street, but didn't phrase it precisely in that way, aren't included.  The results, however, are startling:

1995:3

1996:6

1997:6

1998:7

1999:3

2000:13

2001:48

2002:61

2003:89

2004:19

2005 (so far):16

In the first set I searched the phrase in three separate data ranges:

01/01/1995-09/12/2001:  48 hits  (approx. 5.5 years)
09/13/2001-02/01/2005: 208 hits  (approx. 4 years)
02/03/2005-10/01/2004: 15 hits  (appox .5 year)

I love this.  It looks like our premier newspapers of record discovered the Revolution soon after 9/11, further building up the fantasy ahead of the Iraq invasion.  But after watching Arabs in Iraq and Lebanon voting and waiving American flags, thanking America, the Arab Street vanished.  In the Philistine mind, if the Revolution isn't their Revolution then it doesn't exist.

Let me suggest the Endangered Liberal Meme Act of 2005,  intended to preserve this and other quickly vanishing leftist memes for posterity.