Israel Matzav: How to Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper

Saturday, April 15, 2006

How to Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper

Three months ago, I saw an article by Jerusalem Post Arab affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh, in which he said, "Three years ago I began writing a daily report for the Jerusalem Post. The irony is that, as an Arab Muslim, I feel freer to write for this Jewish paper than I do for any Arab newspaper. I have no problem writing for any Arab newspaper if it will provide me with a free platform and not censor my writing. My editors at the Jerusalem Post do not interfere with my writing."

Another Arab Muslim - a 'Palestinian' in fact - has learned the same lesson. Fawaz Turki has been fired from his job as a columnist at Saudi Arabia's leading English language daily Arab News, for a litany of sins that I'll let him tell you about:

I was unceremoniously fired this month by my Saudi newspaper, a leading English-language daily called Arab News.
It didn't matter that I had been the senior columnist on the op-ed page for nine years or that my work was quoted widely in the European and American media, including this paper. What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government.
The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.
My first provocation was -- horror of horrors -- to criticize Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after he cracked down on human rights activists several years ago. My second occurred soon after the failure of the Camp David accords when I called for the resignation of Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.
My last was to write about the atrocities Indonesia had committed during its occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. For that transgression, my Saudi paper showed no mercy. I was out the door. No questions asked, no explanations given. You don't write about atrocities committed by an Islamic government -- even when they're already documented in the history books -- and hope to get away with it.

Turki has a lesson for those who would introduce democracy into the Middle East. In fact, he hits the nail on the head:

What Arabs, including those masquerading as their newspaper editors, have yet to learn is that a free press, a truly free press, is a moral imperative in society. Subvert it, and you subvert the public's sacrosanct right to know and a newspaper's traditional role to expose. If the Western democracies work better than many others, it is because to them the concept of accountability, expected from the head of state on down, is a crucial function of their national ideology.
What Arabs have yet to learn, in addition to that, is that newspapers are not published to advance the political preferences of proprietors, or the commentary of subservient analysts who turn a blind eye to the abuse of power by political leaders running their failed states.
Democracy may be a political system, but it is also a social ethos. How responsive can a country be to such an ethos when its people have, for generations, existed with an ethic of fear -- fear of originality, fear of innovation, fear of spontaneity, fear of life itself -- and have had instilled in them the need to accept orthodoxy, dependence and submission?

Maybe Turki should apply for a job with the Jerusalem Post?

Read it all.