SAF NEWSLETTERS - Editor's Note

FAHD, ABDULLAH URGE MUSLIMS TO FOLLOW MODERATE ISLAM
[Arab News] By staff writer
RIYADH, 6 November — Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, yesterday urged Muslims to follow the moderate line of Islam and strengthen their unity. “Hold fast the rope of God and don’t be disunited,” the king and the crown prince said in their joint Ramadan message, quoting a verse from the Holy Qur’an.
[Expired Link]

KINGDOM FULLY GEARED TO WELCOME HOLY MONTH
[Arab News] By P.K. Abdul Ghafour, Arab News Staff
JEDDAH, 6 November — The Kingdom is fully geared to welcome Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims seek to relate to God through piety and prayers. [Expired Link]

NO DECISION YET ON LETTING U.S. USE BASES, SAUDI SAYS
[NYTimes] By PATRICK E. TYLER
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 — The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said today that the kingdom had not decided whether it would make its airspace and air bases available to the United States in the event of war with Iraq. Speaking by telephone from Riyadh, Prince Saud sought to amend remarks he made in a CNN interview over the weekend, in which he appeared to state that Saudi Arabia would not allow an American-led coalition to use Saudi air bases and airspace to attack Iraq. Complete report...  CLICK HERE

SALEH KAMEL ACCUSES WEST OF DOUBLE STANDARD
[Arab News] KUALA LUMPUR, 5 November — The head of Saudi Arabia’s biggest conglomerate has accused the West of pursuing a policy of double standard on Iraq and Israel, adding his voice to a growing chorus of criticism from the Kingdom. Saleh Kamel, whose Dallah Albarakah Group (DBG) plans a media push to explain Islam to the West following a series of attacks blamed on Islamists, told Reuters a US-led strike on Iraq would fuel anti-American sentiment among Muslims. [Expired Link]

WHO'S CENSORING WHOM?
By John R. Bradley, Arab News Staff

JEDDAH, 6 November — There is a longstanding joke in Saudi Arabia that the sports daily Arriyadiah is the most popular newspaper because it’s the only one that prints the truth. But the joke is not drawing as many laughs these days. The reason is that journalism in Saudi Arabia has moved on dramatically over the last three years to find itself at a defining junction.

When I recently interviewed leading Saudi editors in chief and columnists for an article on the subject of Saudi journalism for a news agency, they expressed many different opinions. But on one issue they all agreed. Censorship, they argued, is no longer a question of government red lines. It is now often the result of an unwillingness among editors in chief to take full advantage of the freedom they have been given by the government.

I admit that I was a little skeptical, but then on Oct. 9 former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki Al-Faisal published the following complaint in a leading Saudi daily: “I read my article published by your newspaper on Sept. 18, which was translated from an article I wrote in The Washington Post. I was appalled by ... deletion of some sentences from the original text.”

Many Saudis had noticed on the day the translation appeared that the sentences deleted from the Washington Post article included one that described the abolition of the Presidency for Girls’ Education — following the Makkah school fire in March, in which 15 girls died — as representing “a shift away from the religious establishment”.

How ironic it is that elsewhere in the article Prince Turki had emphasized how there was a new freedom in the Kingdom’s press. Saudis who had read the original article in English on the web and then the censored article in Arabic debated the deletion of this sentence.

“Why can’t we read what our senior officials are saying about our own country if the Americans are allowed to read it?” they asked.

Prince Turki’s subsequent comments should leave us in no doubt that it was the newspaper, and not Prince Turki or the Ministry of Information, who acted as censors on this occasion.

What Saudi journalism needs is bolder editors, like those who for some time have been asserting their independence.

“The high rank of the government has started to respond to what the press publishes,” Mohammed Tunisi, Al-Eqtisadiah’s US-educated editor in chief, told me. “We are proud that many of the issues we have raised have afterward been adopted as government policy.”

Al-Jazirah deputy editor in chief, Idrees Al-Idrees, told me that when the Arar border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia was set to reopen for trade he got an independent source to confirm the story and published it as an exclusive on the paper’s front page. This was in advance of a statement from the official Saudi Press Agency, from which editors usually take their cue for discussion on such “sensitive” topics.

“When someone from the Foreign Ministry called me afterward to inquire about our source,” he stated, “I told him to mind his own business, and put the phone down on him.”

“Is that on the record?” I asked.

“I’m telling you because I want you to print it,” he confirmed.

When Al-Idrees was managing editor of Al-Yamama magazine 15 years ago, he published a controversial article, “The right that was given, but never taken”. In it he argued that because editors in chief hold positions of privilege, it made them a part of the establishment.

“Officials tell them to take the opportunity to discuss things,” he still maintains today, “and the reason they on the whole do not is that they have huge salaries, high social status, and people sucking up to them all the time because they have a title. They are cowardly in that after reaching a high position in life they fear putting everything in jeopardy by rocking the boat.”

“There is an old media culture that is against freedom,” Al-Hayat columnist Dawood Al-Shirian agreed. “The editors in chief always have their eyes on what they think the government likes. Even if they kill a paper no one can touch them.”

Newspapers need to sell copies in order to survive financially. Readers will only buy them if they have trust in what is printed. Saudis, like all other people in the world, want not half-truths from their journalists and editors, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

In the past, Saudi readers had no choice but to eat whatever they were served. But now over 80 percent of them have satellite TV in their homes. And over 30 percent have online access — a number increasing by the day.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal’s clarification should serve as a wake-up call: If it’s good enough news for the Americans, it’s good enough news for the Saudis as well.

[Reprinted with the permission of Arab News]