[Mb-civic] How to Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper - Fawaz Turki - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

How to Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper
<>
By Fawaz Turki
The Washington Post
Saturday, April 15, 2006; A15

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.

Never mind that a newspaper cheapens and debases the idea of the 
journalistic enterprise when it enjoins its commentators against being 
critical of the government that it is supposed to be a watchdog over. 
Never mind the absurdity of preventing your contributors from touching 
on the issue of Islam, a social ideology whose embrace by jihadists is 
the top news story in the world today. And never mind that Arab society 
-- a society that remains broken in body and spirit more than a 
half-century after independence -- needs very much to engage in serious 
self-assessment and to promote an open debate in the media among 
intellectuals, academics, political analysts and others about why Arabs 
have failed all these years to meet the challenges of modernity.

But those are the stringent, not to mention pathetic, rules that 
determine how the Arab press conducts its business. You play by these 
rules or you're cut off. The problem is that if stringing words together 
is the only way you know how to make a living, you end up eating humble 
pie and playing the game by whatever rules they set for you.

Sometimes all it takes is a phone call to someone high up in your paper 
from a semi-literate government official who couldn't run a lunch 
counter, or a fundamentalist imam who hasn't read a half-dozen decent 
books in his life, or perhaps a disgruntled diplomat at a Muslim or Arab 
embassy in Riyadh who didn't like what you had to say in your column 
about his country. The result is the same: Your career is ruined.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you will have an editorial page editor who 
likes your work, and he'll cut you a bit of slack and lobby on your 
behalf behind the scenes, often at the risk of losing his own job. But 
even in this case, three strikes and you're out.

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.

But this is not just the story of an Arab journalist losing his job. It 
is a story with implications for the current American administration's 
efforts to "introduce" the Arab countries to democracy, of which 
independent, free media are a major building block.

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?

The Arab world today, sadly, remains a collection of disparate entities 
ruled for the most part by authoritarian regimes that rely on coercion, 
violence and terror to rule, and that demand from their citizens 
submission, obedience and conformity. And that includes those citizens 
who call themselves "journalists," to whom, by now, responsibility to 
truth and logic has become irrelevant.

In this atmosphere, it is regarded as an example of reportorial acumen 
to write on the op-ed pages of prominent Arab journals about how the 
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were the work of Israeli agents, how the death 
of Princess Diana was the result of some diabolical plot by British 
intelligence to end her life rather than see her married to an Arab 
Muslim, how Monica Lewinsky was an agent-in-place, put in the White 
House by the "Jewish lobby" -- and so on with other infantile whimsies.

For Arabs, there is still a great divide between word and world. You can 
embrace conspiracy theories with impressive ease, and be accorded by 
your editors the right to pontificate about any foolish thing you want, 
but don't dare write about the malfeasance of political leaders in Egypt 
and Palestine, or the atrocities of a fellow-Muslim government in East 
Timor. The price you must pay for such offenses if you work for the Arab 
press is heavy indeed.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist living in Washington and the author of 
several books, including "The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian 
Exile." His e-mail address is disinherited at yahoo.com. 
<mailto:disinherited at yahoo.com.>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401116.html
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