Saudi Arabia’s attempt to silence Al Jazeera is outrageous

IRONY is not dead in the Middle East. In April Saudi Arabia, a land where women may not drive, or leave the country without the written permission of a male “guardian”, or appear in public without an all-enveloping cloak, was elected to the UN’s committee on women’s rights. Now that same monarchy, where the government censors everything from political dissent to risqué Rubens paintings, and where a pro-democracy blogger named Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and ten years in jail, is trying to shut down the only big, feisty broadcaster in the Arab world, Al Jazeera. This is an extraordinary, extraterritorial assault on free speech. It is as if China had ordered Britain to abolish the BBC.

Al Jazeera is based in Qatar, a tiny, wealthy Gulf state that the Saudis, Emiratis, Bahrainis and Egyptians are subjecting to a heavy-handed blockade. Qatar’s sins, in Saudi eyes, are manifold. It is friendly with Iran (though so are Oman and Dubai, which are not subject to the same strictures). It harbours dozens of people the Saudis do not like, including some with close links to groups affiliated to al-Qaeda. And it owns Al Jazeera.

Last week news leaked that Saudi Arabia is demanding the closure of Al Jazeera as part of the price for lifting the blockade. The Qataris have only a few more days to comply or face unspecified further action.

You can see why the Saudis would like Al Jazeera to go dark. Unlike other Middle Eastern broadcasters, which in place of news tend to emit a wearisome stream of unexamined government announcements and fawning footage of princes and presidents embracing each other, Al Jazeera, which was set up in 1996, tries to tell viewers what is actually going on. During the Arab spring of 2011 it offered a platform to the region’s protesters, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which went on to form a short-lived government in Egypt, and to challenge incumbent regimes in other states as well. Arab autocrats found this both alarming and infuriating.

Some in the West dislike Al Jazeera, too. When it broadcast Osama bin Laden’s tape-recorded messages from his cave in Afghanistan, many concluded that it was not reporting a big news story so much as promoting terrorism. In 2004 the new government in Iraq, still under the thumb of the American-led coalition that had ousted Saddam Hussein the previous year, closed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad office for a month; in 2016 Iraq’s government closed it again, for a year, for supposedly stirring up sectarianism and violence by reporting on it unsparingly.

Drawing a veil over it

All these bans were wrong. Al Jazeera is not a perfect news organisation, but it strives to offer a variety of viewpoints: government and dissident, domestic and foreign. One of its slogans is: “The opinion and the other opinion”. Granted, it has a large blind spot in the shape of Qatar itself, which never receives the sort of criticism the channel routinely hands out to others. There is also a distinction to be drawn between Al Jazeera’s English-language service (started with the help of many staff poached from the BBC) and its Arabic version, which is more biased in support of political Islam, more tolerant of extremism and closer to being a mouthpiece for the Qatari government. Saudi Arabia and the UAE want to close both of them. Yet on any fair accounting, Al Jazeera performs a valuable service by adding to the supply of news and views about the Middle East. It would be absurd to argue that the Arab world’s problem was too much information or too free a flow of ideas. The opposite is closer to the truth. Saudi Arabia should stop trying to extend its harsh brand of censorship to its neighbours; indeed, it should stop bullying them entirely.