Saturday, April 23, 2005

The near complete monopoly of Saudi Arabia over Arab media is such that nobody is reporting what is going on in the London-based Saudi newspaper Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat. Apparently, the newspaper got scared after a British court ruled against Az-Zaman newspaper for a story on the wife of the Amir of Qatar. So Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat (owned by Prince Salman) decided to move its operations from London to Dubai. And many of the staffers were fired, and they have demonstrated outside of the offices and nobody is reporting about that. Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat (adhering to the new Arab regimes' formula of expediting normalizing with Israel and delaying meaningful reforms to appease Bush) today was busy reporting that Sharon likes poetry and that he reads the poems of Mahmud Darwish. Spare me.