THE CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS of Al Jazeera
appears to have blocked an article critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights
record from viewers outside the United States. The news network, which is
funded by the government of Qatar, told local press that it did not intend
to offend Saudi Arabia or any other state ally, and would remove the piece.
The op-ed, written by Georgetown University professor
and lawyer Arjun Sethi and titled, “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse
for Human Rights Abuses,” ran on the website of Al Jazeera America, the
network’s U.S. outlet. It comments on reports of 50 people recently
sentenced to death for alleged terrorist activity and criticizes the U.S.
government’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
The article ran on December 3, and is still
available in the United States, but people attempting to view the link in
other countries were given an error or “not found” page. (For international
readers, we’ve reprinted the full text of the article here.)
When asked by The Intercept about the
article, Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha said in a
statement, “After hearing from users from different locations across the
world that several of our web pages were unavailable, we have begun
investigating what the source of the problem may be and we hope to have it
resolved shortly.”
Last week, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz quoted
a director of Al Jazeera apologizing for the article and saying that it would
be removed. Another news story, from a Bahraini website, shows a tweet
from Al Jazeera America’s account with the article’s headline. That tweet
appears to have been deleted. A spokesperson for Al Jazeera America would not
comment on the tweet or on the discrepancy between the parent
company’s statement to The Intercept and the comments in Okaz.
The criticisms of Saudi Arabia in Sethi’s piece are
by no means unusual. He notes a steep rise in executions in Saudi Arabia this
year, with Amnesty International reporting
over 150 people killed, including adolescents; the sentencing
of poet Ashraf Fayadh to death for “apostasy”; and allegations by international
humanitarian groups that Saudi Arabian airstrikes in Yemen kill civilians
indiscriminately. The reports Sethi cites have been widely covered in the media
(including The
Intercept.) Sethi, who has written several articles for Al
Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English, the network’s international franchise,
told The Intercept that Al Jazeera America had solicited the op-ed from
him.
A few days after publication, Sethi’s Twitter feed
was flooded with attacks from pro-Saudi accounts. David Johnson, senior opinion
editor at Al Jazeera America, retweeted
many of the attacks. (He declined to be interviewed for this piece.)
“The trolling seemed like an organized concerted
effort to intimidate me,” Sethi said. “I will not submit to this act of
censorship. Human rights are universal and I will continue to litigate and
write about violations wherever they occur.”
Qatar is a monarchy tightly ruled by the emir Sheikh
Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. The tiny, oil rich country has allied with Saudi Arabia
against the government of Syria in that country’s civil war, and is part of
Saudi Arabia’s campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, contributing to the
devastating air
war and deploying
more than 1,000 ground troops this fall. Qatar is also part of the
34-nation Islamic alliance against terrorism that Saudi Arabia announced
this week.
The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, D.C., did
not respond to questions about whether it had discussed the article
with Al Jazeera or the Qatari government.
While Al Jazeera’s international coverage has been
praised — particularly in the years after the 9/11 attacks — this is not the
first time that the network has appeared to cater
to the interests of Qatar and its Gulf allies. (Disclosure: prior to
joining The Intercept, I wrote an article for Al Jazeera America as
a freelancer.)
It has been criticized
for lack of coverage of protests against the government of Bahrain, for
example, and in 2012, several journalists complained
that they had to edit coverage of Syria to feature the emir of Qatar’s
position. In 2013, staffers in Egypt resigned
in protest of the network’s bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood after the
military deposed the president, Mohamed Morsi. (The Egyptian
government subsequently jailed three Al Jazeera journalists for alleged
collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood in a widely denounced
trial. The last of the reporters were freed in September.)
Al Jazeera America was founded in 2013 as the U.S.
face of the network. It has struggled to gain a large audience and was roiled
by drama
this year, with the departure of several top executives amid allegations of
sexism and workplace dysfunction. Qatar’s emir also announced cutbacks
in government support for the news network overall this year.
The apparent censorship of the Sethi article
seems to be unprecedented, however. Several Al Jazeera America
staffers said that they were unaware of another instance in which the
parent company had blocked an article in this way.
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