Tale of Two Gulf Networks, Saudi and Iranian Mouthpieces, the Clever and the Strident……….
Alarabiya TV (Saudi) website (the Arabic site) often seeks to publicize issues and events that exacerbate sectarian or racial tensions around the Gulf region. Here it quotes someone who quotes Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as saying that Iranians are greater than the “people of the Prophet at the beginning of Islam”. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the “people of the Prophet” were pagans and against the Prophet during early years, just as most Iranians were Zoroastrians at the time. So maybe he had a point, if in fact he did say that. The network also reports that Khomeini insisted on calling the Shatt al-Arab river straddling Iran and Iraq by its old Persian name. Maybe he did, or maybe not, who cares: no matter, most people call it Shatt al-Arab, as I do, which is its proper name.
Regardless: Alarabiya has a tendency, and only on its Arabic website, toward stirring sectarian and nationalist divisions in the region. It specializes in raising fear of a specter of Shi’a expansion through some kind of conversion of all the good conforming nice little Wahhabis into rebellious Shi’a Twelvers. Stirring up fears among the peoples of the region: how else can you get them to seek the protection of the absolute royalty (who themselves need protection as well)? And how else can you distract them from important “domestic” issues like despotism and corruption and discrimination? Or maybe it does it to stir up controversy and provoke viewer and reader reaction, like any good network tries to do. However, it is not as strongly one-sided as the Iranian website AsrIran: at least Alarabiya does publish some opposing points of view occasionally (timid ones that do not touch anything royal or scandalous or corrupt). It is also more entertaining than the AsrIran which does not even try to be entertaining, but that is probably only because it operates from freewheeling Dubai and not from grim Saudi Arabia. Overall, it is operated more professionally and in a more clever way, not as openly strident and heavy-handed as the Iranian site, although it is as partisan.
I find Alarabiya, although one-sided, occasionally a useful source of news and reports and I do often link with it. The news are often useful, but the reports I always take with a large grain of kosher salt.
Cheers
mhg
Mon Email
Comments