TUNISIA, SAUDI ARABIA: Press freedom on the run

On Saturday evening, Tunisian Web journalist Slim Boukhidir was heading to a local Internet cafe in the city of Sfax when he was stopped by a group of men and stuffed into a French-made automobile.

He was taken first to a police station and then he found himself back in the car and heading outside of the city and into the rural hinterlands.

The car stopped and the journalist, who was freed last July after spending eight months in prison for publicly criticizing President Zine el Abidine ben Ali, was released without harm.

But not without a warning, according to an account he gave to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists:

After leaving the police station, they started insulting me and threatened to inflict on me the same fate of Libyan Internet journalist Daif Al Ghazal, kidnapped and killed in neighboring Libya in 2005.

The U.S. gets all hot and bothered about human rights abuses and suppression of speech in places such as Iran or Syria. But it has remained relatively silent about an apparent uptick in repression of journalists among its allies in the Arab world, like the staunchly pro-American Tunisia or Saudi Arabia.

On Saturday, a top cleric in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring that all writers who challenge religious leaders should be fired from their jobs, flogged and jailed, according to a news release issued by the CPJ.

Sheik Abdallah Ben Jabreen issued his edict on a privately owned Saudi television channel a week after another cleric, Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan called for the deaths of media executives who broadcast programs deemed immoral. CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney said:

We fear for the safety of journalists and writers in the Middle East when senior religious figures issue calls for the imprisonment and flogging of their critics. The Saudi authorities must take a stand against such sinister edicts and ensure that journalists are protected.

The Middle East and North Africa have never been easy places for journalists to work. Press-rights monitors like the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders have even noticed an upsurge of cases in which journalists in relatively libertine Kuwait are hauled into court for articles they wrote or reports they broadcast.

Reporters continue to be targeted in Iraq, where earlier this month a four-person Al-Sharqiya television news team was abducted and murdered in Mosul.

The region’s political instability often translates into bad conditions for journalists. Press conditions in Mauritania, for example, which had been experimenting with democracy for a couple of years, have gone downhill since a coup d’etat against the government in August.

In a rare spot of positive news, an appeals court in Morocco threw out the conviction of blogger Mohamed Erraji, who was sentenced earlier this month to two years in prison and fined for "disrespecting” King Mohammed VI.

— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Graphic credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Comments

[eileen fleming]

Something else the USA is silent about- Mordechai Vanunu's FREEDOM of SPEECH trial which began January 2006 and after a year of appeal his sentence was reduced from 6 months in prison to 3 on Sept. 23, 2008.

According to Reuters "Vanunu was convicted by the Jerusalem Magistrates Court of 15 violations of a military order prohibiting him from talking to foreign journalists and leaving Israel. The original indictment included 22 different violations of the order, but during the trial the State Prosecutor's Office submitted an amended indictment, and he was eventually charged with 19 violations and was acquitted of four. According to the indictment, Vanunu held conversations with foreign journalists and provided them with news and details on Israel's nuclear reactor. He was acquitted of speaking to foreign nationals on the internet and via video and voice chats…Since his release Vanunu has campaigned for the Jewish state to be disarmed while denying Israeli officials' charges that he has more secrets that he could divulge if allowed to emigrate.

"We should be clear here that Vanunu was convicted for the very act of speaking to non-Israelis, rather than the content of those conversations," attorney Michel Sfard said. "We do not consider this appropriate for a democracy in the 21st century."
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3393749,00.html

Something else the USA is silent about is that American taxpayers provide $7-10 MILLION a day to IIsrael, which claims to be a democracy, but is in fact an Ethnocracy.

"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control."-Jeff Halper, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a Noble Peace Prize Nominee for 2006.
Eileen Fleming, "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory" page 15

Something else the USA is silent about is that 2008 is also the 60th anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, upon which Israel's statehood was contingent upon upholding:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." -Article 19

"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own." -Article 13:2

Eileen Fleming, Citizen Journalist and Founder WAWA:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
Author "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer "30 Minutes With Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"