Prior to Sept. 11, Saudi Arabia hardly ever figured on the American media horizon: ignorance bred disinterest. Today, while there is much about Saudi Arabia in the US media, the ignorance is not any less. The coverage shows a disdain for the truth, for facts. So much of it is based on innuendo, half-truths, prejudice and scorn. A good example of that was a recent snide piece by Pulitzer Prize winner William Safire in the New York Times and syndicated around the world about supposed rivalries in the Saudi royal family. The New York Times is, of course, far from impartial when it comes to the Middle East, being not merely sympathetic to Israel, but pro-Zionist to its core. As for Safire, this is a man who says that he is proud to know Ariel Sharon as a friend — something that even many Israelis would be ashamed to admit. So we know that when it comes to the Middle East, any article by him in the New York Times is not going to be exactly balanced.
Opinions are one thing, and every government around the world has to put up with criticism from the wise as well as from the ignorant; it goes with the job. But what about facts? One might have thought that a Pulitzer Prize winner would do his best to make sure that he gets them right. How come then, he gets his facts so lamentably wrong when he writes about Saudi Arabia? It is not as if the truth is not at hand; it is only a click away on the Internet.
For example, he writes that Crown Prince Abdullah “recognizes that Saudi girls will have to get some education”. He then informs readers that Prince Sultan has “squelched” plans permitting girls to be educated. One does not know whether to weep or laugh. If Safire is going to write a major article criticizing Saudi Arabia, he ought at least to have discovered that girls have been going to school since the mid-60s. He makes assumptions based on sheer ignorance. So it goes on. He writes of Prince Abdul Aziz ibn Fahd, minister of state, and discusses with an air of unquestionable authority what he fancies to be the prince’s future role. But Safire cannot get even his name right: he calls him “Prince Abdullah Al-Aziz bin Fahd”. He gets his age wrong as well: he has him as being 60, not below 30. He then claims that Industry Minister “Hakim Yamani” (sic) is playing politics, patently unaware that the real Industry Minister, Dr. Hashim Yamani, is doing no such thing and moreover, that is not how things happen in the Kingdom.
That foreign media, after decades of disinterest, should want to write about Saudi Arabia is a welcome development. But they have to know what they are talking about. Safire clearly does not know one member of the Saudi Royal Family or of the government from another, let alone what happens in the Kingdom. A opinion is only as good as the facts on which it is based, and even then it remains an opinion. He could easily have checked the facts; he chose not to. Was it because he wants the “facts” to fit the argument, not vice versa; because, as a friend of Sharon, he wants to rubbish Saudi Arabia? At the risk of giving any credibility to his absurd article, presented with all the subtly of a comic strip, it encapsulates what is wrong with so much Western coverage of the Kingdom. It is soaked in ignorance and, often as not, contempt.
