In an age when this country has been under steady assault for many aspects of its social norms and from many very uninformed politicians and journalists in the West, there has been little in the way to counter such false verbiage in a proficient and candid manner from many of our own.
I have heard and seen loads of such journalistic wares of the Western media, and sadly a greater part of them have no rationale and credibility when it applies itself to our society. One recent example was CNN’s report on King Fahd’s funeral. They inferred that the simplicity of the burial in an unmarked grave was due to the strict Wahabi fundamentalist approach in such matters.
Now CNN cannot be excused for being an ignorant and provincial network. And they have been in the business long enough to make certain that such statements have to be verified before being made public. But they chose not to, and the damage was done. Once again, Saudis were expediently portrayed as a fundamentalist and extreme society. The simple truth is that all Muslims, be they in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, are buried in a simple manner and in unmarked graves. Once we depart from this earth, we own nothing and we take nothing except our adherence to our belief and our good deeds. This is the way of Islam.
This is but one example of a whole host of errors in reporting by the Western media. And for many in the West, it naturally becomes the truth. But what are we in Saudi Arabia doing to counter such misinformation? Where are our eloquent journalists and media persons who can present facts as they are and not as some in the Western media would like everyone to believe? And in a language the good folk in the West can understand. Sadly, there are hardly any.
We have known of these frailties within us for some time now. We have discussed them extensively in the Arabic media. And yet there has not been any movement by the concerned ministries in this country to comprehend the magnitude of the problem and gear up an effective response. It is simply not enough to hire some Western public relations companies, pay them oodles of dollars and expect that the problem of our distorted image would go away. That money would have been better spent training our own.
The Ministry of Higher Education has recently reactivated scholarships for students to study abroad in the USA, Canada, and Germany. While I commend the decision to send our youth abroad to pursue such knowledge and experience another culture, I am also surprised at the disciplines of study offered. There is medicine, engineering, computer science, business and accounting, law, and the like. Yet there is no scholarship on offer for those who wish to pursue liberal arts, mass media and communications, an area we are woefully unqualified in. We have an adequate amount of doctors, engineers, lawyers and the like. But how many competent English-speaking media personnel can be found in this country? A handful at most?
Would it not make any sense, and in understanding the present danger of not standing up to this continuous assault of fabricated “truths” from the West, to allocate some slots for those wishing to pursue field in communications and mass media? Why not prepare a whole new generation of qualified Saudis in such arenas to retaliate against the spin-doctors of the West? Along those lines, I had written to the Ministry of Higher Education over a month ago and voiced my concerns. And I am not in the least bit surprised by the lack of response from this bureaucracy. Ho hum, it’s just another day.
