Daily Times

The unquiet American is averse to what he calls fake news. Yet he has been strangely complicit on the orchestrated Gulf manoeuvre to take down Qatar’s Al Jazeera network. Yet this should come as no surprise to anyone. Most western governments happily talk the talk — but never walk the walk — on democratic reform, especially when it comes to a region that the unthinking man’s pundit insists is not ready for such freedoms.

And that was Al Jazeera’s biggest mistake. As The Guardian rightly put it: the network is is under regional fire because it dared to break the mould. Especially with its human-interest coverage of the Arab Spring. We at Daily Times stand in moral support of the Middle East’s first independent broadcaster. We stand with international human rights and press freedom groups who are speaking out against this blatant move at muzzling the media.

We at Daily Times call on western governments, such as Britain and the US, to end their double game playing. Meaning that the whole world has long woken up to the fact that these and other nations hold up certain democratic indicators — such as freedom of media — as proof of functioning democracy at home. Yet they are more than happy to not just throw these on the backburner — but to see these burned to absolute cinders — when it comes to furthering their geo-political interests. We call for and end to this policy of strategic depth by another name.

What does concern us, however, are reports quoting unnamed Al Jazeera employees who have expressed anxiety over the fact that the network was the brainchild of the father of the current Qatari emir. There are those who think the latter doesn’t view the channel as an asset in quite the same way. Yet what concerns us even more is the autocratic response of the bullyboy Gulf states spearheading this propaganda campaign. Bahrain and the UAE, for example, have warned their citizens not to show any sympathy with Qatar. Abu Dhabi has gone one giant step further in threatening its people with up to 15 years in prison for this ‘crime’. Then we have Saudi Arabia who plans to fine close to $2,7000 those who dare to tune in and not drop out. If Al Jazeera goes off air — who will be there to record the subsequent horror stories of intimidation and worse?

And so we have it. The gloves are off. The death knell has been delivered. Any hopes of an Arab Spring revival have been well and truly buried. And leading the pack is the president of a country that prides its self upon militarised democracy interventions overseas. We choose to call this and what is happening to Al Jazeera what it is: state-sponsored terrorism. No more. And certainly no less.  *

Published in Daily Times, June 25th, 2017.