An Open Letter by Senior Middle East Scholars to the New York Times Regarding its Thomas Friedman’s column, “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, At Last.” | Middle East Research and Information Project
▻http://www.merip.org/open-letter-senior-middle-east-scholars-new-york-times-regarding-its-thomas-f
published November 30, 2017
We write as scholars of the Middle East and the Muslim world with long, collective experience on Gulf and Arabian Peninsula policy issues to express our amazement, concern and anger that the New York Times would publish Thomas Friedman’s recent essay “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, At Last.”
We understand that opinion writing allows for some degree of license in the interpretation of events and issues. But Mr. Friedman’s description of the situation in Saudi Arabia is so divorced from reality as to call into question his competence as a journalist or opinion writer. The so-called “Arab Spring” was an attempt by young people and, soon thereafter, large sections of the population of several Arab countries to force their governments to democratize their political systems; to resist stifling of speech and expression; and to halt large-scale systematic torture and physical abuse of citizens by security forces. Not only has the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman not addressed any of these issues, all the evidence points to the opposite conclusion—that his growing power has been accompanied by a ramping up of censorship, arrests, imprisonments without (fair) trials and other forms of violent repression against dissent.
Even worse, Mr. Friedman has nary a word on the unmitigated disaster that is the Saudi war in Yemen, which has now surpassed Syria as the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The evidence for bin Salman’s leading role in executing this illegal, murderous war that has done immeasurable harm to tens of millions of Yemenis and thrown the entire Arabian peninsula and Gulf region into chaos is incontrovertible. We cannot understand how any professional journalist (which Mr. Friedman describes himself as at the start of the article) could engage in a long-form interview with bin Salman and avoid interrogating the issue in any detail, essentially giving him a pass for being the mastermind of an illegal war that has devastated the lives of millions, and today borders on genocide.