Middle East media round up

08 Nov 10 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa

Morocco’s on-again off-again ban on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel is apparently on again. The kingdom is famously touchy about certain issues — last year it banned a magazine for publishing an opinion poll about King Mohammed II’s popularity. The poll actually showed a 91 per cent approval rating, but the palace felt it was disrespectful to even ask the question.

This time around, there doesn’t seem to be one specific incident that prompted the latest Al Jazeera ban. Communications minister Khalid Naciri, in announcing the ban, said the channel’s editorial line, “systematically tarnishes Morocco’s image,” whatever that means, and accused it of “transmitting a caricature of Moroccan reality.”

One news report quoted an anonymous Moroccan government official as saying the regime was reacting “to the way Al Jazeera handles the issues of Islamists and Western Sahara.” The 2003 Casablanca bombings prompted a sweeping crackdown on fundamentalist Muslim groups that continues to this day. Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, was annexed by Morocco in the mid-70s and remains home to a vibrant separatist movement.

Turkey has once again banned YouTube after the site refused to remove footage linked to a political sex scandal. Access to the site had already been blocked since 2008 over videos that made fun of Turkey’s venerated founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That ban was lifted just last week, but within days a new 30-month ban was levied over a video showing the country’s main opposition leader Deniz Baykal in a romantic hotel room tryst with a female staffer. Baykal resigned in May over the scandal. Here’s a link to a (safe for work) excerpt from the video in question.

From the self-censorship file, Egypt’s most prominent modern novelist, Alaa Aswany, is working to PREVENT one of his books from being made available in Hebrew. An Israeli research center translated The Yacoubian Building (an excellent read by the way) against Aswany’s will in the interest, they said, of “expanding cultural awareness”. Aswany, like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, wants no part of what he considers “normalisation” with Israel until there’s a fair resolution to the Palestinian issue. Aswany, by the way, recently announced he was giving up writing his regular column in the independent daily Al-Shorouk. The reason: the government, as part of its ongoing press crackdown, was raiding and shutting down unrelated businesses owned by Shorouk owner Ibrahim Al-Muallem to pressure him to tone down criticisms by Aswany and other columnists. Also worth reading is the Guardian’s always perceptive Brian Whitaker, here he points out one of the ways Egypt’s government controls information: by monopolising statistics.

In Libya, the government has shut down the weekly Oea newspaper. Coverage of the incident in a Qatari newspaper (in Arabic here) pins the ban to a recent editorial that, “claimed that the government had failed to handle the problem of corruption”. The twist: the paper is partially controlled by Said Al-Islam Qaddhafi, son of the Libya’s leader Col. Muammar Qaddhafi. The paper was already banned for six months earlier this year and only resumed normal publication in July.

In Lebanon, the country’s General Security office censored a five-minute scene from a recent play. The scene in question dealt a little too flippantly with Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The play’s Shia writers claim they meant no disrespect to Nasrallah and say they are mystified by the decision. Lebanon is known as a bastion of comparative liberalism in the Middle East, but the General Security office in the Ministry of Interior still has broad powers to ban works of art that could upset the country’s delicate political sensitivities.

Courtesy of the +972 blog, here’s a useful guide to the political line of the major Israeli newspapers, for those seeking to unravel the often bewildering complexities of Israeli politics.