Saudi Arabia
Hassan Tahsin
The Western press just loves a story that makes Arabs look bad, said Hassan Tahsin in Riyadh’s Arab News. European and American media pounced gleefully on an erroneous report that Saudi King Abdullah had asked newspapers throughout the Gulf region to stop printing photographs of Saudi women. They “didn’t even bother to verify the facts.” Had the Western reporters managed to do any of that careful, objective reporting they brag about, they would have discovered that the king was misquoted. What he actually said was that the press should be more careful in how it depicted Saudi women. Any Western journalist with common sense would have known the King would not issue a total ban on photos of women, since Saudi papers routinely run them. In fact, Saudi coverage of the recent World Economic Forum featured prominent photographs of Princess Lolwah al-Faisal, one of the Saudi attendees. But in their “anti-Muslim bias,” the reporters preferred to portray the king as an ultraconservative sexist. The truth is that Islam “respects women.” In the West, women are “reduced to a commodity,” while Islam “recommends gentle treatment to allow them to maintain their natural femininity and chastity.”
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