By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The statement was released by UNCHR spokesman Rupert Colville.
Colville added:
“Whether or not you watch it, like it, or agree with its editorial standpoints, Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English channels are legitimate, and have many millions of viewers. The demand that they be summarily closed down is, in our view, an unacceptable attack on the right to freedom of expression and opinion…”
Journalists have also weighed in on the controversy. Yasser Mahjub al-Ansari writes in al-Sharq, saying that the boycott placed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia and others is a human rights violation in international law and has nothing to do with combating terrorism.
The demand for the closure of Al Jazeera, he said, is an attack on Qatar’s national sovereignty. The channel has become part of Qatar’s grand strategy, and asking them to close it down is like asking Switzerland to close its banks. Moreover, its Arab and Western viewership has come to depend on it– Saudi and the others are intervening in someone else’s relationship.
He quotes Egyptian journalist Muhammad Hussein Haikal that Al Jazeera being the best known brand in Arabic language news.
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
Why Saudi Arabia Wants Qatar to Shut Al Jazeera | The New York Times
Saudi Arabia and other ultra-conservative and autocratic monarchy’s primarily want to suppress all opposition and pro-reform groups and media outlets so that they can continue to be human right violators and use their financial muscle (but not moral right) to remain unaccountable.
The American government has just passed legislation seriously curtailing, if not actually shutting down, the Russian news channels, RT and Sputnic for the very same reasons as the Saudi government wants to close Al Jazeera. That is, they are putting out news and opinion that contradicts the state narrative and therefore has to be silenced. Free speech is only tolerated when it doesn’t challenge the state. Curiously, Turkey’s Erdogan supports Qatar yet he has silenced most of his critics at home by putting them in prison. Its a mad world.
There is an enormous difference between censorship at home – which practically every country has committed and is recognized as their sovereign right under international law – and ordering another country to close its own media a part of an ultimatum of war. The Saudis were already censoring their own citizens’ media. This is very different.
U.N. High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein may well be concerned but his concern has no teeth. Anyone who imagines Mohammed bin Salman can be swayed by UNCHR pronouncements, any more than Netanyahu, is deluded. In fact it might be argued that the expression of such concern in the absence of any meaningful follow through is actually counter productive since it may encourage some to imagine that if the UNCHR has taken it up they can relax about it. It also encourages the perpetrators of human rights abuse to cock a snook at the institution itself. There is no room for sweeping denunciations or trenchant criticisms in the dealings of a world whose falsehoods and veracities are separated by so thin a barrier Gibbon.
To think the US has always supported, protected, and has been Saudi’s best buddy, is unbelievable. Here we have been accusing other nations of not having democracy and we have invaded other nations to take “democracy” there, yet Saudi continues to stone women to death, and arrest women when they dare to drive cars. How about taking “democracy” to Saudi Arabia too, just like we took it to Iraq?