Reuters: masters of Newspeak

In a story about the first ever public display of contemporary art in Saudi Arabia, Reuters correspondent Asma Alsharif characterizes Saudi society as "conservative" four times:

"Evolution not revolution" reads the sign he plans to place over the conservative Islamic kingdom, where an exhibition organisers call Saudi Arabia's first public show of contemporary art has opened this month, entitled "We need to talk." [...]

Saudi Arabia, a country ruled over by the al-Saud royal family in alliance with powerful conservative clerics, has no elected parliament or political parties and applies a rigid variation of Sharia law. [...]

Other taboos include anything seen as blasphemous, criticism of the conservative nature of Saudi society, and sex or nudity. [...]

Angawi said he accepted that he might not be able to play some of the comments people recorded, and that finding the right balance between freedom of expression and the demands of a conservative society would be difficult.

Recall, this is a country where the most draconian suppression of human rights and freedoms is institutionalized in the country's Sharia-based legal system; Islamic dress-code is enforced by religious police; women must be accompanied by a male guardian at all times; homosexuality is outlawed and punishable by imprisonment, lashings and death; and non-Muslims are persecuted and tortured for practicing their faith.

This is what Reuters characterizes as "conservative".

By contrast, journalists in Reuters Jerusalem Bureau refer to a spitting incident by a Haredi Jew in Israel as "violence by zealots".

What do they teach these guys at Reuters school?

Zealots

Israel is currently experiencing an ugly chasm between its strictly religious Orthodox Jews, Haredim, and its secular Jewish population.  Amongst other draconian practices, the Haredim believe in gender segregation in public spaces, including city buses.  This has led to a spate of clashes as well as dramatic demonstrations by partisans on both sides of the issue.

From a socio-political perspective, such a dispute, occurring in the national homeland of the Jewish people, involves complex issues of religion and governance and we will leave it to the citizenry and politicians in Israel to sort these out.

We will comment however, on the way Reuters Jerusalem Bureau has been covering this story.  In the last two weeks or so, correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan, whose writing interests and style strongly suggest she fancies herself a secular feminist, has written several stories on the dispute where she refers to the Haredim as "zealots".

Our desktop dictionary defines zealot as a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.  The term obviously carries a very powerful and for most readers, strongly negative, connotation.

However one may feel about Haredim, they are certainly no more extreme in their beliefs or religious practices than, for example, orthodox Muslims or Islamists.  Indeed, unlike women living in Saudi Arabia, Haredi women in Israel are able to drive cars, frequently work to support the family, and enjoy equality in matters of civil law including inheritance.

Yet, we've never seen a Reuters story where the agency's correspondents characterize Islamists as "zealots".  Rather, the adjectives employed in stories on Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, etc. run along polite lines like "strict", "conservative", and "austere".

Note for example, this story from 2010 (reported on by Fisher-Ilan), about the Pope calling on Islamic countries in the Middle East to guarantee freedom of worship to non-Muslims:

At least 3.5 million Christians of all denominations live in the Gulf Arab region, the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the most conservative Arab Muslim societies in the world.
The freedom to practise Christianity -- or any religion other than Islam -- is not always a given in the Gulf and varies from country to country. Saudi Arabia, which applies an austere form of Sunni Islam, has by far the tightest restrictions.

There are many ways we might describe a society that employs religious police to arrest and lash a woman who drives or is seen in the company of a man other than her husband, but austere is not one of them.

This asymmetric handling by Fisher-Ilan and her colleagues at Reuters clearly reflects bias as well as either the soft bigotry of low expectations (with respect to religious Muslims) or antisemitism (with respect to religious Jews), or both.

On the other hand, perhaps Fisher-Ilan is simply an anti-Israel zealot.

Reuters careful not to offend its master

In a profile piece on Saudi King Abdullah published in October, Reuters correspondent Angus McDowall illustrates Reuters' commitment to protect and promote the image of those who, in turn, protect its corporate and ideological interests.  If you can stomach it, have a gander at McDowall's puff piece on Abdullah:

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has pushed cautious social changes in the world's top oil-exporting country and guided it through a turbulent time that included an al Qaeda uprising, confrontation with Iran and the Arab Spring upheavals in neighbouring states.
Abdullah had an operation on his back on Monday, almost a year after undergoing two rounds of surgery to treat a herniated disc that led to a three-month absence from the kingdom.
The softly spoken Abdullah was born in the royal court of his father, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, in the early 1920s, when the capital Riyadh was a small oasis town ringed by mud-brick walls at the centre of an impoverished but rapidly growing kingdom.
But after becoming de facto regent as crown prince when King Fahd had a stroke in 1995, and as king from 2005 onwards, he enacted reforms aimed at reconciling Saudi Arabia's conservative traditions with the needs of a modern economy.

Although later in the piece, McDowall cites, in fastidiously sanitized fashion, a handful of examples of political oppression and misogynistic practices in the Kingdom, the overall feel of the story is sickeningly sycophantic.

Entirely omitted from the piece is any mention of the cruelties and human rights abuses institutionalized in the country's Sharia-based legal system, a royal ban on religious practice by non-Muslims (and systematic persecution of those who violate that ban), and Saudi funding of terrorist and antisemitic elements around the world.

A "cautious reformer" indeed.

Saudi king expands Islamic religious police; Reuters refers to country as "conservative"

As the Arab world burns, the House of Saud is increasingly feeling the heat.  In an effort to stave off insurrection in Saudi Arabia of the kind being seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain, Saudi King Abdullah has appeared on television to offer billions of dollars in additional handouts to his people and, predictably, to expand the size and funding of the Islamic religious police.

The Saudi religious police or Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, (Mutaween in Arabic) is tasked with enforcing medieval sharia law in the country.  They have the power to:

arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, anyone engaged in homosexual behavior or prostitution; to enforce Islamic dress-codes, and store closures during the prayer time. They enforce Muslim dietary laws, prohibit the consumption or sale of alcoholic beverages and pork, and seize banned consumer products and media regarded as un-Islamic (such as CDs/DVDs of various Western musical groups, television shows and film). Additionally, they actively prevent the practice or proselytizing of other religions within Saudi Arabia, where they are banned.  Among the things the Mutaween have been criticized or ridiculed for include, use of flogging to punish violators, banning Valentines Day gifts, arresting priests for saying Mass, and being staffed by "ex-convicts whose only job qualification was that they had memorized the Qur'an in order to reduce their sentences."

Here's how Reuters correspondent Crispian Balmer, who is never short of the most hyperbolic and hysterical language when characterizing Israeli security policy, describes this most oppressive and primitive Saudi religious and cultural institution:

In a rare televised address to the nation, the aging king made a brief statement congratulating Saudis for their loyalty and national unity before a battery of decrees were read out suggesting he was embracing increasingly conservative policies [...]

The kingdom has been slow to carry out reform promises in the conservative state since Abdullah came to power in 2005. Diplomats say the king faces opposition to political openings from some senior princes and clerics.

No bias here.

Reuters dissembles for the Saudis

International sanctions have apparently not dented Iran's hopes of joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) by 2017.  However, there's one small catch: WTO rules require member states to abandon any boycotts they maintain against fellow member states.  And Israel, which Iran refuses to refer to by name (when not threatening her with obliteration), is a member of the WTO.  So when reporters asked the Iranian Commerce Minister whether Iran would be willing to drop its boycott of Israel to gain admittance into the WTO, he "declined to say".

Reuters then asserts:

Saudi Arabia dropped its boycott of Israel when it joined the WTO in 2005.

In fact, while the Saudis may have agreed to drop their boycott of Israel, it is more restrictive than ever:

A review of US Commerce Department data conducted by the Post found that the number of boycott-related and restrictive trade-practice requests received by American companies from Saudi Arabia has increased in each of the past two years, rising from 42 in 2006 to 65 in 2007 to 74 in 2008, signifying a jump of more than 76 percent.  The bulk of these requests were related to the companies' or products' relationship to Israel. Typically, Saudi officials ask foreign suppliers to affirm that any goods exported to the desert kingdom are not manufactured in Israel and do not contain any Israeli-made components... The Commerce Department figures reflect only those requests that have been officially reported to the US government.

Reuters really ought to catch up with the news.

Reuters' reversal of reality

In a story appearing on the Reuters' website today, Sylvia Westall reports on a non-binding resolution passed by the UN nuclear assembly urging closer scrutiny of Israel's nuclear program. Pakistan and India, which like Israel are non-signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, are not included in the measure nor is Iran -- currently under UNSC sanctions for refusing to terminate its uranium enrichment program. Only Israel is singled out for special treatment.

Near the end of the article, Westall makes this stunning assertion:

Arab diplomats point to an imbalance of power in the Middle East caused by unchecked Israeli might and say it breeds instability and spurs others to seek mass-destruction weapons.

Apparently, this is not a direct quote so Westall is either paraphrasing the Arab position or summarizing her own view. In either case, the notion is stated uncritically as fact when in reality, it is pure nonsense.

As documented in the CIA World FactBook, while Israel is sixth in military expenditures as a percentage of GDP, the five countries which precede her and thirteen of the top twenty countries in the table are Arab and/or Muslim. Eleven of these countries do not recognize Israel as a state and several are officially at war with Israel. This includes of course, Saudi Arabia, which alone, spends two to three times more on weapons than does Israel.

Arab troops outnumber that of the Israel Defense Forces by a conservative factor of 20:1. As the US has increasingly supplied technologically advanced weapons to the Saudis and Egyptians while Russia has done the same for Iran and Syria, Israel's traditional qualitative military advantage has also been eroded.

That Israel has defied the odds by emerging victorious in all previous wars with the Arabs may have led to the perception of the country as a comparative military giant but that is no excuse for Reuters to parrot ludicrous Arab propaganda or to disseminate its own.  If there is an "imbalance of power" in the Middle East, the advantage in troops, materiel, natural resources, and money lies clearly with the Arabs.  And Iran is not seeking weapons of mass destruction because Israel's military strength "breeds instability".  Iran is inherently unstable and is seeking WMDs to achieve its goal of eradicating a Jewish sovereign.