If you haven’t heard about the Saudi journalist who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Mohammed, received 30,000 mostly angry tweets, fled the country, was arrested in Malaysia and returned to Saudi Arabia where he faces the death penalty for “blasphemy,” it could be because you’re watching too much Fox News.
As of this writing at least, almost a week after the Kashgari story broke, I can’t find a single story on it at the Fox website.
Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN have all reported the Kashgari story, cluing their viewers in on how far totalitarian Islam, Saudi style, will go to exert its control over the human spirit. But not Fox.
Say — you don’t suppose the fact that Prince Talal bin Alwaleed owns the second-largest block of stock (7 percent) in Newscorp, Fox News’ parent company, not to mention a new $300 million stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent), has anything to do with Fox silence on this Saudi black eye of a story?
After all, it was Saudi dictator King Abdullah — Alwaleed’s uncle — whom press accounts credit with ordering the tweeting journalist’s hot pursuit and imprisonment. And it is Saudi Arabia’s adherence to Islamic limits on free speech that is driving Kashgari’s ordeal.
Maybe it has become institutional Fox thinking to let such news slide for fear of offending the company’s Saudi prince — or for fear of risking the kind of exposure that might remind viewers of Fox’s connections to Saudi regime interests via Alwaleed.
As I’ve argued in the past, it is these connections that make it incumbent upon Newscorp to register as a foreign agent. So, too, should universities that take Saudi and other Islamic millions to open departments of Islamic studies.
Fox’s silence on this bell-ringer of a story reinforces the sneaking suspicion that, conscious or not, there may be an Alwaleed effect on Fox coverage which, in a conflict of interest, actually serves the House of Saud before Fox viewers.
Despite widespread enthusiasm for his demise among fellow Saudis — at last count, a Facebook page titled “The Saudi People Demand Hazma Kashgari’s Execution” had a whopping 23,000 members — I’m guessing Kashgari’s already publicized repentance will be accepted by Saudi poobahs.
The new “moderation” of “the Kingdom” — see, they don’t kill you for tweeting! — will become the story of the day, maybe “fair and balanced” enough for Fox News to cover it.
That would make it a win-win situation, at least when it comes to Islamic law enforcement. Saudi Arabia gets international “modernization” brownie points, and no one dares break Shariah inside the country anyway, particularly given the bloodthirsty scorn of the Saudi public (remember that Facebook community of execution-for-“blasphemy” enthusiasts.) No “blasphemy,” no “defamation,” no problem.
This same issue is a part of a much larger story, a terrifying point of parley between the Islamic world, as represented by the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the free world, as led, still, by the USA.
Why terrifying? Any accommodation of Islamic so-called blasphemy law is an unconstitutional erosion of American free speech. Disastrously, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working the USA into sync with the Saudi, OIC and, apparently, Fox position that silence on Islam is golden.
While meeting with the OIC last summer to discuss “defamation” of Islam, Clinton promoted a de facto censorship of Islam’s critics by calling for “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”
Funny, but I don’t think Fox covered the secretary of state’s menacing comments about free speech. Not a tweet’s worth.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
