Soapbox: Muzzling the media By Awatef Abdel-Rahman Arab regimes keep coming up with new ways to muzzle the media. When they are not issuing laws restricting freedom, they are confiscating newspapers or imprisoning journalists. Now they have graduated into technological censorship. In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain and Yemen it is now common for governments to use special filters to block any websites they deem offensive. Arab foreign ministers -- with the notable exception of Qatar and Lebanon -- recently approved a document that restricts satellite broadcasts. The reason is that satellite stations have been pushing the envelope, exposing corruption, and reporting on the ineptness of our regimes. Now governments can use any of a myriad of ambiguous clauses the regulatory document contains to revoke the licences of virtually any broadcast station they don't like. In this part of the world we have no solid tradition of democracy and freedom, not in our families, schools or public life. With the gap between the rich and the poor forever widening, governments have lost interest in playing fair. And our intelligentsia has either sold out or been bullied by the regimes. What is truly sad is that our media has grown too dependant on the West in matters of hardware, technology and method. We have been influenced by American consumerism just as by Zionist propaganda. Since we started signing peace treaties with Israel, our very way of thinking has changed. The language our media now uses seems designed to strip our culture of its basic components and replace it with a way of thinking that is more malleable and less offensive to Zionists. If you don't believe me, just take a quick look at what the media is saying in Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Mauritania. This week's Soapbox speaker is a professor of mass communications at Cairo University.
