"I will not submit to this act of censorship," said the article's author.
Al Jazeera Blocks Anti-Saudi Arabia Article
Cora Currier
THE CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS of Al Jazeera appears to have
blocked an article critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record from
viewers outside the United States. The news network, which is funded by
the government of Qatar, told local press that it did not intend to
offend Saudi Arabia or any other state ally, and would remove the piece.
The op-ed, written by Georgetown University professor and lawyer
Arjun Sethi and titled, “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for
Human Rights Abuses,” ran on the website of Al Jazeera America, the
network’s U.S. outlet. It comments on reports of 50 people recently
sentenced to death for alleged terrorist activity and criticizes the
U.S. government’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
The article ran on December 3, and is still available
in the United States, but people attempting to view the link in other
countries were given an error or “not found” page. (For international
readers, we’ve reprinted the full text of the article here.)
