Courage In Their Coverage

DUBAI -- Talking with brave Arab journalists such as Hussein Shobokshi, I hear the passion that animates good reporting everywhere. And it makes me all the more disgusted by recent revelations that my own government has been corrupting the nascent Iraqi free press by planting stories.

Shobokshi was fired by the Jiddah daily paper Okaz in 2003 after he wrote a column imagining a democratic Saudi future in which his daughter could drive, leaders were elected and the budget was public. This June he was attacked for writing a column in Asharq al-Awsat titled, "Why Do We Hate the Jews?" He described "a very noble and polite" Jewish doctor in America who had treated his young nephew for a rare cancer, and he asked why Saudis were encouraged "to hate Jews and pray against them, too."

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