‘Battling Boycotts'

That was the headline over an article in the Saturday/Sunday edition of the Wall Street Journal, in what appeared as a news section of that newspaper produced "in collaboration with MITSloan Management Review." The article carried three bylines, none of which, so far as we could tell, belonged to newspapermen or Wall Street Journal staffers. The lead author was Saleh AlShebil, who was identified as "a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the University of Texas in Arlington" who "will be joining King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, in Saudi Arabia, upon graduation."

One scans the article in vain for some acknowledgement of the biggest boycott that looms over the Middle East, the Arab boycott of Israel. As Michael Freund reported in the Jerusalem Post, Saudi Arabia last week attended an Arab League conference at Damascus on the Arab boycott, and its adherence to the boycott is in violation of pledges made to the Bush administration in exchange for American support of Saudi accession to the WTO. It seems to be a boycott the authors have little interest in battling – or covering.

Journal readers wondering how to deal with a boycott are told of "a Saudi furniture store" that changed its name "from the Saudi-American Furniture Store to the Saudi Furniture Store." What this would mean for, say, American Airlines is a question the article does not confront, but the logical extension seems to be that anti-American sentiment in the Middle East could be quelled simply by changing the name of America to Saudi Arabia.

Readers are told that an anti-American boycott in Egypt was "driven by anger over U.S. support for Israel" and that "because of the anti-U.S. sentiment in the Arab region and elsewhere in recent years, many foreign brands and retail stores became targets of protests and boycotts because they were thought to be American." The authors don't seem up to probing whether these "anti-U.S." sentiments and "anger" are fanned by the local dictators eager to distract their populations from their own misery.

The Wall Street Journal is a heroic newspaper, with an editorial page that has a record of defending Israel and free trade, and it has done so on principle, not by urging businesses to abandon America or to appease the local hatreds. These columns try to make it a practice not to advise other newspaper proprietors how to conduct their affairs. But if Wall Street Journal doesn't move quickly to assign an Israeli graduate student or mineral magnate to apply to King Fahd University or try to sell the university some products as a follow-up article, it might find itself scooped.