The Company They Keep
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One has to wonder what Time Inc. was thinking when it held its conference this week in Washington, which its Fortune magazine sponsored with a Saudi Arabian front group called the Arab Thought Foundation. Once the association with the Saudi propaganda arm became clear, President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, had the savvy to cancel her scheduled appearance at the conference. So did Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Barak. Mayor Giuliani’s photograph was removed from the conference’s promotional material after The New York Sun called his office to inquire about it. But Fortune’s editorial director, Geoff Colvin, spoke at the event. He had the distinction of sharing a platform with the editor of Arab News, Khaled al-Maeena, who made headlines by defending his newspaper’s description of the Zionist lobby as “subhuman.”
One wonders whether if Time Inc. had been headquartered at the World Trade Center rather than in the Time-Life building, its editors would have been so quick to participate in a propaganda event aimed at polishing the image of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers. To the claim that the event was aimed at improving the conditions that created the hijackers, well, let’s just say that labeling as “subhuman” the defenders of the Jews’ right to a state strikes us as something that falls a bit short of constructive. It’s not as if Fortune’s editors didn’t know this was going to happen. It was clear enough to Ms. Rice and to Messrs. Barak and Giuliani.
Mr. al-Maeena is of a piece with other editors of Saudi controlled publications. Even Al-Hayat, a newspaper respected as a forum for relatively robust debate, is in a sorry state. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, Al-Hayat recently fired a Tunisian journalist, Lafif Lakhdhar, after Mr. Lakhdar spoke about the demand for Western culture by Arab youth and called on the U.N. Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International to intervene “to protect the women who are stoned in Iran” or oppressed everywhere. No doubt were Americans to attack those who speak out for women’s rights, were Americans to refer to Jews as “subhuman,” would be roundly condemned. But it’s a sign of the times that Saudis who do so get listened to demurely at a Fortune magazine conference.
