What is Thomas Friedman doing in Riyadh?

[Solomon2]

Trouble posting comments but it seems I can still post new threads. Here goes:

What is Thomas Friedman doing in Riyadh?

MOHAMMED FAHAD AL-HARTHI
Published — Wednesday 25 November 2015


The presence of American writer and columnist Thomas Friedman in Riyadh has sparked a debate about the purpose of his visit. Some have classified Friedman as an anti-Saudi writer, who has written articles implying the Kingdom is the source of terrorism. In some circles, he is also seen as anti-Arab for his critical pieces on countries in the region.

While I disagree with some of Friedman’s views, I cannot align myself with those who try to classify and label him. A deeply rooted problem in our society is that we love to categorize, not only differences between us and people abroad, but also domestically, simply based on a divergence of views. Time and effort will be needed to eliminate these tendencies.

Friedman is influential but it would be futile to try to censor him or others. Harsh censorship policies can be considered among the chief reasons for the decline of Arab countries. It is easy to ban a book, newspaper or writer, but the consequence is that debate is stifled. Dialogue is critical if people are to reach any form of consensus and mutual understanding on issues.

Societies that offer space to accommodate and discuss opposing views are those that are confident and capable of determining their own futures. Intelligent and open discourse allow people to either modify their own behavior if they are wrong, or identify the mistakes of others.

The presence of writers with different views and approaches, and the discussion of these views, is a healthy practice. During the Janadriyah Festival, for example, Saudi Arabia would host writers and intellectuals of many different backgrounds, including leftists, nationalists, Nasserites and liberals.

There were no red lines imposed on certain subjects. On the contrary, the frank debates often surprised many in attendance during seminars. Several participants remarked to me that they had been told everything was open for discussion as long as it was to exchange ideas in a constructive manner.

I personally had the opportunity to attend the majlis, or council, of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman when he was the governor of Riyadh. The discussions during the majlis reflected a myriad of ideas from people of different backgrounds in a healthy, productive and bold manner.

The revolution in information technology has opened the door for the discussion and debate of issues across all sorts of geographical and ethnic boundaries. It is difficult to limit dialogue on these sites, so governments have become more flexible in dealing with them, and more receptive to different opinions.
An audience that has little trust in traditional media outlets will head toward other media and perhaps find alternative voices. However, the danger of these sites is that information posted lacks credibility, with sources obscure at best. There have been numerous instances where information on these sites have been inaccurate or fabricated. People are quick to spread news, but often find later that it is false. A welcome development is that people are increasingly seeking to verify information.

Furthermore, opening the door to foreign media can enhance our reputation abroad. We can certainly expect that some people would support us on certain issues once this happens. While we may be advocating fairness and justice, the problem possibly lies in our inability to market ourselves.

Some people are critical of this, arguing that our government could consider foreign media professionals more important than local journalists, by giving them access to people and create exclusive news opportunities for them. There is certainly a danger of losing the trust of local reporters.

Nonetheless, being open to others’ ideas and views does not mean the advancement of one group over another, but an opportunity to discuss issues on a level playing field. Festivals are a good way to market a country. And what often happens is that once foreign journalists visit a country, their views are exposed as stereotypes and changed forever.

So Friedman’s trip to the Kingdom and his meetings with various segments of society is a smart way to deliver our ideas, and to listen and learn about how others see us.

It is not logical to continue our dialogue internally, with the assumption that everyone is listening. Opening our doors to journalists and writers is an important step that will help develop a positive image of the Kingdom. The power of the media lies with its influencers, which requires direct engagement with these individuals or groups. Our voices are bound to be the loudest as long as we stand for truth and logic.

 

[Steve781]

Thomas Friedman is always wrong. If he's now started liking the Saudis they should worry.

 

[Solomon2]

Thomas Friedman is always wrong. If he's now started liking the Saudis they should worry.

I find that what TF communicates is of more interest than his personal opinions.

 

[Aestu]

Thomas Friedman is always wrong. If he's now started liking the Saudis they should worry.

"Like" has nothing to do with it, and what they should be (and are) worried about are fracking in the US and missile developments in Iran.

 

[Solomon2]

Letter From Saudi Arabia
NOV. 25, 2015



Thomas L. Friedman

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is a country that is easier to write about from afar, where you can just tee off on the place as a source of the most austere, antipluralistic version of Islam — the most extreme versions of which have been embraced by the Islamic State, or ISIS. What messes me up is when I go there and meet people I really like and I see intriguing countertrends.

Last week I came here looking for clues about the roots of ISIS, which has drawn some 1,000 Saudi youth to its ranks. I won’t pretend to have penetrated the mosques of bearded young men, steeped in Salafist/Wahhabi Islam, who don’t speak English and whence ISIS draws recruits. I know, though, that the conservative clergy is still part of the ruling bargain here — some of the most popular Twitter voices are religious firebrands — and those religious leaders still run the justice system and sentence liberal bloggers to flogging, and they’re still in denial about how frustrated the world is with the ideology they’ve exported.

But I also ran into something I didn’t know: Something is stirring in this society. This is not your grandfather’s Saudi Arabia. “Actually, it’s not even my father’s Saudi Arabia anymore — it is not even my generation’s Saudi Arabia anymore,” the country’s 52-year-old foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said to me.

For instance, I was hosted by the King Salman Youth Center, an impressive education foundation that, among other things, has been translating Khan Academy videos into Arabic. It invited me to give a lecture on how big technological forces are affecting the workplace. I didn’t know what to expect, but more than 500 people showed up, filling the hall, roughly half of them women who sat in their own sections garbed in traditional black robes. There was blowback on Twitter as to why a columnist who’s been critical of Saudi Arabia’s export of Salafist ideology should be given any platform. But the reception to my talk (I was not paid) was warm, and the questions from the audience were probing and insightful about how to prepare their kids for the 21st century.

It appears that conservatives here have a lot more competition now for the future identity of this country, thanks to several converging trends. First, most of Saudi Arabia is younger than 30. Second, a decade ago, King Abdullah said he’d pay the cost for any Saudi who wanted to study abroad. That’s resulted in 200,000 Saudis studying overseas today (including 100,000 in America), and now 30,000 a year are coming back with Western degrees and joining the labor force. You now see women in offices everywhere, and several senior officials whispered to me how often the same conservatives who decry women in the workplace quietly lobby them to get their daughters into good schools or jobs.

Finally, just as this youth bulge exploded here, so did Twitter and YouTube — a godsend for a closed society. Young Saudis are using Twitter to talk back to the government and to converse with one another on the issues of the day, producing more than 50 million tweets per month.

What’s been missing was a leadership ready to channel this energy into reform. Enter the new King Salman’s son, Mohammed bin Salman, the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, who, along with the moderate crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, has embarked on a mission to transform how Saudi Arabia is governed.

Mohammed bin Salman. Credit Kenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images​

I spent an evening with Mohammed bin Salman at his office, and he wore me out. With staccato energy bursts, he laid out in detail his plans. His main projects are an online government dashboard that will transparently display the goals of each ministry, with monthly K.P.I.s — key performance indicators — for which each minister will be held accountable. His idea is to get the whole country engaged in government performance. Ministers tell you: Since Mohammed arrived, big decisions that took two years to make now happen in two weeks.


“The key challenges are our overdependence on oil and the way we prepare and spend our budgets,” Mohammed explained. His plan is to reduce subsidies to wealthy Saudis, who won’t get cheap gas, electricity or water anymore, possibly establish a value-added tax and sin taxes on cigarettes and sugary drinks, and both privatize and tax mines and undeveloped lands in ways that can unlock billions — so even if oil falls to $30 a barrel, Riyadh will have enough revenues to keep building the country without exhausting its savings. He’s also creating incentives for Saudis to leave government and join the private sector.

“Seventy percent of Saudis are under age 30, and their perspective is different from the other 30 percent,” said Mohammed. “I am working to create for them the country they want to be living in in the future.”

Is this a mirage or the oasis? I don’t know. Will it produce a more open Saudi Arabia or a more efficient conservative Saudi Arabia? I don’t know. It definitely bears watching, though. “ “I’ve never been more optimistic,” Mohammed Abdullah Aljadaan, chairman of the Saudi Capital Market Authority, told me. “We have a pulse that we’ve never seen before, and we have a [role] model in government we thought we’d never see.”

Bottom line: There are still dark corners here exporting intolerant ideas. But they seem to now have real competition from both the grass roots and a leadership looking to build its legitimacy around performance, not just piety or family name. As one Saudi educator said to me, “There is still resistance to change,” but there is now much more “resistance to the resistance.”

Mohammed has had the important backing of his father, King Salman, who has replaced both the key health and housing ministers with nonroyal business executives as part of a broader shift to professionalize the government and stimulate the private sector to take a bigger role in the economy. The new health minister was the most important C.E.O. in the country, Khalid al-Falih, who was running the national oil company, Aramco.

Streamlining government, Mohammed said, is vital to “help us fight corruption,” which “is one of our main challenges.” Moreover, only by phasing out subsidies and raising domestic energy prices, he added, can Saudi Arabia one day install “nuclear power generation or solar power generation” and make them competitive in the local market. That is badly needed so that more Saudi oil can be exported rather than consumed at home, he said.

But this will all be tricky. Saudi workers pay no income tax. “Our society does not accept taxes; [citizens] are not used to them,” said Mohammed. So the fact that the government may be increasing taxes in some way, shape or form could have political ramifications: Will the leaders hear declarations of “no taxation without representation”?

How far things will go in that direction — Saudi Arabia already has municipal elections where women can run and vote — is unclear. But the new government does seem to intuit that to the extent that its welfare state has to be shrunk, because of the falling price of oil, its performance and responsiveness have to rise.


“A government that is not a part of the society and not representing them, it is impossible that it will remain,” said Mohammed. “We saw that in the Arab Spring. The governments that survived are only those that are connected to their people. People misunderstand our monarchy. It is not like Europe. It is a tribal form of monarchy, with many tribes and subtribes and regions connecting to the top.” Their wishes and interests have to be taken into account. “The king cannot just wake up and decide to do something.”


There were other little things that caught my eye on this visit — like the Western symphony orchestra playing on Saudi state-run television one afternoon and the collection of contemporary paintings by Saudi artists, including one of a Saudi woman by a Saudi woman, on display in the Ministry of Information.

As for ISIS, Mohammed disputed that it is a product of Saudi religious thinking, arguing that it was in fact a counterreaction to the brutalization of Iraqi Sunnis by the Iranian-directed Shiite-led government in Baghdad of Nouri al-Maliki and to the crushing of Syrian Sunnis by the Iranian-backed government in Damascus. “There was no [ISIS] before America departed from Iraq. And then America leaves and Iran enters, and then ISIS appears,” he said.

He complained that at a time when ISIS is blowing up mosques in Saudi Arabia in an effort to destabilize the regime, the world is accusing Saudi Arabia of inspiring ISIS: “The [ISIS] terrorists are telling me that I am not a Muslim. And the world is telling me I am a terrorist.”

This is the legacy, though, of decades of one part of the Saudi government and society promoting Salafist Islam and the other part working with the West to curb jihadists. As I said, the world has been frustrated with that dichotomy.

Mohammed argued that the ISIS narrative is beamed directly to Saudi youth via Twitter, and that the message is: “The West is trying to enforce its agenda on you — and the Saudi government is helping them — and Iran is trying to colonize the Arab world. So we — ISIS — are defending Islam.”

He added: “We don’t blame the West for misreading us. It is partly our fault. We don’t explain our situation. The world is changing rapidly, and we need to reprioritize to be with the world. Today the world is different. You cannot be isolated from the world. The world must know what is going on in your neighborhood, and we must know what is going on in the world — [it’s] a global village.”

In Yemen, a Saudi-led Gulf coalition has been fighting a coalition of Houthi militants and rebels loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who are backed by Iran. The rebels pushed the official Yemeni government out of the capital, Sana, in March and the Saudi coalition is trying to restore it to power. So far, the U.N. reports, some 5,700 people have been killed, many of them civilians. Saudi officials made clear to me that they are ready for a negotiated solution, and don’t want to be stuck in a quagmire there, but that the Houthis will get serious only if they keep losing ground, as they have been.

“The other side has trouble reaching a political consensus,” said Mohammed, who is also defense minister. “But whenever they sustain loses on the ground and international pressure, they get serious [about negotiating]. We are trying to bring this to an end.”

Like just about every official I spoke with on this trip to the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Mohammed voiced a desire for America not to abandon the region. “There are times when there is a leader and not a leader [in the world], and when there are no leaders, chaos will ensue.”

Writing about KSA from afar

ABDULATEEF AL-MULHIM
Published — Monday 30 November 2015

Thomas Friedman, in his latest article “Letter from Saudi Arabia” published in the New York Times, wrote, “Saudi Arabia is a country that is easier to write about from afar.”

In his article, Friedman has explained many things about Saudi Arabia to his readers in the United States. This writer wishes to explain many other aspects of Saudi Arabia that the people in the US and other parts of the world need to know.

Friedman visited the Kingdom last week. It wasn’t his first visit to the Kingdom and most likely it will not be his last. Whether he admits it or not, he likes visiting the region especially Saudi Arabia. He also loves writing about it just like so many journalists from around the world. As a matter of fact many Op-Ed writers envy Friedman and others who visit the Kingdom for the opportunities and hospitalities they receives while in the Kingdom.

I have written in many articles in the Arab News that writing about Saudi Arabia generally boosts sales of a newspaper and attracts worldwide attention if the writer is somebody like Thomas Friedman.

I am sure Friedman must have been aware of the opinions of many Saudis about his visit to the Kingdom. As he wrote in his article, many were not happy to see him invited to Saudi Arabia because of some of his controversial articles about the country. To be honest, I didn’t even know about the visit till I saw many of the tweets and comments about the visit. Reading between the lines, most of the people who were opposed to the visit were basically irked because they were not invited to his lecture. In other words, it was a perfect case of sour grapes. They all knew that Friedman is a widely read writer. Every writer knows that it is not easy to make everybody like his or her articles. The same goes for Friedman. Even I don’t agree with many of his analyses about the Kingdom but he is entitled to his opinion and I do respect his opinion. Since I have been following his articles for a long time, I can claim to read between the lines. His writings are usually based on concrete facts or educated guesses. And to be honest, I sometimes feel that he has a red line between his Washington DC office and the White House, State Department, the Pentagon and M Street.

As for Friedman’s lecture in Riyadh, I honestly wanted to attend it. Had I been there, I would have asked him few questions like: Are the Saudi-US ties really strategic by nature? What really makes Saudi Arabia such an interesting place to write about from afar? Why he or other well-known columnists never write about Saudi Arabia’s contribution to the region and to the world?

I sometimes feel that both Saudi Arabia and the United States are underappreciated regarding what they have done for the world. Both countries are blamed for many things than any other country.

Whenever things get complicated in the world, people start looking at the US for a solution. Similarly, when some regional crisis goes out of control, people await for a solution from Riyadh. But the difference between Saudi Arabia and the US is that America has the strongest and most influential media outlets in the world. The US media can shape not only the opinion of people in America but also of the people around the world. And this is where Friedman gets his influence.