If you did not know that you were in Britain as you read the press coverage of King Abdullah's visit to the UK this week, you would think that you were in socialist Romania or in a third world country where a government handler tells the press what to say and then the front pages of all the country's newspapers have the same headlines and the same phrases.
They all focused on the King Abdullah's comment about "Britain has not done enough" to combat terrorism and Saudi human rights. Is this a case of the boat of the British media innocently capsizing? Or is it, as many Arabs suspect, a clever attempt to run away from the difficult and sensitive issue of Palestine and King Abdullah's peace initiative?
This was a personal disappointment to me because in almost all my columns in the Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat I argue that Arab media should emulate western standards of journalism and stop blaming every Arab problem on the West.
The Monday papers blamed everything wrong with Britain on Saudi Arabia. It was the Saudis who corrupted BAE Systems; the hate material in British mosques was a Saudi product. Robert Fisk of the Independent set the tone of the coverage with remarks that anywhere else could be borderline racism. In response to King Abdullah's statement to the BBC about the need for Britain to do more to combat terrorism, Fisk asks: "In what world do these people live?" Making cultural comparisons between Saudi Arabia's palaces and Buckingham Palace, Fisk says: "There won't even be a backhander - or will there? - which is the Saudi way of doing business."
Fisk asks how dare the king lecture us on terrorism while "we fete these people, we fawn on them, we supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores." Is this what Britain supplies to Saudi Arabia: "whisky and whores"? Then who is corrupting whom? The strange logic that dominated the coverage was: how you dare criticise us on handling intelligence material while you have a bad human rights record?
It is a pity that the British press in general seemed seem to run away from the essence of the visit and the big strategic stakes involved for the security of the world and the security of the Middle East at large.
The reality is that Saudi Arabia is a stabilising force in the world economy. As a major producer of oil and as a moderate country, the west relies on Saudi Arabia to moderate prices by pumping enough oil into the market not to stop them from shooting above $100 a barrel, which could tilt the western world into recession.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a frenzy of diplomatic activities to avert regional disasters. On March 28, 2007, it hosted a summit of all Arab leaders to re-launch the Saudi peace initiative of 2002. As a result, King Abdullah's peace initiative is now an Arab initiative that is taken seriously by Israel. This came on the heels of the Mecca agreement between Hamas and Fatah concluded by King Abdullah. He also hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad in an effort to moderate Iran's position on its nuclear programme. In Iraq he invited many members of the leadership including the Kurdish leader Masoud Barazani and Iyad Allawi to promote Shia -Sunni-Kurdish dialogue as a way of stabilising Iraq. Saudi Arabia is also involved in concluding a deal to stabilise Lebanon.
All these activities on a strategic level seem to have been of no relevance to the British media, which instead gave disproportionate coverage to a few human rights protesters in front of Buckingham Palace.
Do not read me wrong. Human rights matter. However, if we compare the number of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia with the rest of the neighbourhood, we find that the Saudi number today does not exceed 10 by the accounts of the opposition themselves, while in the rest of the region we find that political prisoners are held by the thousands, including in Israeli jails. The principle of proportionality is important.
It is ironic that King Abdullah is being hailed by Saudi women as the man who will give them more rights. Saudi girls put pictures of the King on their scarves, and nobody is telling them to do so. This king deserves support for what he is doing to reform Saudi Arabia and also for the new role that he carved for Saudi Arabia as a force of economic and political stability.
King Abdullah is right to say that Britain is not doing enough to combat terrorism. A country that hosts Muslim radicals who appear from London on the screens of al-Jazeera TV rallying young Arabs for jihad is not doing enough to combat terrorism. The number of extremists who are fuelling jihad who live in London gave the city its name in the moderate camp of the Muslim world: Londonistan.
For example, on October 1, 2007, Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority, Sheikh Abd al-Aziz Al Sheikh issued a fatwa against Saudi youth who are engaging in jihad in Iraq and other places. In a long and detailed piece of Islamic theology, he condemned Saudi youth who go to Iraq to conduct terrorist operations. He called their actions "dirty deeds that have no relationship to Islam".
The Saudi fatwa was widely hailed - in the west and the Muslim world - as an excellent step to combat extremism, though there were some in London who denounced it. The king was talking about this kind of failure in combating terrorism.