What a disappointing response to such an interesting and important article.
I thought online opinion was a thinkers forum. Wake up to yourselves!
Didn’t this even register with any of you? "And never mind that Arab society - a society that remains broken in body and spirit more than a half-century after independence - needs very much to engage in serious self-assessment and to promote an open debate in the media among intellectuals, academics, political analysts and others about why Arabs have failed all these years to meet the challenges of modernity."

What about this?
"Democracy may be a political system, but it is also a social ethos. How responsive can a country be to such an ethos when its people have, for generations, existed with an ethic of fear - fear of originality, fear of innovation, fear of spontaneity, fear of life itself - and have had instilled in them the need to accept orthodoxy, dependence and submission?"

Now go back and re-read the article and then write out a hundred times “I will not post crap on the online opinion pages”.

Staunch, I was thinking similar things myself, but less eloquently. I thought this was a really important piece and went out of my way to chase it and couldn't believe that it hasn't attracted more comment.

STAUNCH: I thought online opinion was a thinkers forum.

Yeah nah. That'll learn ya, but.

And there's one of them aprostate things in "thinker's".

GrahamY,

Maybe the article didn't attract many comments because the story is expected. You can't work for any newspaper anywhere and criticise the politics they promote. Can you have a job or keep it at foxnews if you criticise US policy and / or Israel?

Fawaz,

Honest journalism is becoming a rare commodity so keep writing what you truly believe and one day you will get a job because of what you stand for not because of what you should write.

Fact is, honesty is not respected across many workplaces these days - more of the world's moral decline where the ends justify the means.

I lost my last job due the fact that I like to call a spade a spade. People in positions of power are can say what they truly believe, but due to their own agendas, the absymal irony is, that they rarely do.

Also I read this article previously on the Washington Post website - and reached the same conclusion then as Fellow Human.

Welcome back F_H - you have been greatly missed.

Regards

Fellow Human, of course you can criticise US policy or Israel and keep a job at Fox, although I'm sure there are limits. The point is not that he lost his job for going against the newspaper's stance, but that the newspaper's view of what could be published is so narrow. Not only that, but this view is uniform across newspapers in Saudi Arabia, and aparently much of the Arab world.

So, imagine a world not only where Fox refused to carry stories on prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib, but where the Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, CNN etc. etc ad nauseum refused to carry such stories. You'd have a dysfunctional society, at least compared to what is now considered the norm.

Perhaps the reason this article didn't collect too many comments is because the writer didn't sheet the blame home to Islam.