U.A.E. Attempts to Censor News Website in the U.S.

U.A.E. Attempts to Censor News Website in the U.S.
By Rory Jones August 14, 2013

It is usually taken as given that the mollycoddling states of the Persian Gulf censor their local press. Even international newspapers are sometimes subject to censorship on particularly sensitive issues. The U.K.’s Daily Mail discovered as much recently when it printed in Dubai with a blank page where a story on the Godolphin scandal, a racing stable owned by the emirate’s ruler, should have appeared.

But the United Arab Emirates has seemingly gone one step further recently in its bid to censor the media. The country’s telecoms regulator wrote to Hetzner Online AG, a German internet hosting company, on July 31 asking it to shut down an Arabic-language news site based in the U.S, called Watan.com.

The Telecoms Regulator Authority, or TRA, threatened legal action against Hetzner if the company didn’t comply with its request to take down the website.

“The TRA has received a request from the U.A.E. public prosecution, requesting the TRA to shutdown (put offline) the above website,” the letter, posted on the Watan website, said. The TRA declined to comment. Hetzner confirmed it had received the complaint from the TRA and that it would not suspend Watan.com.

Nezam Mahdawi, the Palestinian-American founder and owner of Watan.com, believes he has been subject to a campaign of harassment by authorities in the U.A.E. due to his website’s recent coverage of the political trial of the 94 activists accused of plotting a coup and running a Muslim Brotherhood cell. Set up in 1993, Watan.com claims to receive 120,000 hits per day, and covers a broad range of issues across the Middle East, including the so called Arab Spring uprisings and alleged human rights violations across the region.

“My personal emails have been hacked and every two to three days my wife receives emails from random addresses threatening to publish pictures of our daughter,” Mr. Mahdawi told The Wall Street Journal, adding that GoDaddy, his website’s domain name provider, told him that his website was last year subject to an attempted hacking that originated in Dubai.

Mr. Mahdawi says the U.A.E and other Gulf states are now blocking Watan.com, which has caused a dramatic fall in readers and in advertising in the past year. The website is ranked 132,271 in global traffic, according to web information company Alexa, having been closer to 15,000 in 2011. It agreed a 12-month contract with Dubai-based advertising network Ikoo, which was cancelled after four months due to pressure from the U.A.E. authorities, according to Mr. Mahdawi.

However, Ikoo maintains that the contract was cut short as the site had low traffic and little advertising demand. “Ikoo signs 100s of sites every year, and during first few months of agreement we evaluate and decide on continuing the agreement purely on profitability and ROI,” Isam Bayazidi, chief executive of Ikoo, said in an emailed statement. “This site didn’t make it for us in this simple test, and it was cancelled because of that. Whatever the site owner is stating are his words and it was never communicated by us as it is untrue,” he added.

The move by the TRA to shut down Watan coincides with a heightened crackdown on online dissent throughout the Persian Gulf in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. This year, bloggers and tweeters have been convicted to jail, deportation and public lashings in countries such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

“Authoritarian regimes fear news websites that expose their abuses and inconsistencies,” said Rori Donaghy, campaign manager at the Emirates Centre for Human Rights. “[The TRA move] is an outrageous attack on free speech and indicative of how the U.A.E. is increasingly descending into a police state.”

Source:
U.A.E. Attempts to Censor News Website in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal [http://blogs.wsj.com/middleeast/2013/08/14/u-a-e-attempts-to-censor-news-website-in-the-u-s/]