Arab media condemns beheading
Arab media reacted cautiously to the beheading of an American civilian on a video issued by an associate of Osama bin Laden, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.
Opinion columnists condemned the execution of Nick Berg, an American businessman who had been kidnapped in Iraq in April.
The main satellite channels broadcast an edited version of the video, cutting out the severing of the head as indecent.
Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired carefully edited snippets of the video.
In Al-Arabiya’s edit, a militant is seen drawing a knife and jerking Berg’s torso to one side. The rest is not shown.
“The news story itself is strong enough,” said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. “To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency.”
The video was released on the internet too late for Middle East newspaper columnists, but the grisly execution appalled many Arabs.
They said it surpassed the American military’s abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, which had been the top story for the past 10 days in the Middle East.
“We were winning international sympathy because of what happened at Abu Ghraib, but they come and waste it all,” said Abdullah Sahar, a Kuwait University political scientist, said of the Islamic militants responsible.
Mustafa Bakri, editor of Al-Osboa weekly newspaper in Egypt, said Berg’s execution would only harm efforts to expose American offences against Iraqis.
“Such revenge is rejected,” Bakri said of the execution. “The American administration will make use of such crimes just to cover their real crimes against Iraqis.”
Lebanon’s private Al Hayat-LBC station led its bulletins today with the video. Its news presenter said: “We apologise to our viewers for not showing the entire tape because of the ugliness of the scene.”
Kuwait’s state television broadcast the news of the execution late Tuesday but not the video.
Egypt’s leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading. Two other major pro-government newspapers ran news agency reports on their inside pages and without photographs.
Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report the execution at all.
