Today’s editorial on AL-Quds AL-Arabi, Bari Atwan compares the Saudi position with Egypt’s Sadat before signing the peace pact with Israel, Atwan says:
The new Saudi normalization strategy [with Israel] is going forward based on a slow, pre-planned media campaign led by Saudi “neo-liberals”, intellectuals to wipe off the Palestine issue from the Arab mind.
This campaign reminds us with a similar campaign started by Egyptian writers and intellectuals few months before Sadat surprise visit to Israel.
Atwan’s article reminds me of an article reported on the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan two days ago called “This is the Saudi time, like it or not”:
It does not bother me that someone comes from the far away in the world to portrait us as cartoon: a savage Bedouin live in a tent beside an oil well. What upsets me is that an Arab brother tries to draw such image about us.
Some of them are upset that we became the “center” after we were the “side”.
Some of them are upset that the Arab world and its surroundings are timing their clock according to Riyadh time.
There are “eyes” follow “the Saudi scene” only, searching for anything to alter our image, officially or publicly.[They want] to portray everything “Saudi” as an evil, and we conspire– people and institutions — to destroy the glories of the Arab nation.