More al-Arabiya Watch

Bizarrely, Only a week after Mohammed "Artist of the Arabs -except that he thinks of himself as Saudi first" Abduh, who in between 90 minutes of incoherent mumbling gave Prophet Mohammed a Saudi passport on the Saudi MBC channel, he appeared on sister news channel al-Arabiya in the program Idha'aat
Idhaa'at is an excellent Gulf-centric reformist-bent program that interviews personalities often considered "controversial" ranging from intellectuals, writers, politicians, and poets. So what does Abduh, a socially and politically irrelevant singer who messed up answering a question doing here? and if that's not a dead giveaway, the first question anchor Turki ad-Dakhil asked him was to apologetically explain the incident, and he explained it like a robot...without stuttering.

On al-Arabiya.net : Aside from the ongoing anti-Hezbollah campaign, al-Arabiya runs an article on Gambia's president, who threatened to behead all homosexuals in Gambia. I can only describe the comments section as "happy lynching (of homosexuals, that is)."

al-Arabiya

After reading Angry Arab, I came to realize the bias of Saudi al-Arabiya, who I thought was fairly objective before. it's certainly more coy than the fire-and-brimstone traditional Arab-Muslim views of al-Jazeera, but just look at the front page: championing the weak Hariri with headlines such as "Progress being made in Doha in spite of setbacks," while waging a complete war against Hezbollah with the featured opinions: "This is why the Hezbollah coup failed," a simpler and more obvious inclination of their bias is the article about Saudi singer Mohammed Abduh's recent interview on the "Godfather" talk show, (for some reason, Abduh is called the "Artist of the Arabs" although I don't think he's really heard outside the Gulf much), in that interview, Mr. Abduh lambasted Iraqi Kadhum al-Sahir, another frequently cited "Artist of the Arabs" but possibly the most successful pan-Arab artist in recent decades. while al-Arabiya mentions this in its headline as the major controversy of the show, they pass in silence the real controversy which is all over other forums, in which the Saudi singer called the Prophet Muhammed a "Saudi." live on air.