When a Saudi court sentenced a young woman to 200 lashes in November after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her, the case provoked outrage and headlines around the world, including in West Asia. But not at Al-Jazeera, the Arab world’s leading satellite television channel. The station’s silence was especially noteworthy because until recently, and unlike almost all other Arab news outlets, Al-Jazeera had long been willing — eager, in fact — to broadcast fierce criticisms of Saudi Arabia’s rulers.For the past three months Al-Jazeera, which once infuriated the Saudi royal family with its freewheeling newscasts, has treated the kingdom with kid gloves, media analysts say. The newly cautious tone appears to have been dictated to Al-Jazeera’s management by the rulers of Qatar, where Al-Jazeera has its headquarters. Although those rulers established the channel a decade ago in large part as a forum for critics of the Saudi Government, they now seem to feel they cannot continue to alienate Saudi Arabia — a fellow Sunni nation — in light of the threat from Iran across the Persian Gulf. The specter of Iran’s nuclear ambitions may be particularly daunting to Qatar, which also is the site of a major US military base.The new policy is the latest chapter in a gradual domestication of Al-Jazeera, once reviled by US officials as little more than a terrorist propaganda outlet. Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts no longer routinely refer to Iraqi insurgents as the “resistance,” or victims of American firepower as “martyrs”. The deal also illustrates the way the Arab media, despite the new freedoms introduced by Al-Jazeera itself a decade ago, are still often treated as political tools by the region’s autocratic rulers.“The gulf nations now feel they are all in the same boat, because of the threat of Iran, and the chaos of Iraq and America’s weakness,” said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. Those assurances, Alani added, were given at a September meeting in Riyadh between King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and top officials in the Qatari Government, aimed at resolving a long-simmering feud between the nations. The Qataris brought along an unusual guest: the chairman of Al-Jazeera’s board, Sheik Hamad bin Thamer al-Thani. Several employees confirmed that the chairman of the board had attended the meeting. “Orders were given not to tackle any Saudi issue without referring to the higher management,” one Jazeera newsroom employee wrote in an e-mail message.
