The ten Arabic newspapers published in the United States and Canada have very little in common except dislike of Israel. But they are staunch defenders of freedom of the press, a condition they acknowledge does not exist in the Arab world, according to an article on domestic Arab newspapers by Spyridon Granitsas appearing in Editor & Publisher, the American newspaper trade Journal. A typical paper, according to the writer, is Al Islaah, established in 1931 and published by an Iraqi-born Christian, Dr. Alphonse Chaurize, which claims that “the creation of Israel was a satanic plot of the Communists to drive the Arabs into the Soviet embrace.” The newest of the Arabic weeklies is Action, edited by Dr. M.T. Mehdi, an active propagandist for Arab causes in the U.S. He told Granitsas that the Arabic press reflects all of the divisions that exist in the Arab world. However, Dr. Mehdi’s newspaper endorsed Arthur J. Goldberg in this year’s New York gubernatorial race because it thought his election would “make the Jews–are secure in New York and they would bother us less in the Middle East.” Dr. Mehdi predicted that in 10-15 years the Arab world will have a free press. “The fact that Israel has more freedom of the press–even during crisis–is mainly due to Western influences while the Jews lived in the Wes. What we need now is some of the same ideas in the Arab world,” Mehdi said. According to Granitsas, most Arab editors believe Jews or Israelis control the American press which, they claim accounts for the alleged one-sidedness of news accounts from the Middle East and distortion of the Arab image.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
