Akhbar Al Khaleej
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Akhbar Al Khaleej is a Bahraini daily with a Left wing/Arab nationalist slant. Its editor in chief is Anwar Abdulrahman and is the sister paper of the English language, Gulf Daily News.
The paper is known to be close to Bahrain’s main leftist opposition party, National Democratic Action and its columnists include some of the country’s most prominent leftists such as Sameera Rajab and Mahmood Al Gassab, who is a leading member of the Jami'at al-Tajammu' al-Qawmi al-Dimuqrat, one of the four opposition societies to the government.
With its Arab nationalist stance, the newspaper has led condemnation of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and has been particularly critical those Iraqis who have cooperated with the American backed political order: Samira Rajab in 2005 dismissed Iraqi Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani as an ‘American general’. This resulted in death threats towards Ms Rajab from Shia Islamists – who hold the Iraqi cleric in high regard – and brought to the surface political fissures in the alliance of Shia Islamists and ex-Marxists that had come together to oppose the 2002 Constitution.
Juan Cole on his Informed Comment website discussed the issue:
Al-Hayat reports that Samirah Rajab published an op-ed in the Khalij Times [sic] after the recent Iraqi elections in which she referred to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as "General Sistani" and complained that the Shiite cleric had legitimated the foreign military occupation of Iraq by supporting the elections and by helping pacify the country for the Americans. The article produced vehement protests among the Bahraini Shiite community (the majority of the population), and demands that Bahrain newspapers be censored so as to prevent such comments from appearing in the future.
Shaikh Husain al-Najati, Sistani's representative in Bahrain, complained of the negative and derisive tone toward the grand ayatollah. Rajab had defended Saddam Hussein, and represents a Sunni Arab nationalist point of view that views the rise of Shiite dominance in Iraq as extremely unfortunate. This conflict demonstrates the kinds of tensions between Sunnis and Shiites provoked by the new situation in the Gulf.[1]
