From the Arab News:
Rabah Al-Quwayi, a reporter for the Arabic daily Okaz, was about to go to work in the morning when he saw that the window of his car had been broken and a note had been left behind.
The note said: “In the name of God, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful: This time it is your car but next time it is you. Return to your religion and forsake heresy. This is the last warning.”
“I’ve been receiving threatening SMS messages and verbal attacks for a year now,” Al-Quwayi told Arab News over the phone from Hail. “But this is the first time things have turned physical. I tried to track the numbers through the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) but it always turns out that the numbers are registered to expatriates.”
The reporter was not attacked for anything he had written in Okaz, but rather for his participation in several Internet forums. Al-Quwayi’s liberal points of view upset a number of participants in the forums.
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“(The journalist) wrote that the only logical explanation for Al-Harbi’s case is that he is against terrorism and some religious people seem to support terrorism and so Al-Harbi, by disagreeing with them, is against religion. It is confusing,” Al-Quwayi explained.
Another threat was made on Al-Quwayi’s life last month. The threat was made on the well-known fundamentalist website, Al-Sahat. “They took a sentence that I had written earlier out of context. In a long article I wrote in a discussion of the Holy Qur’an and posted on the Internet, I said that ‘nothing should be taken for granted.’ The fundamentalists then concluded that I did not believe in the Holy Qur’an and so I should be killed.”
Technorati tags: Saudi Islam Muslims Journalism
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