Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 129-130

The Middle East on the Internet

Middle East News on the Internet

By Shawn L. Twing

Finding information on the Internet has been compared to taking a drink of water from a fire hose. The massive amount of information available, combined with easy and almost limitless access, has created an environment that has incredible potential, but often is awkward to navigate. The exponential proliferation of Web sites on the Internet, without the corresponding development of a means to search it effectively and intuitively, can leave travelers on the information superhighway bewildered.

To help overcome this problem, the Washington Report publishes in this column Web site addresses of interest to this magazine's readers, with brief descriptions of the Web sites' contents. And to help make finding them a little easier, the Washington Report will link these sites on the "Middle East Resources" section of the magazine's Web site, which can be found on the Internet at www.washington-report.org

Middle East News in Cyberspace

There are a lot of reasons to get news from the Internet, including easy access at little or no cost, and saving a few trees from the pulp mill. An additional benefit of Internet-based news is that it allows readers virtually anywhere in the world access to information that originates anywhere else in the world. That means no more waiting for international or regional newspapers to be delivered, which can be well after their utility has passed.

Now a reader in the United States can browse a newspaper in the Middle East on the day it's published. And, unlike several years ago when the Internet was viewed only as a tool to promote the print or electronic media, entire texts of news articles rather than small "teasers" now are available on-line.

Consumers of general news about the Middle East can begin at Cable News Network's (CNN) home page (www.cnn.com). CNN World News has an outstanding section on the Middle East, with a main story, several top stories, and a lengthy list of news articles from individual countries in the region. CNN also maintains links to the previous five days of its coverage that contain all of the articles published on those days.

Aside from a user-friendly and extremely high-quality, fast-loading site, which is to be expected from the world's leader in international news, CNN also deserves praise for listing "Jerusalem" as a separate entity with Middle Eastern countries, rather than as a subheading of Israel as other organizations have done.

Several English-language newspapers in the Middle East also have created useful Web sites, many of them with regional and country-specific news. General news about the Persian Gulf can be found on sites for the Arab News published in Saudi Arabia (www.arabnews.com), the Bahrain Tribune/Al Ayam (www.alayam.com), Gulf News/Gulf Times (www.gulf-news.com), and the UAE daily Khaleej Times (www.khaleejtimes.com).

All of these on-line newspapers include sections for regional news that concentrate mainly on the Gulf region, with individual sections devoted to local news from Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, respectively. Except for the Khaleej Times, which is an unusually slow-loading site (with a standard 33.6 kbs modem Internet connection), each of these sites loads quickly. Offsetting that minor inconvenience is the financial section of the Khaleej Times, which is by far the best in the Middle East.

Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Palestine and Turkey also have useful Web sites for regional and local news. Egypt's Middle East Times (www.metimes.com), a weekly newspaper based in Cairo, has an excellent Web site with news and analysis about Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. Unique to the Middle East Times Web site are links to the full text of articles censored by Egyptian authorities, with a comprehensive, eye-opening explanation of what kinds of articles are censored and why. This is by far the most provocative of any Middle Eastern news Web site, and demonstrates clearly the power of the Internet to distribute information freely.

Israel's Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com) is a great place to see the Middle East from a Likud-leaning Israeli perspective, with approximately half of the news on the Web site devoted to Israeli politics and the rest focused on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The daily Internet edition of the Post includes all of the articles, analysis, and commentary/opinion pieces found in the printed edition. As an added bonus, the Jerusalem Post keeps extensive archives on its Web site that are keyword-searchable.

Also available from Israel is Israeli and Global News (www.cmep.com). The most valuable feature on this site is its daily compilation of headlines and brief summaries translated from Israel's Hebrew press. Although full English-language translations of the Hebrew-language articles are not available for free on the Internet, this comes the closest.

The Palestinians also have two worthwhile Web sites for news and opinions. One is the Jerusalem Times (www.amin.org/biladi.htm), the Internet version of the English-language Palestinian newspaper published in Jerusalem. The other is the Palestine Times (www.ptimes.com), a monthly magazine of news and analysis about Israel and Palestine published in London. Both of these sites offer counterpoints to Israel's explanation of events in the occupied territories, particularly when those events involve Israeli violence against Palestinians.

Four other sites deserve attention as well. The Iranian (www.iranian.com), a strictly Internet-based source of news and other information about Iran and the Iranian diaspora, has a brief section on news from Iran and various Iranian communities worldwide. The Iranian also has a separate news service, The Iranian Times, that, for a fee, sends daily e-mail updates of news about Iran.

Two sites concentrating on Lebanon, the Beirut Times (www.arabbiz.com/~beirut/) and Lebanon.com (www.lebanon.com/news/), also are very good. The Beirut Times Web site, the Internet version of the weekly newspaper of the same name published in Los Angeles, has a section of news from the current and previous several issues of the newspaper.

Lebanon.com is an excellent news Web site with links to daily news about Lebanon, daily news wire reports from Beirut, and an outstanding section of news from the Middle East. The most impressive feature of this Web site is the news archives section that has links to daily news (by date) for the past four months.

Finally, The Turkish Daily News (www.Turkish.Daily.News.com) offers the best available Internet access to English-language news from Turkey. One minor drawback of the site, however, is that it at first appears only to list short summaries of headlines and news stories from the newspaper. Internet users need to follow the link entitled "Enter Today's Free Edition" to get to the same list of summaries, but with links to the full text of the articles.

Questions about finding news on the Internet can be directed to the author on-line at stwing@washington-report.org. They will be answered in subsequent columns.

Shawn L. Twing is the news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.