Look at this sentence: “Visit the college of
entrepreneurship in King
Abdullah City
You could also say that nothing is wrong with it in the
context of the article in which it appears. This would be the one that came
under the title: “The path to a new Saudi Arabia ,” and the subtitle:
“Where the new crown prince wants to take the critical Gulf state, and the
obstacles in his way.” It was written by Dennis Ross and published on June 29,
2017 in the New York Daily News.
When you evaluate the sentence in the context of the wider
debate surrounding the subjects relating to that article, you find plenty
that's wrong. No, what's wrong is not with the sentence itself but with the
fact that its content was deliberately hidden from the public for a long time.
To make sense of all this, we define content as the intrinsic truth that would
have been relevant to the wider debate had it not been hidden.
In his article, Dennis Ross introduces the readers to Saudi Arabia 's
newly appointed crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. He makes it clear that the
prince is expected to modernize his country. There is some truth to this, but
that's where the incongruity between the reality on the ground and the picture
that's painted of it, is shockingly out of whack. However, neither Ross nor his
article is responsible for the incongruity. The problem dates back to decades
of distortions that were so egregious, they effectively transformed into new
realities. They became what's referred to as fake news in today's parlance.
Here is the crux of what constitutes an error in logic.
Mohammed bin Salman was appointed to his new position only a few weeks ago. He
could not have (in that short period of time) waved a magic wand and created a
college of entrepreneurship that feels like a Google campus. This is a project
that took years to think about, plan for, work on, get going and populate with
waves of students who went on a learning journey year after year for several
years before graduating … and make room for new waves of students.
If this campus and others like it are symbols of Saudi Arabia 's
rise to modernity, you cannot attribute this movement to a prince that just
came on the scene. The intrinsic truth, therefore, must be that the movement to
modernize Saudi Arabia
started long ago. Moreover, when you realize that the prince is only 31 years
old, you can say with certainty that the movement started at least when he was
a toddler, if not before he was born. That makes him not the instigator of the
country's drive to modernize, but its beneficiary as well as its product.
Thus, the title of the Ross article which refers to the path
of a new Saudi Arabia
is misleading because what it claims to be new was started a long time ago.
What the crown prince will do is not start something that wasn't there, but
make sure that the country will remain on a path that was taken before he came
on the scene. The only thing he might do that's different is accelerate the
process of modernization.
The lesson to be learned from this episode is that every
situation has within it an intrinsic truth. It can be a short and simple truth,
or it can be a long and complex one. The situation discussed by Dennis Ross is
of the second category. That is, the move to develop and modernize Saudi Arabia
started earnestly in the 1970s when it became apparent that oil is a national
wealth, but that it is finite.
This was the time when it was decided that the wealth
generated from the sale of oil today, will be used to put down the
infrastructure that will create the wealth of tomorrow when oil will have been
depleted. But very little of this set of truths was told to the consumers of
news and commentaries in the English speaking world during all those decades.
On the contrary, besides telling an occasional half-truth,
the operators of the hate-the-Arab propaganda machine, dumped on their
audiences tons of omissions, distortions and outright lies about Saudi Arabia ,
and more generally about the Arab world.