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On Censorship
December 28, 2004
There is a high level of censorship in Saudi Arabia. Almost nothing remains untouched by censorship, from magazine images to website access to symbols in books. A lot of this censorship occurs at the customs point in airports and road entries at the kingdom's borders. Some of this censorship is meant for political reasons. A lot of this censorship seems to be for religious reasons.
Want to bring back a book full of images of the famous nude sculptures from Italy? Perhaps a book featuring "Michelangelo's David"? Or Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus"? Too bad. Customs officers will use black permanent markers or large white stickers and cover those images; that is if they don't confiscate it instead. How about a photo book full of images of Buddas? Marked over or gone too. Images of Christ? I wouldn't risk it. Jewish symbols? The risk's not worth your life. Have an issue of Time Magazine showing a female ice-skater on the cover? They'll mark any revealing areas of legs or arms on images of females. If there's cleavage or anything even more revealing, they'll obviously censor that too. Or maybe they'll just confiscate it again.
Even our school yearbooks were censored. Dhahran School teachers thankfully made an effort to do the covering up of legs and arms themselves so that they could minimize the amount of marking instead of risking heavier censorship had the job been left to customs staff, or whoever does the censoring. So whenever a group photo was being shot for the yearbook, teachers told girls with sleeveless shirts or skirts or shorts to stand behind at least the first row of people. This was done in order to minimize the amount of black marker censorship that had to be done in the yearbook later on.
Meanwhile, every Internet service provider in the kingdom seemed to block countless numbers of websites using the infamous parade of firewalls, port blockings, and HTTP proxies. (This also caused a lot of connection problems with instant messaging clients, Internet telephone software, and FTP clients, to name a few.) It made sense that every ISP would block access to adult content sites, but the restrictions didn't stop there. At one point, the entire domains of free homepage sites like GeoCities were blocked, and innocent websites like The Internet Archive (archive.org) and TheFaceBook were blocked (reasons: firewall dodging site and personals/dating site, respectively).
Movies are censored too, even in the theaters in the compounds (possibly the only theaters in the kingdom). That's why bringing DVDs or VHS tapes through customs is a hassle. They stop you, pull you aside, and check each DVD and tape on their TVs or computers. If they feel that they've found something unacceptable, they confiscate the videos. Perhaps you gift-wrapped some of these DVDs for someone. Tough. Some of these customs officers will force you to unwrap them and take out the DVDs. Furthermore, if you buy a video in the kingdom, scenes are removed from the video that you, yes, paid for. The same goes for pages in books (ripped out or marked out) and magazines that you have, again, paid for.
Of course, out of respect, I've tried to follow their rules of censorship because it's their country and their culture. Still, it sometimes seems rather harsh to force this on everyone with few exceptions. Maybe it's because I've grown used to a relatively more open society in California. The problem is that I cannot figure out where to draw the line between protecting culture and changing an old way of thinking. Maybe there is a right time for a little censorship here and there, but this went too far.
-Gordon Mei
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