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| Type | Online |
|---|---|
| Editor-in-chief | David Hearst [1] |
| Founded | April 2014 |
| Headquarters | 1 Sussex Place, London, England, United Kingdom [2] |
| Website | middleeasteye.net |
Middle East Eye (MEE) is a UK-based news website founded in 2014, that covers the Middle East and North Africa. It is reportedly funded by the government of Qatar. [3]
Middle East Eye was launched in London in April 2014. It is not transparent about its ownership. It is formally owned by a company called M.E.E. Limited with a single director Jamal Bessasso; Bessasso is not specified as the owner. [4] Its editor-in-chief is David Hearst, a former foreign lead writer for The Guardian . [1] It employs about 20 full-time staff in London as of 2017. [5]
According to its critics, Middle East Eye began forming in London in 2013 as the Islamist influence of Al Jazeera began to wane; several Al Jazeera journalists subsequently joined the project. [6] [7] [8] [9] Jonathan Powell, a senior executive at Al Jazeera, was a consultant ahead of its launch and registered the website's domain names. Bassasso, a Kuwait-born Palestinian living in London, who lists his nationality as Dutch at Companies House, was the sole director of Middle East Eye's parent company, M.E.E. Limited, and company secretary for a couple of weeks in 2018. Bassasso was a former director for the Hamas-controlled Al-Quds TV. [10] Bessasso is listed as owning more than 75% of the shares and voting rights and has the right to appoint or remove directors. [11] David Hearst denied that Bessasso was the owner of the news site but refrained from divulging the real owner. [12] [13]
According to Ilan Berman and Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, Middle East Eye is backed by Qatar. [14] [15] [16] The governments of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Bahrain accuse MEE of pro-Muslim Brotherhood bias and receiving Qatari funding. They have demanded MEE be shut down following the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. [5] [17] MEE has denied the accusations, saying that it is an independent news site, not funded by any country or movement. [18]
Middle East Eye covers a range of topics across the Middle East. According to its website, it reports on events in 22 different countries. Content is separated into different categories on its website including news, opinion and essays. [19]
Since the foundation of the media outlet, it has provided exclusives on a number of major events in the Middle East, which have often been picked up by other media outlets globally. In early June 2017, an anonymous hacker group began distributing emails to multiple news outlets that they had hacked from the inbox of Yousef Otaiba, the UAE's ambassador in Washington D.C. [20] This included providing details from leaked emails of Mohammed bin Salman and US officials. [21] This revelation on 14 August 2017, led to other media outlets printing other material from the leaked emails. [22] [23] According to The New York Times , the hacked emails appeared to benefit Qatar and be the work of hackers working for Qatar, a common subject of the distributed emails. [24]
On 29 July 2016, MEE published a story alleging that the government of the United Arab Emirates, aided by Palestinian exile Mohammed Dahlan, had funnelled significant sums of money to conspirators of the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt two weeks earlier. [25] In 2017, Dahlan brought a lawsuit of libel against the MEE in a London court seeking damages of up to £250,000. However, Dahlan abandoned the suit shortly before the case was to begin. In a statement, Dahlan maintained that the story was "fully fabricated" but claimed that he has "achieved his goals in the English courts," and was now planning to sue Facebook in Dublin where the article was "widely published". However, according to MEE and their lawyers, by dropping the claim, Dahlan would be forced to pay all the legal costs, of both parties, estimated to be in excess of £500,000. [26] [27]
In November 2019, the Turkish government officially accused Dahlan of involvement in the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt and is offering $700,000 for information leading to his capture. [28]
In 2016, the United Arab Emirates blocked the MEE countrywide. MEE says it contacted the UAE embassy in London for an explanation, but received no response. [29]
Saudi Arabia also blocked the website across the country in May 2017.[ citation needed ]
Following protests against the President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in September and October 2019, Egypt also blocked the website. [30]
Saudi Arabia accused MEE of being a news outlet funded by Qatar (both directly and indirectly). [31] On 22 June 2017, during the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain, as part of a list of 13 demands, demanded that Qatar close Middle East Eye, which they saw as sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and a Qatari-funded and aligned outlet. [31] [32] [33]
MEE denies receiving funds from them stating that the demand was an attempt to "extinguish any free voice which dares to question what they are doing." [34] In a statement responding to the demand, the publication's editor-in-chief said "MEE covers the area without fear or favour, and we have carried reports critical of the Qatari authorities, for instance how workers from the subcontinent are treated on building projects for the 2022 World Cup." [35] [36]
Commentator Ibrahim Alkhamis, writing for the Saudi Arabia newspaper Arab News, accused the MEE of propagating rumours and fabrications regarding Qatar's state enemies such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, while simultaneously remaining silent on the misdeeds of Qatar's own members of its royal family, and said that MEE functions as an "extension to Al Jazeera" without being accused of being a state-owned news outlet yet hosting a rotation of columnists and Al Jazeera employees. [9]
In April 2020, MEE was one of 20 websites targeted by hackers that cybersecurity experts, ESET, have linked to an Israeli surveillance company called Candiru. The website was impacted using a Watering hole attack which serves malicious code to certain visitors allowing the attackers to compromise their PCs. [37]
On 20 October 2022, MEE cut ties with Palestinian journalist Shatha Hammad after it was discovered that she made a Facebook post in 2014 which praised Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust and for "sharing the same ideology". The Thomson Reuters Foundation had withdrawn a 2022 Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism from her, after the discovery on 18 October. [38] [39] [40] [41]
In 2017, a conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Institute accused the Middle East Eye of being pro-Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Hamas. [42]
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Jamal Khashoggi wrote for MEE prior to joining The Washington Post . [58] [59]
According to a post on the MEE website, Khashoggi wrote for them over a period of two years. According to MEE, his op-eds were not credited to him at the time due to concerns for his safety because many of his articles for MEE are critical of Saudi Arabia and its policies, and Saudi Arabia's rift with Qatar. [58] Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was assassinated when he entered the Saudi consulate in Turkey on 2 October 2018. After initial denials, Saudi Arabia stated that he was killed by rogue assassins inside the consulate building with "premeditated intention". [60]
Mohammad Yusuf Dahlan is a Palestinian politician. Arrested by Israel for being involved with the Fatah Hawks—the Fatah youth movement—he subsequently helped in negotiations for the Oslo Accords, later becoming a critic of Yasser Arafat. The former leader of Fatah in the Gaza Strip, Dahlan's power there as head of the Preventive Security Force was at one time so substantial that the territory was nicknamed "Dahlanistan". Seen as a favorite by the George W. Bush administration to be Mahmoud Abbas' second-in-command, Dahlan was appointed by the latter to head the Palestinian National Security Council. An antagonist of Hamas, he participated in the Fatah–Hamas Mecca Agreement before his power began to decline after the latter gained the upper hand in the Battle of Gaza. He was controversially elected to the Central Committee of Fatah amid allegations of fraud. Living in exile in Abu Dhabi, Dahlan has, according to Foreign Policy, had a hand in facilitating the Abraham Accords.
Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist, dissident, author, columnist for Middle East Eye and The Washington Post, and a general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Yousef Al Otaiba is the current United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States and Minister of state. Previously Al Otaiba served as non-resident ambassador to Mexico. His father is Petroleum magnate Mana Al Otaiba, who served as the president of OPEC a record six times.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey relations have long fluctuated between cooperation and alliance to enmity and distrust. Since the 19th century, the two nations have always had a complicated relationship. While Turkey and Saudi Arabia are major economic partners, the two have a tense political relationship, stemming partially from the historic enmity.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are neighbouring countries in the Middle East and Persian Gulf region, and share extensive political and cultural ties. Saudi Arabia maintains an embassy in Abu Dhabi and a consulate in Dubai of the UAE, while the UAE has an embassy in Riyadh and a consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
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Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, commonly known by his initials as MBS or MbS, is the de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, formally serving as Crown Prince and Prime Minister. He is the heir apparent to the Saudi throne and the seventh son of King Salman of Saudi Arabia and grandson of the nation's founder, King Abdulaziz.
Qatar has been accused of allowing terror financiers to operate within its borders, which has been one of the justifications for the Qatar diplomatic crisis that started in 2017 and ended in 2021. In 2014, David S. Cohen, then United States Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, accused Qatari authorities of allowing financiers who were on international blacklists to live freely in the country: "There are U.S.- and UN-designated terrorist financiers in Qatar that have not been acted against under Qatari law." Accusations come from a wide variety of sources including intelligence reports, government officials, and journalists.
The New Arab or Al-Araby Al-Jadeed is a London-based pan-Arab news outlet owned by Qatari company Fadaat Media. It launched an Arabic-language website in March 2014 and an Arabic language daily newspaper in September 2014. The English version of its website is The New Arab.
Al Jazeera Arabic is a Qatari state-owned Arabic-language news television network. It is based in Doha and operated by the Al Jazeera Media Network, which also operates Al Jazeera English. It is the largest news network in the Middle East and North Africa region. It was founded in 1996 by the then Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
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The Qatar diplomatic crisis was a high-profile incident involving the deterioration of ties between Qatar and the Arab League between 2017 and 2021. It began when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt simultaneously severed their bilateral relations with Qatar and subsequently banned Qatar-registered aircraft and Qatari ships from utilizing their sovereign territory by air, land, and sea; this involved the Saudis' closure of Qatar's only land crossing, initiating a de facto blockade of the country. Tensions between the two sides came to a close in January 2021, following a resolution between the Saudis and the Qataris.
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