Manama: The legal stand-off in Bahrain between liberal media and Islamists has intensified after the Arab Federation of Journalists said it was backing Al Ayam Editor-in-Chief Eisa Al Shayji, who is under fire from religious preacher Wajdi Ghunaim.
"We express our full solidarity with Eisa Al Shayji and we put all our technical, legislative and logistic potential at his service so that rights prevails over wrong and the soldiers of right and good words and the heroes of press freedom defeat the enemies of freedom," the Cairo-based federation said in a statement yesterday.
"We have full confidence in Bahrain's judiciary and we trust that it will once more prove that it supports the freedom of expression."
Al Shayji, who also heads the Bahrain Journalists Association, was quizzed last week in a defamation case brought against him by Egyptian-born Wajdi Ghunaim who charged that Al Ayam had misrepresented him as an extremist who opposed progress and modernism.
Support
The support from the Arab Federation of Journalists came days after Iraq's journalists union said it "fully backed Al Shayji in his case for freedom of expression."
Al Ayam, the flagship of liberal media in Bahrain, published a series of articles and columns lashing out at Ghunaim for "seeking to instill regressive and backward ideas in the minds of young students" and for "abusing Bahrain's tolerant policies by siding with Islamists while seeking Bahraini citizenship."
Ghunaim, who lived for years in the US and now wanted to settle in the Gulf, rejected the charges, saying that they were part of malicious attempts in a character-assassination campaign to discredit him.
But Al Shayji yesterday told Gulf News that the case against him was a new episode in a drive to limit the influence of liberals and to promote political Islam in the country.
"This is a real paradox. We live in a country where the king, the prime minister and the crown prince, invariably and repeatedly call for freedom of expression while journalists have to endure a restrictive press law and Islamists repeatedly seek to silence the media so that they can move forward with their own agenda," he said.
