Thread by @FadilAliriza

Resharing this bc, w/o any personal attacks, @OuiemCh utterly exposed a class of court MENA "experts". Their only rebuttal: personal attacks & misrepresting her arguments as "nativist", "pro-coup", or the Orientalist "authoritarian".

jadaliyya.com/Details/43160/…“Hot-Take”-Arsonists

Since the latest accusation vs Ouiem is of "censoring" NYT & foreign pundits (by being too critical?), this is a good time to come forward with a story of when NYT asked @OuiemCh & me to write an op-ed on August 2. (Shared w/her permission):

After so many awful hot takes from "experts" in Washington re July 25, with a glaring absence of input from Tunisians or people in Tunisia, we thought NYT reaching out was a sign some people noticed this argument.

International oped pages had no Tunisian authors except the Ghannouchi NYT oped, which reinforced interventionist rhetoric (though less dramatically than his warning to Italy's Corriere della Sera of Tunisian migrants).

But NYT request came with an outline of the oped 's main argument we were to write: one claiming "that the President's actions do not constitute a coup"-an argument both of us had rejected as premature & a distraction from more important questions, like why & how did it happen?

I declined the request, knowing Ouiem had been drafting a joint oped with Tunisians who have prominent international acclaim, a message demanding respect for sovereignty & of the multiplicity of Tunisian perspectives.

NYT rejected this open letter format, then asked Ouiem to coauthor with someone, choosing between a few prominent Tunisians that they put forward as recommendations.

Ouiem tried to convince them otherwise, failed, and seeing the urgency of having a counterpoint with the reach of NYT, conceded to the request but chose her own coauthor: a brilliant & experienced activist.

Ouiem shared with me their rounds of edits back and forth: NYT kept writing their own oped, adding inaccuracies, simplifying things to the point of reinforcing their own prejudices, deleting important context then asking for more examples after deleting earlier examples given.

NYT editors seemingly got so frustrated with Ouiem & her coauthor pushing back, them trying to speak in their own voice using their own experiences, citing the facts they saw as crucial context, that NYT shared edited versions with no markup visible.

In the end, NYT gave what they said were final edits, a totally rewritten piece by themselves with Ouiem & her coauthor's name on it, with an ultimatum that it go out like that or not at all.

Ouiem & her coauthor declined. Rather than letting them speak for themselves, NYT did exactly what we've said is the problem w/international media: written by "experts" who know everything already without needing to listen to diverse opinions.

Only in this case, they had been pushed to try and get token representation of other Tunisian voices to counterbalance their Ghannouchi oped, to give the false impression of balance.

So that's how NYT opeds get written in case you're curious: written by the NYT staff themselves, with the "right" authors names to hide their own pontifications on the world as they see it.

Many who reshared this thread also seem to have strong criticisms of NYT; If you want to support independent media coverage of Tunisia & not rely on big international press, please consider following @MeshkalTn or even support its work via patreon.com/meshkal if you can.