Saudi Arabia accuses Qatar of using Twitter to stoke dissent


Agence France-Presse
Posted at Jul 07 2017 12:30 AM
Saudi Arabia, which is leading a four-country blockade of Gulf neighbor Qatar, on Thursday accused Doha of being behind over 23,000 Twitter accounts it blames for trying to stoke dissent in Saudi Arabia.
"We found over 23,000 Twitter accounts driven by Qatar, some of them linked to accounts calling for 'revolution' in Saudi Arabia," Information Minister Awwad Saleh al-Awwad told AFP during a visit to Paris.
They included the @mujtahidd account, which claims to have the inside track on the Saudi royal household and has over 1.8 million followers, he said.
The account, which has backed Qatar, claimed that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates had set out to overthrow Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani but decided against after coming under pressure from the United States, an ally of both Riyadh and Doha.
Al-Awwad accused a London-based Saudi dissident, Saad al-Faqih, of being behind the account, "together with Qatar".
While some of @mujtahidd's claims have proven false, it reported the death of Saudi King Abdullah in 2015 a few hours before the news was officially announced.
Some of the other accounts identified by Riyadh as being Qatari proxies were behind calls for protests by the jobless on April 21, he said. 
In the end, there were no major demonstrations in Qatar, with police flooding the capital.
Further calls for protests during the holy fasting month of Ramadan also went largely unheeded.
"They failed," al-Awwad declared.
His remarks came as Saudi Arabia vowed to push on with its month-old boycott of Qatar after the emirate refused to meet a list of demands to end the diplomatic crisis. 
These include Doha ending support for the Muslim Brotherhood and closing its flagship broadcaster Al-Jazeera.
Saudi Arabia and its supporters have severed air, sea and ground links with Qatar, cutting off vital routes for imports including food.
Qatar has dismissed the demands as "unrealistic".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PCG: China’s bullying in West Philippine Sea undermines international law --- Ghio Ong - The Philippine Star

MANILA, Philippines — Letting China sustain its aggression in the West Philippine Sea would make other countries doubt the strength of international law currently being asserted by the Philippines, Commodore Jay Tarriela of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) said. “Allowing China to blatantly disregard the established rules-based order threatens the very foundation that we all depend on,” he wrote in a post on X last Tuesday. He added, “If we permit this, countries worldwide may forget why this order was created in the first place. Nations could begin to doubt the significance of adhering to international law if powerful bullies can easily violate it.” Tarriela also said defiance of other countries to a rules-based order would result in the prevalence of cruelty. He wrote, “This could lead us back to a time when might makes right, undermining the global structures that keep human greed, savagery and barbarism in check. Such a scenario would not only invite challenges from aggressive ...
Read more

China ships maintain presence in key West Philippine Sea areas --- Michael Punongbayan - The Philippine Star

STAR / Michael Varcas MANILA, Philippines — While Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) have decreased in number, they have maintained a presence in three key land features where naval and coast guard ships have intensified operations in the past seven days, according to the Philippine Navy. Latest monitoring by the Philippine Navy showed armed ships of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) maintaining a menacing presence around the grounded BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin Shoal, Panatag Shoal and Escoda Shoal. According to the Philippine Navy, there are 17 Chinese military vessels and 28 China Coast Guard (CCG) boats spotted inside the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) between Sept. 23 and 30, or one vessel more than in the previous week Sept.17-23. Five of the warships were seen roaming around the vicinity of Escoda Shoal, along with 10 CCG vessels and 12 maritime militia vessels (MMVs). There are also two PLAN ships in Ayungin Shoal as well as 10 CCG boats and 12...
Read more

Social media seen as cause of rising intermarriages --- Helen Flores - The Philippine Star

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) sees social media as the main reason for the rising number of Filipinos marrying or becoming partners of foreign nationals. In 2022, the CFO recorded 6,854 marriages or partnerships with foreign nationals, a 40.1 percent increase from the 4,891 “intermarriages” recorded in 2021. “First of all, what we see in the increase in the marriage rate of Filipinos or Filipinos with foreign partners is because of social media, (that) is number one; matchings; letters, introduction of their friends,” CFO chairperson Romulo Arugay said at the Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon public briefing yesterday. Arugay said the agency has been registering a high number of intermarriages since 2007, but the figures went down during the COVID-19 pandemic. From over 6,500 Filipinos who married foreign nationals, only 600 are men, he said. Most of them are married to Americans, Japanese, Germans, Canadians and Australians, Arugay said. Arugay warned Fi...
Read more