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Hi,
My name is Arnaud Gonzague, I'm a French journalist working forTransfert, a magazine about new technologies (www.transfert.net). I'd like to make an article about the Arab Times, because I've just been in Palestine and Palestinian youth speaks a lot about your site.
When has the AT has been created? In which country?
Is there a version of the AT in english?
Is it exclusively an online newspaper or is there a printed version (in English?)?
What are the topics treated in the AT? Politics, Sports, culture, business?
Or only politics and business?
Do you know then reason why the printed version of your magazine is forbidden in Israel? Can you tell me the whole story (with dates, etc.)? How Israel does justify this censorship?
What is Dr Osama Fawzi's biography?
What political movement do you feel close to, politically, in the Arab world?
Would you qualify yourself as radical? Moderate? Satirical? Balanced?
Thank you for answer as quickly as you can (the end of the week) or to giveme a PR phone number or somebody that could answer my questions, please.

Best Regards
Arnaud Gonzague
(0033) 142 2159 76
arnaud@transfert.net

Dear Mr. Gonzague:
Thank you for your interest in Arab Times.  I hope the information I will share with you today is helpful for your story.
In response to some of your questions, Arab Times was created in 1986 in Houston, Texas (USA).  It started out as a strictly printed Arabic publication, and has since moved to the internet as well.  The printed publication is issued every 10 days, made up of 48 pages.  Arab Times deals with the topics that are of importance to the Arab-American reading the paper.  Most of the time this means the main items are politically related, but this is not always the case.  Our paper has found a wide readership for one simple reason, the paper’s philosophy of stating the unblemished truth. 
This is also the reason why the paper has made so many enemies of important people and governments.  Almost all the governments that have been mentioned in our pages have banned not only the printed version of our publication, but the internet site as well.  It might sound strange that a government should ban an internet site because it disagrees with its politics, or because it disagrees with its agendas, but that has been the case with Arab Times.  Despite that fact, soon after going live on the internet in 1997, Arab Times became the number one Arabic site on the internet, with over 40,000 visitors a day.
To give you some background on Dr. Osama Fawzi, he is a former journalist and television host.  He worked for a long time out of the Persian Gulf, until he moved to the United States in 1986.  Formerly of Jordanian and US citizenship, Dr. Fawzi now only has the US passport because the Jordanian government refused to renew his passport after he wrote a letter concerning the Jordanian monarchy to the US president.  Dr. Fawzi has long suffered from threatening letters, phone calls, and finally an assassination attempt.
  It is impossible to explain why any regime would go to such lengths to silence an observer.
Finally, you mentioned one question that I find puzzling.  You asked how does Israel justify its censorship of Arab Times.  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t even need to.  How can its censorship of an Arab-American newspaper even begin to compare with all its human-rights violations, violence, and state sanctioned assassinations that it has committed in the past  five months alone??  The magnitude of Israel’s propensity for violence far eclipses its censorship practices.

I hope this information has been helpful and can aid you in your article.  If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to send them to us. 

For more information about Arab Times . visit www.arabtimes.com Click on about us
Thank you again for your interest.
Sincerely,

Arab Times