It’s not a big secret that my opinion about English Arabic sites is a mix of scorn and contempt, with Al-Arabiya featuring once again in my previous post. Yet with all of my dislike for them, they are a valuable source of information with regards to what they publish, but more so, what they don’t.
You can learn a lot from reading between the lines or from filling in blanks, and this is exactly what I did with this map by Al-Arabiya:
You can tell right away this is an amateurish cartographic job. The legend is not in order, there’s a redundancy in “None” and all together blanked out countries. Malaysia is missing it’s eastern part on Borneo, while Indonesia is missing 17507 islands, showing only Sulawesi.
Also on the list of cartographic errors, the UK is missing Northern Ireland, Turkey swallowed the Marmara sea whole, Germany is labelled Belgium and the US is there for no reason.
Above all, two highly telling omissions exist. Pakistan earned full control of Kashmir, even on Aksai Chin that is claimed by China, and Western Sahara is completely joined with Morocco. India’s right to at least some part of Kashmir, and Western Sahara’s disputed status is erased without a whimper.
Is it coincidental that Morocco and Pakistan are Muslim? I would say yes if it was some unbiased infographic, but when it’s Al-Arabiya, I’m inclined to opt for the more malignant option.
I would like to point out that the Israeli outline includes Judea and Samaria, but then again, it appears to not include the Golan. That can mean that the pseudo-cartographer mislabelled it wholly as “Palestine”.
