Smear Campaign

In the NPR story on how Women Take Their Place In Kuwait's Parliament, newly elected Kuwaiti legislator Aseel al-Awadhi complains that her political opponents used ubiquitous recording devices to capture some of her lectures and then post them on YouTube to discredit her as a representative who would be overly Western or opposed to Sharia law. Since in the United States college professors have expressed similar fears about vengeful students or conservative plants eager to catch faculty supposedly expressing outrageously biased liberal opinions in their classrooms and lecture halls, I thought it would be interesting to attempt to investigate the YouTube offerings about al-Awadhi, despite being obviously hampered by the language barrier.

I discovered that Middle Eastern news coverage focused on al-Awadhi's own use of YouTube, where she announced her candidacy and maintains her own YouTube channel.