After the substantial local and international media attention Helem has received following its appearance on New TV’s interactive talk show Al Hal Bi Eeddak and its public event to mark the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) in May, it was expected that some backlash would occur from regressive and homophobic opponents of Helem's fight for the civil liberties of LGBT people.

However, Al-Arabiya.net has consistently compromised its journalistic integrity by launching a smear campaign against Helem, spreading dangerous and odious rumors about the organization. In its coverage of the IDAHO event on May 20 (http://www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/05/20/23904.htm), Al-Arabiya.net ran an article by UPI, a conservative, right-wing wire service known to have ties to the controversial Unification Church , with the title “’s Perverts Announce their Activities and Screen Sex Films in a Beirut Hotel”. This headline deliberately distorts the reality of the event, as Helem’s film screenings contained nothing pornographic and the text of the article itself makes note of the fact that the films were social in nature, dealing with the lives and struggles of LGBTs in the Arab world. It is worth noting that of all the major media coverage the event received, Al-Arabiya.net’s was the only one to portray it in a negative, inaccurate light.

Helem contacted Al-Arabiya.net asking them to correct this mistake to no avail, and the website continued to run UPI’s obsessive coverage of Helem. On May 29, it ran a piece in which Beirut municipality councilmember Saad-Eddine Wazzan publicly called on Lebanese PM Fouad Sanyoura and Minister of Interior Ahmad Fatfat to shut down Helem (http://www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/05/29/24200.htm). This statement was not found anywhere else in the local press, and points to UPI’s deliberate ad suspicious targeting of Helem, as one might question whether Wazzan would have made this statement had UPI not contacted him. A few months earlier, Wazzan had filed an official complaint against Helem, accusing it of endangering society and public morality and of trying to impose Western values that run contrary to local beliefs and tradition. An investigation was launched and then dropped due to lack of evidence.

In the latest of UPI and Al-Arabiya.net’s distorted and outright fabricated news pieces, an article posted on June 8 covering an Egyptian campaign to combat nudity in Arabic video clips contained a fictitious correspondence between Helem and the man responsible for the campaign, Mohammad al-Sayyed. Al-Sayyed alleged that Helem had contacted him about the campaign, hurling insults and claiming that it was heavily supported (presumably an implicit claim that Helem is backed by the United States or other foreign governments), and that it had received one and a half million US dollars with which it intends to open other similar organizations across the Arab world (http://www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/06/08/24499.htm). The way that this fabrication was framed is clearly intended to play into local fears of an encroaching domination of what is perceived as ‘western degeneracy and lack of morals’, in this case in the guise of ‘sexual perversion’ imposed on the Arab world with the help of abundant amounts of foreign money.

This allegation carries dangerous political overtones. Regressive elements in Arab societies have continuously used emotive language and accusations of playing into the demands of Western imperialism in order to silence any internal socio-political dissent, whether that be in the form of attacking women's rights defenders, stifling local voices of opposition, or most recently, attempting to silence the debate on the rights of sexual minorities in the Arab world before it even begins. By the same token, the American government has also co-opted the language of human rights in order to serve in own agenda, claiming, amongst other things, that women's liberation was part of its goal in its deplorable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of these underhanded and disingenuous strategies need to be denounced and shown for what they really are, and the media in particular needs to stand up to its responsibilities in upholding the values of journalistic integrity and honesty and maintain objectivity in its coverage of events.