How to lose your job at a Saudi newspaper

I've done my share of critique on Middle Eastern government autocracy, but never have I been able to articulate it so eloquently as Fawaz Turki, former columnist of the Saudi Arabian newspaper the Arab News, in his Washington Post commentary How to lose your job at a Saudi newspaper

An excerpt:

Democracy may be a political system, but it is also a social ethos. How responsive can a country be to such an ethos when its people have, for generations, existed with an ethic of fear -- fear of originality, fear of innovation, fear of spontaneity, fear of life itself — and have had instilled in them the need to accept orthodoxy, dependence and submission?