The Fight Against Al-Jazeera
Alex Higgins
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The Fight Against Al-JazeeraAlex Higgins |
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Colour scheme: red for those who hold political power, blue for those who don't and purple for independent analysis and commentary. They prod and hint, you decide. Fox News brings you a photograph of the hapless US Marine Corps Captain Joshua Rushing. Below is the caption 'TRAITOR?' Cut to commercial break - and while the ads start plying you to buy things you don't need, viewers of Fox can decide for themselves, on the basis of almost no information, whether they hate Captain Rushing or not. In this way, does Fox empower its viewers to hate someone they've never met before and may know nothing at all about. 
You may have come across Capt. Joshua Rushing before if you have seen The Control Room, the documentary on life inside the Arab world's most-watched and most independent television network, Al-Jazeera (literally 'The Island' or 'The (Arabian) Peninsula') from its headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Rushing was the oddly likeable public relations man for US Central Command in Doha, whose job it was to rehash the Bush administration's line to Al-Jazeera's journalists as the invasion of Iraq proceeded in the spring of 2003. Over the course of the film, however, it was clear that far from convincing anyone, Rushing himself was being changed by his experience of working with Arab journalists. At the end of the film he conceded that US media representations of the Palestinians were unfair, for instance, and expressed the wildly optimistic view that he might be able to do something about it when he returned to the USA. Rushing does not withdraw his support for the Iraq War at any point in the movie, but does express his self-doubt very openly - something you are not supposed to do if you want to be a PR zombie. He is shown questioning himself over why he felt more upset at footage of dead US soldiers than dead Iraqi civilians: "It upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe we can live in a world without war yet." Rushing's appearance in The Control Room earned him limited celebrity status among its viewers, and enemy status among the US Marine Corps' most senior officers. Rushing went on to give follow-up television interviews, and it was at this point that the Pentagon decided that "He was way too far in the opinion realm", in the delicate words of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kay, deputy director of public relations for the Marine Corps. Rushing was barred from giving further interviews. His wife, Paige Rushing, complained to the press - and so the Pentagon asked Rushing to keep her quiet as well. Other military PR personnel complained about the treatment of Rushing on the obvious grounds that it was bad PR - Rushing had done a good job for the US army, they argued, by convincing Arab audiences that US military personnel could be honest and thoughtful. Rushing has now resigned from the US army and has taken up a job with Al-Jazeera International, the station's new English-language project. It was this that prompted Fox to ask its viewers whether or not he should be considered to have committed no less than an act of treason. So what did Rushing say that went out too far into the realm of opinion, as opposed to the highly objective position of the White House? It wasn't just his discomfort with images of death from Iraq or his remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was rather the fact that he helped to normalise Arab opinion by engaging in conversations with Arab journalists as though their points of view might be reasonable. He challenged the official view of the Al-Jazeera network and in so doing, unintentionally opened the way for serious consideration of popular Arab political views by western viewers. 
The business news on Al-Jazeera, with an unveiled female presenter This is what Rushing told Village Voice in May: "People don't understand what a complex organization Al Jazeera is. They say it's all Islamists, or Ba'athists, or Arab nationalists. You have all that, but you have really progressive voices too. Al Jazeera shows it all. It turns your stomach, and you remember there's something wrong with war." Compare this with Donald Rumsfeld's view of the network (hilarious unintentional irony included): "It seems to me that it is up to all of us to tell the truth, to say what we know and what we don't know and recognise that we are dealing with people [the Al-Jazeera network] who are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case. And to the extent people lie, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility and one would think it wouldn't take very long for that to happen in dealing with people like this." Such an hysterical view of Al-Jazeera as a station of pathological and committed liars has been repeated by the Secretary of Defence elsewhere: "Truth ultimately finds its way to people's ears and eyes and hearts and I don't worry about that over the long-term. Does it make me sad to see television saying things that are flat not true and people printing things in that part of the world that are flat not true, children being taught things that are flat not true? Yes, it bothers me." Truth ultimately finds its way to people's ears and eyes and hearts... we can only hope. Anyway, it is possible to see where Rushing's opinions diverge from the expressed views of the Pentagon and Department of Defence. The slightly more sober State Department echoed these sentiments, with its spokesman Richard Boucher informing us in April 2004 (a time when they had every reason to divert the public gaze from events in Iraq): "On Iraq they have established a pattern of false reporting." In a bleak political landscape, Al-Jazeera represents a major positive development for the Arab world - a popular news channel that is allowed to operate freely, exposing some of the corruption, deception and brutality of its ruling cliques, dictatorships and the uninvited great powers endlessly crashing into the place. For the first time, diverse political opinions from across the region are being given an airing - little wonder then that the network has won the undying enmity of so many. That the US government should hate it too is also not surprising given that the US political, military and economic role in the region is so unpopular. But Washington's hostility to Al-Jazeera reveals the untruthfulness of the Bush administration's claim to support the spread of democracy in Arab countries. 
The Control Room gives some examples of political opinions of Al-Jazeera staff. We do not find supporters of Osama Bin Laden or people who want to throw Jews into the Mediterranean or the cartoon Al-Jazeera that exists in the mind of American ultra-nationalists. Instead we find such views as those expressed by journalists like Hassan Ibrahim, who mocks Arab anti-Jewish paranoia for instance: "See the problem with the Middle East is everything is an Israeli conspiracy - everything! If a water pipe breaks in the centre of Damascus it will be blamed on the Israelis - instead of blaming it on our own incompetence." Al-Jazeera is in fact the first Arab television network to employ Israelis on its staff. In a debate with a colleague on how US military dominance of the region can be stopped, Hassan expresses confidence in the US constitution and American people: "The question is, who's going to stop the United States? Who is going to do that? You need a new group. A powerful group." "The United States is going to stop the United States. I have absolute confidence in the American constitution. And I have absolute confidence in the ability of the American people. The United States people are going to stop the United States Empire." In condemning Al-Jazeera as malicious propagandists, the Bush administration aligns itself with some pretty ugly company. In July 2004, the gruesome Algerian government put a stop to the reporting of Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Algiers and even shut down power stations to prevent the broadcast of unwelcome reports. The network was temporarily banned in Bahrain in 2002 after the dictatorship decided its broadcasts were biased against the governments - and indeed the whole countries - of Bahrain and Israel. Conversely, Al-Jazeera has been accused by Islamists of being biased towards Israel by giving too much broadcast time to Israeli spokesmen and they have dubbed the network "Al-Khinzeera" - "the Pig" - a particularly serious insult coming from them. In 2003, Al-Jazeera became the first international television network to report on the unfolding genocide in Darfur by the Sudanese military-Islamist regime against the black Africans in the west of the country, or zurga ("niggers"), as their killers call them. The butchers of Khartoum responded by arresting Al-Jazeera's correspondent and kicking him out of the country in December 2003, shutting down the network's operations in the capital. The Sudanese regime made the rather familiar accusation that it produced reports "stuffed with false information and poor biased analyses". Touchy people, obviously. When Boucher and Rumsfeld declared that Al-Jazeera was misrepresenting the situation in Iraq, they were in agreement with Saddam Hussein, whose Iraqi Ministry of Information initially banned the network's Tayseer Allouni (more on him further down) and Diyar Al-Omari from the country. The US-appointed Iraqi Interim Government, under Iyad Allawi, followed directly in Saddam Hussein's footsteps in re-imposing temporary bans, claiming that the station was giving Iraq a bad image and inciting the mujahideen to attack Coalition troops. In April 2005, the Iranian regime became another ally against Al-Jazeera and banned it, accusing it of inflaming unrest among Iran's Arab minority in the south-west of the country (not two years after Iranian secret police beat to death the Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, incidentally) . And so on and so forth. In such inglorious company does the Bush administration find itself - with every spook, ghoul and reactionary that haunts South-West Asia and North Africa in deciding that a television station is a cause of the region's problems. The US hatred of Al-Jazeera has a positively lethal ring to it. On April 8th, 2003, as US forces began to enter the city, a US A-10 Warthog fighter plane bombed Al-Jazeera's Baghdad headquarters, killing their correspondent Tarek Ayyoub. This was not the first time the US airforce had bombed an Al-Jazeera station, and this time the network had taken the precaution of providing the US government with detailed information of their position so as to avoid a repeat of what happened in Kabul. Responding to queries about the killing of Tarek Ayyoub, the official US response was its aircraft had come under hostile fire from the Al-Jazeera building - a claim for which there is no evidence. Combined as it was with a US artillery assault on the Palestine Hotel where Reuters correspondent Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso of a Spanish network were killed by US tank fire, Al-Jazeera personnel drew the conclusion, justified or not, that the US government had deliberately decided to hit them and other journalists.
Certainly, Al-Jazeera's unthinking critics in the US have made nothing by way of an apology for this incident. Instead they prefer to make out that the TV station is the aggressor. In July, Al-Jazeera planned to film a report on Mexican immigration into the United States. A new racist vigilante group calling themselves the Minutemen, who try to help track down Latin American immigrants on the US-Mexico border, announced that they would also resist Al-Jazeera's efforts to film in Arizona. Republican congressman for the state, Trent Franks, also complained, arguing that "It is insane policy to allow al-Jazeera to film Arizona's unsecured border with Mexico and then broadcast it to the very people who perpetrated 9/11." You see - if Bin Ladenists were watching they might seek to exploit the weaknesses of the Arizona border patrols and thus slip into the USA via Mexico. Presumably, CNN, Fox, the BBC etc. should also be forbidden to report on all policing and social issues lest terrorists exploit anything they see in the footage. But only Al-Jazeera is lumbered with the image as Terrorist TV. The project was abandoned and the Minutemen declared an "anti-terrorist victory" in their moronic official statement - "The world's most prolific terrorism television network has cancelled its recon operation at the Arizona/Mexico border." Currently the Bush administration is seeking to undermine Al-Jazeera with more subtle tactics than incitement or firing missiles in its direction. Steven Weisman reported for the New York Times in January this year that relations between the US government and Qatar's monarchical despotism were good: "The tiny state of Qatar is a crucial American ally in the Persian Gulf, where it provides a military base and warm support for American policies." Indeed, the country's capital, Doha, was used for the World Trade Organisation's fourth ministerial meeting in 2001 so that the delegates could take advantage of Qatar's protestor-free streets, public protest being illegal. But one issue was spoiling this picture of harmony: Yet relations with Qatar are also strained over an awkward issue: Qatar's sponsorship of Al Jazeera, the provocative television station that is a big source of news in the Arab world. ...The pressure has been so intense, a senior Qatari official said, that the government is accelerating plans to put Al Jazeera on the market, though Bush administration officials counter that a privately owned station in the region may be no better from their point of view. "We have recently added new members to the Al Jazeera editorial board, and one of their tasks is to explore the best way to sell it," said the Qatari official, who said he could be more candid about the situation if he was not identified. Meanwhile, other western governments have put pressure on Al-Jazeera. Canadian authorities announced their intention to monitor Al-Jazeera 24 hours a day and pressure distributors into censoring "abusive comments", one of those broad categories that helps censors cover a multitude of (their) sins. In Spain, the judge Baltasar Garzon (who has made better decisions in his career, such as issuing arrest warrants for General Pinochet and Henry Kissinger) issued a warrant for Al-Jazeera reporter Tayseer Allouni in September 2003, charging Tayseer with supporting al-Qa'ida. Pleading not guilty, Tayseer was jailed for collaborating with al-Qa'ida - the principal evidence for which was that he had interviewed Osama Bin Laden (prior to 9/11). The judgement of the court was criticised by Reporters Sans Frontieres. Allouni suffers from heart disease and was denied leave to attend his mother's funeral in Syria. Al-Jazeera has yet to make to make a profit despite an international audience somewhere between 30 and 50 million viewers. As a result it is dependent in more ways than one on the subsidy and patronage of the Qatari regime. Privatisation could affect and undermine Al-Jazeera in a number of ways, though as Steven Weisman wrote, the White House may still be unsatisfied by a broken and less well-protected station. The Bush administration has also set up a rival station to get its own message across, Al Hurra. The New York Times dryly notes that "administration officials say it has yet to gain much of a following." A legitimate line of criticism of Al-Jazeera is that its actual reporting lacks professionalism - for instance, during the invasion of Iraq, the network reported a number of rumours with little verifiable substance. As Al-Jazeera expands and sets up its English-language channel, Al-Jazeera International, many at the network hope to address this problem and improve the quality of their journalism. Saying that, more established media outlets are in a poor position to criticise. In September for instance, numerous Western media outlets reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina gave credence to lurid stories of murder, rape and violence in New Orleans among its beleaguered survivors, the great bulk of which have turned out to be unsubstantiated rumours. Otherwise powerful coverage of the neglect and betrayal of the New Orleans poor by the US government and the chaotic scenes faced by those trying to save lives was undermined by this credulous reporting that served to reinforce racist images of the victims as animal-like. This is not to mention other episodes, such as the continued regurgitation by western journalists of White House garbage on the subject of Iraq, both before the invasion and ever since. As the New York Times discovered, for instance, which issued an apology to its readers for uncritical reporting of many White House claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes, Al-Jazeera is far from the only news service that needs to monitor its reporting. And the NYT is at least distinguished by its surface-scratching introspection, absent in many other publications and news outlets. 
Hopefully Al-Jazeera will continue to grow as a challenging news service and a force for freedom of speech across Arabic-speaking countries, but it's numerous enemies are a determined and ruthless bunch. It is important that all of them lose in their efforts to quash the emergence of independent voices as badly as they deserve to. _______________________________________________________________________ Some links for more information (most sources are available through links in the article): Friends of Al-Jazeera campaigns for freedom of speech in South-West Asia. Reporters Without Borders US Presses for Censorship of Jazeera TV, Human Rights Watch, 2001 Under Pressure, Qatar May Sell Jazeera Station, Steven Weisman, New York Times, Jan 30th, 2005 (registration required) Petition for Tayseer Allouni (in French)
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