September 8, 2003
On September 1, the Arabic language television network, Al Jazeera, had its English language website up and running again (www.english.aljazeera.net). The English online edition was started on March 24 to provide coverage of the war with Iraq, but was quickly taken down by a hacker who obviously didn’t take kindly to the news from an Arab perspective.
The Qatar based network first aired in 1996, but didn’t receive much attention until after September 11, 2001, when it began receiving and broadcasting videotapes that purported to be from Osama bin Laden. The network has received much praise in the Arab world and elsewhere. It is the only television station operating in an Arab country that is independent and completely free from any government control.
Last spring, Videotron, a Montreal-based cable company, applied to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for permission to add the "Arab CNN" to its package of cable channels. Videotron’s rationale for wanting to include Al Jazeera in its offering of digital channels was based on the rational business criteria that there was a demand for it. Currently, Al Jazeera can only be obtained in the gray market of picking up U.S. satellite services.
Given the number of Arabic speaking people in Canada, there is no doubt that Al Jazeera does have a market here, especially in an industry that has brought us channels devoted to food, gardening, and the lowly Toronto Maple Leafs. But there has been opposition to the application to the CRTC for permission to carry the network.
Jewish groups, most notably the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), are opposed to allowing cable companies in Canada to offer Al Jazeera, and have applied to appear before the CRTC to oppose the application. The CJC, which has been monitoring Al Jazeera since 1996, will argue that the network is blatantly anti-Semitic and some of what it broadcasts would clearly constitute hate crimes if broadcast in Canada. Al Jazeera has produced programming where Jews (not Israelis) have been referred to as apes and pigs and murderers who should be exterminated.
Arab Canadians, of course, defend the presence of Al Jazeera on Canadian airwaves by citing free speech, a concept that would quickly disappear if Arabs were the ones that were being described as apes and pigs. But what is really troubling is the defense of the right to broadcast the network that is being raised by the non-Arabic Canadian left.
Rick Salutin, writing in the Globe and Mail (and you can’t get any further to the left than Salutin), accepts Al Jazeera’s explanation that the "apes and pigs" comments came from a viewer in an email that was read, rather than an employee, so that makes it okay. The fact that Al Jazeera doesn’t have a "delay button" is simply repeated as a fact. Salutin is nothing more than an apologist for the network’s anti-Semitism. All in the name of it being important to understand the Arab perspective.
Antonia Zerbisias, the media columnist for the Toronto Star, questions whether or not the few occasions of anti-Semitism should outweigh the network "which has been praised by many as delivering the straight goods about the Middle East." What would Ms. Zerbisias think of a program about black people that was generally positive and informative, but occasionally used the descriptive n-word? Would she and others on the left brush that aside as quickly as they ignore the blatant anti-Semitism that has been broadcast on Al-Jazeera.
And would these same lefties use the same arguments of free speech and balance to support the view that Canadian cable companies be allowed to broadcast the Fox News Channel? Of course not. An application to carry Fox would be met with Canadian content arguments, and arguments about how we have to protect our culture, which apparently allows the odd dose of anti-Semitism, but not the conservative viewpoint that Fox brings.
The Al Jazeera debate says more about the Canadian left than it does about Al Jazeera.