By Cliff Kincaid —— Bio and Archives February 11, 2010
Comments | Print This | Subscribe | Email Us
AIM demonstrated, through a videotape captured after the liberation of Iraq by U.S. forces, that Al-Jazeera's first managing director was an agent of the Saddam Hussein regime. In addition, one of Al-Jazeera's Afghanistan reporters, Tayseer Alouni, went to prison in Spain on terrorism charges. Al-Jazeera paid Alouni's salary, legal fees and "related expenses" during his trial and continues to defend him.
Our charges of bias were vindicated when the top U.S. journalist at Al-Jazeera English, Dave Marash, left the channel and said that anti-American bias was a factor in his decision to leave. Prior to the channel's launch in 2006, Marash had claimed that Al-Jazeera English would be editorially autonomous and independent from Al-Jazeera Arabic.
Marash told the Columbia Journalism Review that Al-Jazeera officials in Doha, Qatar, had wanted to do a series on "Poverty in America" that was "so stereotypical and shallow" that AJE in Washington, D.C. rejected the idea. "And so the planning desk in Doha literally sneaked a production team into the United States without letting anyone in the American news desk know," he said. The result, he said, was just as he predicted--a shallow and stereotypical story.
The CRTC had received a request on February 27, 2009 from Ethnic Channels Group Limited for the addition of AJE to the Canadian distribution list. The ECGL had stated that AJE's Code of Ethics included "journalistic values of honesty, fairness, balance, independence and credibility" and "was taken very seriously by AJE's reporters and management."
This is laughable, of course. As AIM disclosed during the U.S. presidential campaign, Al-Jazeera aired a Moammar Gadhafi speech praising then-candidate Barack Obama and followed with a story depicting supporters of GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin as white racist Christians. The Al-Jazeera "reporter" who did the hit piece on Palin was Casey Kaufmann, who surfaced in Federal Election Commission (FEC) records as a $500 contributor to the Obama-for-president campaign.
In terms of "ethics," Judea Pearl has described how Al-Jazeera not only covered but helped sponsor the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, a released terrorist who had smashed the head of a four-year-old girl with his rifle butt in 1979 after killing her father before her eyes. Kuntar had been released by Israel in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006.
"Al-Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model," Pearl noted in a Wall Street Journal column. "No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al-Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al-Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs."
"I have to explain to people that I'm not the voice of Osama [bin Laden]," AJE correspondent Rizwan "Riz" Khan defensively told a National Press Club International Correspondents Committee event on March 9, 2007. Khan, who worked for the BBC and CNN before going to AJE, also wrote the book, Alwaleed, an official biography about the billionaire Saudi prince who has become a major investor in News Corporation, the parent company of the Fox News Channel.
Bin Laden's continuing use of Al-Jazeera as a mouthpiece for al Qaeda came on January 24, when the channel broadcast the terrorist's latest audio tape. "Ever since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Al Jazeera has been the network al-Qaeda has often chosen to deliver its messages to. For al-Qaeda, the channel's reach in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as its global audience, is key," acknowledged the report on AJE. It said that Ahmed Al Sheikh, editor-in-chief of Al-Jazeera Arabic, had confirmed the tape was bin Laden's voice.
Bin Laden took responsibility in the tape for the attempted Christmas Day bombing attack on the U.S.
The AJE aired the views of various people who claimed that airing the tape didn't mean that Al-Jazeera was in any way sympathetic to the terrorist group. One talking head even claimed that while airing the tape meant that the channel had exclusive "access" to al Qaeda, this gave Al-Jazeera increased "credibility."
Five days later, on January 29, Al-Jazeera aired another bin Laden tape blasting the U.S. for contributing to climate change.
In the recording, according to Al-Jazeera, bin Laden also stated that "Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the US policies to those of the Mafia. They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the US dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible."
Al-Jazeera identified Chomsky as "the US academic and political commentator" when, in fact, the professor is a member of the board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Communist Party spin-off group, and well-known for his anti-American and anti-Israel views.
On another occasion, Noam Chomsky was identified by Al-Jazeera as "the renowned US academic, author and political activist" and appeared on a show on the channel called "Inside USA." He had previously appeared on Riz Khan's program.
Al-Jazeera Arabic on February 7 aired an interview with the U.S.-born Yemen-based "religious scholar" Anwar al-Awlaki, who is actually an al-Qaeda propagandist and recruiter and has been accused of being linked to the murderous attack at Fort Hood and the Christmas Day attempted bombing. "I have said in an earlier interview with Al Jazeera's Yusri Fouda that the United States is a tyrant, and tyrants across history have all had terrible ends," he said. "I believe the West does not want to realize this universal fact. Muslims in Europe and America are watching what is happening to Muslims in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will take revenge for all Muslims across the globe."
The U.S. House of Representatives in December passed a resolution (H.R. 2278) by a vote of 395-3 to "direct the President to transmit to Congress a report on anti-American incitement to violence in the Middle East..." It was sent after passage to Senator John Kerry's Senate Foreign Relations Committee for further action.
The resolution declared that "The broadcast of incitement to violence against Americans and the United States on television channels and other media that are accessible in the United States may increase the risk of radicalization and recruitment of Americans into Foreign Terrorist Organizations that seek to carry out acts of violence against American targets and on American soil."
The sponsor, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), said passage was a blow to "terror TV" and that the report from President Obama "must include a country-by-country list and description of media outlets that engage in anti-American incitement to violence in the Middle East and a list of satellite companies that carry such media."
However, Al-Jazeera was not named in the text of H.R. 2278 while other television networks associated with Hezbollah and Hamas were.
Yet the legislation defines "anti-American incitement to violence" as "the act of persuading, encouraging, instigating, advocating, pressuring, or threatening so as to cause another to commit a violent act against any person, agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the United States."
It will be difficult for officials of the Obama Administration to argue that the definition does not apply to at least some of the programming from its "friends" at Al-Jazeera.
Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. usasurvival.org.
Older articles by Cliff Kincaid