Hugo A. Sanchez/©Gulf News
The Israeli government is toying with the idea of closing down the occupied Jerusalem bureau of Al Jazeera, as recently stated by the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman defended the decision saying: “Al Jazeera is not media. It’s an incitement machine. It is pure propaganda of the worst variety, in the style of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.” Apparently, even Israeli leaders, who have long supported Qatar and appeared live on Al Jazeera’s shows, are no longer able to stand the controversial station.
A closer look, however, shows that literarily nobody else can — with the sole exception of notorious terrorists who still appear on its programmes.
Why did Al Jazeera do this to itself? Was it self-inflicted character slaughter, or simply — Al Jazeera being Al Jazeera, a channel founded to inspire hate and sectarianism — to fan wars throughout the region.
Since its launch in November 1996, Al Jazeera won the hearts of millions of Arab viewers — thanks to its cutting-edge studios, news scoops, its liberal reporting, and the calibre of its anchors and show hosts. After decades of watching state-directed television stations, preaching dogmatic rhetoric of thinly-veiled propaganda, Al Jazeera seemed different, supposedly more democratic and free. On January 1, 1999, it started 24-hour broadcasting, on the 47th birthday of Qatar’s then Emir Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani.
The channel only unveiled its true face in 2001 when Osama Bin Laden chose it — out of all other media outlets in the world — to air his first videotape, claiming responsibility for 9/11. From that moment onwards, the channel started to reveal its real identity, becoming a platform for outlawed military groups like Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaida and Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). It exclusively aired all of Bin Laden’s videos and since his death in 2011, Al Jazeera has honoured the practice with his friend and successor Ayman Al Zawahiri. Some of its anchors have since been arrested or accused of being affiliates of Al Qaida or sympathisers of the terrorist organisation, notably Tayseer Allouni, the Syrian journalist who covered the war in Afghanistan and was given an exclusive interview by Bin Laden. He was a good friend of Abu Musaab Al Souri, the chief Al Qaida ideologue who helped him obtain press credentials from the Taliban regime to set up an Al Jazeera office in Afghanistan. Allouni was arrested in Spain in September 2003 and sentenced to 26 years in prison for links with global terrorism. Al Jazeera shamelessly defended him, rather than distance itself from such a controversial figure. He has since been released and has snuggled up to Abu Mohammad Al Golani, the commander of Jabhat Al Nusra, the Al Qaida branch in Syria.
In December 2013, Allouni was given another exclusive — this time with Golani, a man blacklisted all over the globe.
Other staff members have been no less controversial, like Ahmad Mansour, the Egyptian presenter of the programme Shahed Ala al-Asr, widely believed to be a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. His guests have included Hassan Tourabi, the Sudanese affiliate of the Brotherhood, Ahmad Yassin, head of the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine, and Adnan Saadaldine, the group’s leader in Syria from 1976-1981. In 2014, a criminal court in Cairo convicted Mansour in-absentia, sentencing him to 15 years in prison. And in 2015, he was briefly detained in Germany. On both the accounts, Al Jazeera came to his defence.
By insisting on hiring and maintaining men of such calibre, Al Jazeera was actually confirming everything that has ever been said about its role in global terrorism. In covering the Iraq War of 2003, it hailed terorists who blew themselves up on civilian targets as members of the “resistance”. When Hezbollah militant Samir Kuntar was released from an Israeli jail in 2008, its Beirut bureau chief threw him a birthday party, hailing him as “Brother Samir”. He had been arrested for a 1979 operation that resulted in the killing of an Israeli policeman and four civilians, including his four-year old daughter. In its coverage of the Syria War since 2011, Al Jazeera has positioned itself as a 24-hour platform for the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt responded to the decapitation of 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya by Daesh in 2015 with retaliatory strikes on the city of Derna. Al Jazeera chose to condemn Egypt, rather than Daesh, for “violating” Libyan sovereignty. It didn’t say a word about Daesh. When Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi arrested Mohammad Mursi in 2013, Al Jazeera transformed itself into a cheap propaganda tool in the hands of the Egyptian Brotherhood, siding with the Islamic underground and terrorist network, rather than with the Egyptian state.
Much of its radical legacy was built during the era of its director Waddah Khanfar, a former Palestinian reporter from Jenin who headed the station from 2001 to 2011, during its honeymoon with Al Qaida. He was then replaced by Ahmad Bin Jasim Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, who clubbed the channel with Al Nusra Front and Daesh. The channel’s former Washington bureau chief Hafez Al Mirazi resigned a year after Khanfar’s arrival, protesting the station’s “Islamic drift”.
Even in the US, Al Jazeera has stirred controversy. When covering the US elections in 2008, it aired racist comments about Barack Obama’s colour. In 2001, the US Army struck at an Al Jazeera Office in Kabul and in 2003, a US missile hit its bureau in Baghdad. That same year, it was “indefinitely” banned from covering the New York Stock Exchange, because authorities wanted networks that focused on “responsible business coverage” — something that Al Jazeera had failed to provide. In 2004, the then US president George W. Bush singled out the channel as a source of “hateful propaganda” while former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that it was “inexcusably biased and vicious”.
In a ground-breaking book by two French journalists called: Le Villain Petit Qatar, cet ami qui nous veut du mal (Our friend Qatar, the little villain who doesn’t wish us well), the Qatari government was accused of “transforming Doha into a refuelling station for the majority of extremists in the world”. The book sums it up brilliantly: “Just create an ‘Islamic front’ and Doha will give you an office, lodging and a cover.”
Sami Moubayed is a senior fellow at St Andrews University in Scotland and author of Under the Black Flag.
