Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board

A R C H I V E S

Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war

Madina Archives


Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board

Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
BrKhalid
03/28/03 at 11:24:44
Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war

My station is a threat to American media control - and they know it

Faisal Bodi
Friday March 28, 2003
The Guardian


Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others bedded down at the £1m media centre at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm of al-Jazeera.

And yet, only a week into the war, I find myself working for the most sought-after news resource in the world. On March 23, the night the channel screened the first footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most searched item on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as many hits as the next item.

I do not mean to brag - people are turning to us simply because the western media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here could not be more different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring occasional resistance, going to plan.

Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising" which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as saviours.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the coalition bombing of "Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under "coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

Throughout the past week, armed peoples in the west and south have been attacking the exposed rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time - despite debilitating sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen litte except their steady advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.

There is also a marked difference when reporting the anger the invasion has unleashed on the Muslim street. The view from here is that any vestige of goodwill towards the US has evaporated with this latest aggression, and that Britain has now joined the US and Israel as a target of this rage.

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soliders either dead or captured and humiliated.

Amid the battle for hearts and minds in the most information-controlled war in history, one measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock and awe" hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war. As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile, our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought down by the hacking.

It's too early for me to say when, or indeed if, I will return to my homeland. So far this war has progressed according to a near worst-case scenario. Iraqis have not turned against their tormentor. The southern Shia regard the invasion force as the greater Satan. Opposition in surrounding countries is shaking their regimes. I fear there remains much work to be done.

Faisal Bodi is a senior editor for aljazeera.net
Re: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
jannah
03/28/03 at 14:26:05
[quote] The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soliders either dead or captured and humiliated.  [/quote]

No doubt. The New York Times ran a picture of a dead,burned Iraqi on the front page, and they dkn't hesitate to show the dead or captured Iraqis on network news.

[quote] As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon.[/quote]

Interesting he says that.



I think what they need to do is set up a email service/listserv and also a broadcast system where other people can replicate their articles on their websites. Kind of like what syndicated news people type do.

03/28/03 at 14:28:57
jannah
Re: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
ascetic
03/28/03 at 21:06:26
I am now positive that the department for propagating propaganda that Donald Rumsfeld alluded to during the attrocities in Afghanistan is actually established and we're seeing it in action in the obscenely choreographed news reporting on all the major news (sic) outlets.

It is encouraging to see more arab news channels (Abu Dhabi TV, Manar, Arabiyya) get into the act and show us the real side of the war
[wlm]
Re: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
Taalibatul_ilm
03/28/03 at 22:05:16
[slm]
Last night on Al-Jazeera, a Jazeera reporter inside Basra reported that he and his crew were fired upon by British soldiers as the British were firing upon a food warehouse and vehicles with foodstuff.  The reporter did not know if it was purposeful or not, but then reported that two of his crew were missing after the incident.  
Although it could have been a mistake, the bigger question is why they were firing on the food warehouse.  Are they trying to starve the people of Basra into submission?
Re: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
panjul
03/28/03 at 23:37:45
[slm]

I stoped listening to NPR radio a *long* time ago...they are so useless. Today i turned it on just to see what they were reporting and a reporter was saying something but i wasn't really paying attention, but then he said something like, "this is a warning to our listeners, the following details of the war story may not be suitable for all listeners." And i braced up thining they were going to describe how people were killed and they gory detalis of a limb hanging from a tree or brains spilt on the floor...the realities of war....u know? well guess what he braced his listeneres for??? I was so mad!!! >:(  Now get this, he described how a *bomb* demolished a building..."the asphalt was jutting out and then it caved in..." "the bomb was thrown from (name of some place.) I waited to hear about the "shocking" part of the story....but then they moved on to who supports the station.

Re: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
mr-bean
03/29/03 at 16:35:59
i don't really know if al-jazeera is really that objective....it  seems like another sensationalist organization....kindof the opposite of CNN....

it is a revolution for the arab world because no independent media really existed before...but it plays too much on feelings of arab nationalism and victimization....well at least that's what i think....

this arab nationalism is a really wierd thing...for example on palestinian tv you've got people glorifying suicide bombers to such an extent that apparently you have mtv like music videos with some not very well dressed women singing (and possibly dancing) about the glory of suicide bombing.....wierd man....wierd!!

somehow, i think this kind of stuff is really far from what islam teaches....

something intermediate between the facile coverage in america and aljeezera is
bbcfivelive

http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/

i'm not saying aljazeera is rubbish....i'm just saying don't accept it blindly...it is much more in tune with muslim perspectives....but its still got a  way to to go before it becomes objective enough to really be called honest in the islamic sense....


Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
A R C H I V E S

Individual posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Jannah.org, Islam, or all Muslims. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster and may not be used without consent of the author.
The rest © Jannah.Org