"The CNN of the Arab world" is how some describe Al Jazeera, but others call it "Jihad TV," a megaphone that amplifies and glorifies Islamist terrorists, anti-Semites and other fanatical foes of Israel and the United States.
Al Jazeera broadcast the blood libel that Jews had been warned by Israel's Mossad in advance about the 9-11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and had stayed home. Al Jazeera interviewed as one of its "experts" making this claim the American former Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party leader racist David Duke, without clearly explaining to its Arab audience who and what Duke is.
Al Jazeera routinely has described Islamist suicide-homocide bombers in Israel as "martyrs" and Palestinians as Israel's victims. Its newscasts and on-air discussions are staged to show its 50 million mostly-Muslim viewers a relentlessly-visceral, emotion-charged drama in which Jews, Israel and Americans are almost always cast as villains, infidels and evil-doers.
"Al Jazeera has an editorial line and a way of presenting news that appeals to the Arab public," said U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003. "They tend to portray [U.S.] efforts [in Iraq] in a negative light."
"You don't have to look too closely to find that Al Jazeera also inhabits the far side of the ideological moon," wrote Wolff, "and is as responsible for the region's departures from reality as anyone." By amplifying the views of terrorists, giving a one-sided view of bloodshed in the Middle East and encouraging both fear and loathing, Al Jazeera has at a minimum abetted terrorism. At a maximum, Al Jazeera's reporters and executives have crossed the line between commentary and complicity by working hand in glove with terrorists.
In May 2003 Al Jazeera sacked its chief executive Mohammed Jassem Ali, reported the British newspaper The Independent, after Iraq government documents captured after the fall of Baghdad that he and two of its reporters had secretly worked with, and probably for, agents of Saddam Hussein's brutal intelligence agency the Mukhabarat. All had played roles in Al Jazeera's pro-Hussein and anti-American reporting.
But Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Baghdad refused to resign after a pan-Arab daily newspaper in London in November 2004 reported - erroneously, he claimed - that he was related to the "main aide" of Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who in several videos used a knife to behead kidnapped people. The interim government in Iraq in August 2004 temporarily closed Al Jazeera's bureau in Baghdad in the interest of national security.
In September 2003 Al Jazeera's star reporter in Spain, Tayssir Alouni, was arrested after an investigation found that he had "frequent and continuous" contact with the leader of bin Laden's Al Qaeda cell in Spain. This Al Jazeera reporter also had close contact with a German-based businessman who may have funded 9-11 skyjacker and Al Qaeda agent Muhammad Atta in Hamburg.
Al Jazeera "is a dangerous force," wrote Johns Hopkins University Mideast exert Fouad Ajami in late 2001 in a New York Times Op-Ed article, "and should be treated as such by Washington." He accused Al Jazeera of glorifying the Taliban, romanticizing bin Laden and exhibiting a "virulent anti-American bias."
In March 2004 Al Jazeera praised Democratic presidential nominee-apparent, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry. The terrorist-friendly broadcaster was invited to cover the Democratic National Convention, and did so with remarkably positive reporting. Michigan and other battleground states in 2004 might have turned on Arab-American votes.
