Judea Pearl Warns About Al Jazeera English
Sheik Qardawi, a host on Al Jazeera, has been blamed for inciting the beheading of two Americans in Iraq
In the International Herald Tribune today, Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, warns that:
even if Al Jazeera English waters down its alarmist content, it should still be seen as a potential threat: it will bestow respectability upon the practices of its parent network in Qatar, which continues, among other things, to broadcast Sheik Qaradawi’s teachings.
A host of the Al Jazeera program “Sharia and Life,” Qaradawi defended suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, stating: “Israeli society in general is armed,” and in 2002 said, “We have the ‘children bomb,’ and these human bombs must continue until liberation.”
Other problems with Al Jazeera as Pearl sees it are:
For example, the words “terror” and “insurgency” are rarely uttered with a straight face, usually replaced with “resistance” or “struggle.” The phrase “war in Iraq” is often replaced by “war on Iraq” or “war against Iraq.” A suicide bombing is called a “commando attack” or, occasionally, a “paradise operation.”
Al Jazeera’s Web site can be less subtle. On Dec. 12, after religious leaders and heads of state all over the world condemned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran for staging a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran, the headline on the site read, “Ahmadinejad Praised by Participants of the Holocaust Conference in Tehran, but Condemned by Zionists in Europe.”
In short, Al Jazeera’s editors choreograph a worldview in which an irreconcilable struggle rages between an evil-meaning Western oppressor and its helpless, righteous Arab victims. Most worrisome, perhaps, it often reports on supposed Western conspiracies behind most Arab hardships or failings, thus fueling the sense of helplessness, humiliation and anger among Muslim youths and helping turn them into potential recruits for terrorist organizations.
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