Iran and Qatar are allies. Qatar for years has sided with Iran in one proxy fight after another, whether in Bahrain, Yemen or in backing Hamas terror against Israelis and Palestinians.
by Anwar A. Khan
Al Jazeera Satellite Channel, now known as AJA, was launched on 1 November 1996 following the closure of the BBC's Arabic language television station, a joint venture with Orbit Communications Company in Qatar.
At Al Jazeera they claim they stand in solidarity with all their colleagues in the media. They further add, “We believe that no journalist should be intimidated, persecuted or imprisoned for carrying out their duty. We believe in the fundamental truth that freedom of speech is the very basic building block to uphold the values of democracy”, but in fact, they act diametrically just the opposite.
It is just a most spoilt den of worst criminals!
Al Jazeera has lost reporters and anchors in London, Paris, Moscow, Beirut and Cairo. Ali Hashem, the organization's Shia Beirut correspondent, resigned after leaked emails publicized his discontent with Al Jazeera's unprofessional and biased coverage of the Syrian civil war at the expense of the Bahraini protests of 2011.
Since the Bahrain government was supported by the Gulf Cooperation Council (of which Qatar is a member), the protests were given less prominence than the Syrian conflict on the network. Longtime Berlin correspondent Aktham Suliman left in late 2012, saying that he felt he was no longer allowed to work as an independent journalist in Al Jazeera.
It was committed to the truth, but it is bent. It's about politics, not journalism. For the reporter that means: time to go ... The decline in 2004–2011 was insidious, subliminal, and very slow, but with a disastrous end.
According to Walid Phares, Al Jazeera became the "primary ideological and communication network" for the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Phares noted that after democratic forces had begun the rebellions, Al Jazeera played a tremendous role in supporting Islamist elements of the revolution.
One of the organization's largest resignations was that of 22 members of Al Jazeera's Egyptian bureau. The group announced their resignation on 8 July 2013, citing biased coverage of Egyptian power redistribution favouring the Muslim Brotherhood, a killing outfit like Jamaa-e-Islami mass-murderers in 1971 in Bangladesh.
During the visit of the Qatari delegation to the 2017 UN General Assembly, anonymous critics commissioned what ostensibly appeared to be a news website, authoring a variety of articles calling Al Jazeera a "state-run propaganda arm", criticizing the Gulf state's link to terror groups or to Iran, and promoting a dark view of the Qatari economy in response to the diplomatic crisis that year.
The organization commissioned to launch this website was later identified as a conservative-leaning PR firm, Definers Public Affairs, which was also hired by Facebook to attack the social network's opponents, including Apple, Google…
BANGLADESH
In 2012, Al Jazeera faced criticism from Bangladeshi human rights activists and relatives of those killed in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. The news channel is often accused of downplaying the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which Islamist militias assisted the Pakistan Army in targeting Bengalis who sought independence from Pakistan.
In response to the Al Jazeera Investigates Documentary All the Prime Minister's Men, the Government of Bangladesh described it as "a misleading series of innuendos and insinuations in what is apparently a politically motivated “smear campaign” by notorious individuals associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami extremist group, which has been opposing the progressive and secular principles of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh since its very birth as an independent nation in 1971.”
The foreign ministry stated that the Bangladeshi government "regrets that Al Jazeera has allowed itself to become an instrument for their malicious political designs aimed at destabilizing the secular democratic Government of Bangladesh with a proven track record of extraordinary socio-economic development and progress".
The ministry also stated that "the fact that the report’s historical account fails to even mention the horrific genocide in 1971 in which Jamaat perpetrators killed millions of Bengali civilians" was "one reflection of the political bias in Al Jazeera’s coverage". The Bangladesh Army called the documentary a "concocted and ill-intended report by a vested group in the news channel Al-Jazeera", according to a statement by ISPR.
Responding to allegations by Al Jazeera that Israeli surveillance equipment is used by Bangladesh UN Peacekeeping Forces, United Nations spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said that UN agreements with Bangladesh on peacekeeping deployments did not include the "operation of electronic equipment in the nature described by Al Jazeera in its documentary, and such equipment has not been deployed with Bangladeshi contingents in UN peacekeeping operations".
The Bangladesh Federal Union of Journalists demanded a ban on Al Jazeera transmission within Bangladesh citing similar bans in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3946749368709315 – this face-book link must uncover the ugly faces of Al-Jazeera, David Bergman and many more…
One voice, one message is what the executives of Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) and Qatar’s Al Jazeera had in mind when they signed a cooperation agreement over summer.
But while these supposed news agencies and their sponsoring nations officially entered into formal cooperation only a few months ago, the reality is that these working partnerships were announced so soon after Qatar’s high-profile fight with some other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members because the executives were merely formalizing what had already been in place for years.
Iran and Qatar are allies. Qatar for years has sided with Iran in one proxy fight after another, whether in Bahrain, Yemen or in backing Hamas terror against Israelis and Palestinians.
Even when Qatar officially joined GCC positions against Iran, its real foreign policy — the so-called news pumped out by my former employer Al Jazeera — was on full display to anyone with a satellite dish or Internet, showing unquestionably that the emirate was firmly aligned with the mullahs, not with its Arab neighbours.
It is clear that the Qataris learned their current diplomatic strategy by following the Iranians’ lead of using their governmental mouthpiece, masquerading as a news organization, as a weapon to achieve their goals.
Since IRNA’s inception, its objective has been to secure Iran’s national interests, pit Sunni Arab communities against each other, fuel sectarian conflict, incite against Western nations and Israel and obtain hegemony at any cost — a terrifying design Qatar has unwisely duplicated with Al Jazeera, particularly with the new agreement.
What Al Jazeera continues to do is far more and far worse than simple bias. The Pan-Arab network has a deliberate agenda that serves as Qatar’s actual foreign policy, one that costs lives and promotes violence.
Al Jazeera’s open sponsorship of the agendas of terrorist groups including Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood under the guise of so-called press freedom must no longer be tolerated.
The US and the West believe that Al Jazeera’s one-sidedness is a reflection of the freedom of press. That belief, however, is dangerously wrong!
What actually happened with that coverage was the result not just of Al Jazeera siding with the Iranian axis, but also of Qatar’s leadership directing the network to do so.
Evidence of this collusion come from an authenticated audio recording released months ago of a 2011 phone call between Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Attiya, the adviser to the Qatari emir, and Hassan Ali Sultan, who has close ties to Iran and Hezbollah.
The network’s open sponsorship of the agendas of terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps under the guise of so-called press freedom must no longer be tolerated.
Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war in Yemen fueled by an Iranian-backed Houthi insurgency is another horrifying example of how the network has become an active player in the regional struggle rather than maintaining an independent role of an unbiased news organization.
Amjad Taha, an Iranian dissident living in exile and the head of the British Middle East Center in London, has been outspoken about Qatar’s financing of terrorist groups and Al Jazeera’s dubious role in the region.
“Al Jazeera hardly reports on the crimes committed by the Iranian-aligned Houthi criminals who recruit women and children, target coalition forces, disregard human rights and have zero political legitimacy. Iranian media cannot relay its views to the Arab viewer mainly because of the language barrier,” Taha said in a phone interview from his home in Bahrain.
“Iran does not want to portray what is happening in Yemen as a war, or case of good versus evil. They want to present it as a work of their nemesis — Saudi’s war. Al Jazeera translates this idea through its Arabic and English language channels — an exact duplication of the message broadcast day and night on Al Alam, the Iranian TV channel controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or IRGC, which could potentially be designated as a terrorist organization.
The use of Al Jazeera as a weapon to push Qatar’s agenda resulted in imprisonment of many.
Egypt suspected that Al Jazeera reporters would be engaged with supporting terrorists. It was because, quite simply, Al Jazeera uses the cover normally granted to members of the press to aid and abet terrorists in war zones.
In prison, when Brotherhood members and non-journalists were interviewed, they told that they had received production resources from Al Jazeera Arabic — a systematic technique - the network applied in conflict zones, such as, Syria, Libya and Iraq.
In a recent interview, Canadian scholar and Simon Fraser University professor Adel Iskandar described Al Jazeera’s unethical and at times illegal newsgathering tactics, including the distribution of technical equipment that would allow for satellite uplinks for distribution of footage.
This gave Al Jazeera an advantage over its competitors as the network essentially was recruiting protesters and fighters to become journalists and information gatherers for its news programming. And since the Syrian opposition (particularly those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups) was ideologically harmonized with the Qatari policy in the Levantine country, the coverage often went straight to air without verification, clarification or corroboration.
Al Jazeera long ago disposed of any pretense that it was anything other than a weapon used by its Qatari masters to promote a dangerous agenda — one that is firmly in line with Iran’s, and directly opposed to the Arab allies.
The behaviour of Al Jazeera does not represent the worthy of reliance or trust journalism.
The End –
The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
Post a Comment