Al Jazeera Goes (More) Islamist
While Al Gore — who recently gained 100 million personally from the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera — may be laughing all the way to the bank, as the saying goes, reporters have been fleeing the once supposedly unbiased Qatar-based network in droves. Reason? It’s turning into a propaganda station. From Spiegel Online:
Since the Arab Spring, though, many former dissidents have risen to power across the region — and these fledgling leaders often show little respect for democratic principles. Al-Jazeera, however, has shamelessly fawned upon the new rulers.
Today, when Egyptians protest against President Mohammad Morsi and the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jazeera is often critical of them, in the style of the old pro-government TV station. Conversely, according to ex-correspondent Suliman, Al-Jazeera executives have ordered that Morsi’s decrees should be portrayed as pearls of wisdom. “Such a dictatorial approach would have been unthinkable before,” he says. “In Egypt we have become the palace broadcaster for Morsi.”
This is rather surprising considering that Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir of Qatar and financier of the network, used to ban such blatant influence peddling. The walls of the TV station’s modern headquarters in Doha are decorated with quotations from free-thinkers like Bob Dylan and Mahatma Gandhi.
What? No quotations from Chairman Al?
What a perfect example of the inevitable trajectory which our democratic and Western freedoms take when Muslims are in charge. For years we have heard from the brightest lights in the West that things like al Jazeera and democracy are good ways to moderate Arabs and Muslims. We are assured that when Arabs and Muslims get their voice, get their access, the ineveitable outcome will turn them away from Islamic totalitarianism and towards moderation. Geniuses like Reuel Marc Gerecht and Bernard Lewis assure us that if Muslims, even Islamists are empowered, when their fanaticism meets reality, reality will force them to compromise. We’re assured, and told not to worry if the MB takes charge in Egypt – or if al Jazeera braodcasts into the West. Pragmatism will inevitably prevail! Fear not!
But Egyptians overwhelmingly voted for the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood. And the MB is showing its true colors every day. The Palestinians overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, and we can see the cancerous results in Gaza. The Iraqis and the Afghanistanis overwhelmingly chose Islamist totalitarians too, and we will rue the day that George Bush and Noah Feldman enshrined Sharia Law into their constitutions.
And we’re also constantly assured that Muslims in the West pose no dangers, that they will be influenced away from Muslim fascism and towards Western tolerance and pluralism. We are told this as if Muslims are just like any other immigrants, yet polling unequivocally shows that each ensuing generation of Western Muslims adhere more, not less, to Sharia and barbarism… And we can now see unambiguously, in every single place where Muslims reside in sufficient numbers, in places as diverse and tolerant as Paris, Copenhagen, Michigan, or LA, Muslims are becoming more, not less Islamic.
As Muslims spread their voice and their populations and their influence, as they find their sea-legs in the foreign climes which they claim for Islam, in every case their totalitarian and ugly tendencies assert themselves as they feel more comfortable – and the moderation we were promised evaporates. Instead we get “honor killings” and clitorectomies in Australia and Berlin. We get beheadings in New York and Belgium. We get S haria zones in London and Minnesota and Dearborn, and shriller and more menacing threats to “respect” them and ignore what hey are doing…
Al Jazeera was always a propaganda arm of totalitarian Islam. The vile potentate who started it was and remains a funder of Al Qaida. The wolf now emerges from the sheep-disguise it used to fool its Western dupes. God help us, our elite still adhere to the rotten nostrums of multiculturalism and “diversity”, and meanwhile, civilizations burns andnretreats as Islamic totalitarianism marches forward.
They hell they do. The elites always knew what Islam was about. They just want us to have to live in fear of constant offensive Jihad.
While we’re distracted just trying to keep the Islamic scimitar away from our throats, they loot what’s left and escape to Costa Rica, New Zealand, or at this point, even Moscow.
Inviting Jihadist Islam into the West was the Global Elite’s Nuclear Option for killing off the freedom of those they see as below them once and for all.
I’m inclined to skepticism regard Spiegel Online’s evaluation of Al-Thani’s prior stance. Sounds like they’ve only been watching al Jazeera-English.
In late 2001, Fouad Ajami found a poster of bin Laden on the wall of al J’s main studio. See the 8th paragraph of this Middle East Quarterly article (“In the wake of those attacks…”)
http://www.meforum.org/3147/al-jazeera
And I doubt the Samir Kuntar broadcast could have been made without Al-Thani’s at least tacit permission.
Well, I found myself spending a lot of time on Al Jazeera English in 2009, (cheering for the Iranian people) and then later watching as the Arab Spring unfolded. Seemed to me they were fair in their coverage and I even signed a petition for AJE to be allowed to broadcast here in the States. I’m sorry to hear they have gone south in that fairness now.