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VIEWS: The Attacks on Al-Jazeera
Wednesday, November 28, 2001
By Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute

Whom do you remember more vividly from the first Star Wars trilogy: Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader?

Islam Online
Ever since Osama bin Laden's first videotaped commentary on the U.S. attack on Afghanistan was shown on al-Jazeera, we have seen the Arab world's most independent television outlet attacked repeatedly. First, there was the verbal criticism by the Bush Administration that warned off American media from carrying unedited and accurately translated broadcasts of al-Jazeera material. Last week, the attacks turned violent when U.S. forces literally bombed al-Jazeera's Kabul studios. In the wake of that bombing, Fouad Ajami (2001) has criticized not this extreme abridgement of freedom of the press, but al-Jazeera's coverage of current events instead.

I found Ajami's experience with watching al-Jazeera reminiscent of my own experience watching the Fox News Network. I should first confess that I don't usually watch the Fox News Network. However, while my car was being maintenanced recently, I spent some hours in the waiting room of a car dealership where the television had been tuned to that channel.

Ajami is concerned with what he calls the "unsubtlety" of al-Jazeera's "nonstop coverage of the raids on Kabul and the street battles of Bethlehem." The entire time I was in the dealer's waiting room I endured the same thing from Fox's point of view. Of course, on the day the World Trade Center was bombed, it was not just Fox, but all American commercial television news media that not only engaged in nonstop coverage of the devastation of that day, but showed the same few images over and over again.
(More: Islam-Online.com News Source)
2001 © Islam Online.

Dan