(free candy from the US Air Force)
"The range of breaking stories has gained Al-Jazeera an unprecedented number of new fans in the U.S., and more powerful enemies in the Middle East."A little later in the story, Amos - providing no details or explanation - notes that,
"Al-Jazeera Arabic has been controversial since broadcasts began 15 years ago."The focus of Amos' piece is on the current hostile reaction of authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes to the informative news that Al-Jazeera produces, but there is an odd and glaring lack of context to the report. Except for this one brief mention regarding Al-Jazeera English - " It was shut out of the American market by reluctant cable operators after the Bush administration labeled the network anti-American" - listeners would never know that Middle East dictators attacking Al-Jazeera are simply following the same playbook used by US during the past "controversial" decade. The tactics of the US playbook against Al-Jazeera range from mild to very extreme:
- public critiques and complaints
- aggressive, hostile lies and denunciations
- detention of reporters and confiscation of tapes
- detention and torture of reporters [case of Salah Hassan]
- detention and torture of cameramen [case of Suhaib Badr al Baz]
- long term detention and torture of reporters [case of Sami al-Haj]
- killing reporters [case of Tareq Ayyoub]
- blowing up its offices in Kabul in a missile attack
- blowing up its offices in Baghdad with a missile attack
- plotting to bomb its main offices in Doha
The complete omission of this background history leads to some excruciating irony - for instance, this bit from Amos:
"Al-Jazeera's office was closed and burned, journalists beaten and detained, tapes confiscated or destroyed."She is talking about recent events in Egypt - not Iraq or Afghanistan.
Hearing this latest example of the NPR history scrub made me wonder if I was being too harsh on NPR. Perhaps they have covered some of the United States government's most egregious abuses against Al-Jazeera and so decided that repeating them was unnecessary. So let's see what on-air coverage NPR has given to the most significant cases of US assaults on Al-Jazeera:
What can you say? NPR has not given a single bit of coverage to even one of these US-orchestrated assaults on journalism in general - and Al-Jazeera in particular. I have to confess that - even as critical as I am of NPR - I was stunned at its absolute censorship of these stories. Given NPR's hypocrisy when it comes to covering attacks on journalists, I guess I should not have been the least bit surprised.
