March 26, 2003

Too Bad We Can't Bomb al-Jazeera

The allies bombed Iraq's state-run television network's satellite service yesterday, knocking it off the air. The enemy's state-run TV is a legitimate target in a war. Somebody hacked Al-Jazeera's English-language website yesterday, knocking it offline, at least in the U.S. Good for them. Al-Jazeera is the mouthpiece of radical Islamofacism. It is not an Arab CNN, an independent news network for the Arab world. It is, as Little Green Footballs has dubbed it, "Jihad TV."

Walid Phares. a professor of Middle East studies and comparative politics at Florida Atlantic University, and author of several books on the Middle East, says this of Al-Jazeera:

The network functions essentially as a high-tech madrassa, broadcasting the ideology of jihad to millions around the world. Every development is thoroughly analyzed from a jihadist angle. One example was the Iraq campaign. Months before the U.S. engagement began, two audiotapes were aired by Al-Jazeera in which Osama bin Laden called on Muslims to fight for Baghdad as the "second capital of Islam" - not as the center of Saddam's Baath. Al-Jazeera was to use the term repeatedly, slowly building up the illusion that such a jihad would be fought for Iraq, not for Saddam. Interviews with religious fundamentalist leaders multiplied. The pressure eventually led al-Azhar, the Vatican of Sunni Islam, to call for jihad if Baghdad were to be attacked. That call, now "news," in turn was broadcasted by Al-Jazeera.