THE RESPONSE OF AMERICANS TO THE hijack-threatening videotaped rant of Osama bin Laden’s spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith on Tuesday was probably: “I don’t remember ordering this crap in my cable package.” Of course they didn’t–the footage came from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based independent news network. With an estimated 35 million viewers, it has become the most popular television station in the Arab world. It’s beloved of Arab news-addicts everywhere. In France last week, there was a ruckus in the Arab media when Al Jazeera began broadcasting “snow.” Rumors flew that the station had been “censored” by the French state–and they were quelled only when Al Jazeera revealed that it had changed from analog to digital without telling anybody. CNN has an exclusive contract to use its footage, but other Western networks are lining up to rebroadcast it, too. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice criticized Al Jazeera for the broadcast, on the grounds that, among other things, it could be used to send coded messages to terrorist “sleepers” in the United States and elsewhere. More generally, Secretary of State Colin Powell (who has himself been interviewed on the network) recently asked the Qatar authorities to curb Al Jazeera altogether. Are they right? Is it dangerous? If we’re dying to watch it, why shouldn’t the Arabs get to see it, too? Well, we are at war, for one thing, and Al Jazeera has broadcast plenty of stuff just as ferocious as bin Laden’s pronouncements. They aired Palestinian terrorist denunciations of Yasser Arafat for being an appeaser of Israel, any video or press release that Hamas or al Qaeda has chosen to disseminate, and Saddam Hussein’s call for resistance against the United States in 1998. Al Jazeera is, in fact, Saddam’s favorite TV station. In its defense, D.C. bureau chief Hafez Al-Mirazi sensibly told the New York Post that the tendency of thugs to seek it out shouldn’t necessarily undermine the station’s reputation for journalistic integrity. “It’s the same reason that the Unabomber would send a letter or a fax to the New York Times,” Al-Mirazi said. “It’s a matter of credibility with the audience.” On balance–and for the time being–Powell’s call for censorship appears counterproductive. For one thing, Al Jazeera is an exception to the Saudi-subsidized stranglehold of Wahhabite chauvinism over education and media in the West (see Stephen Schwartz’s article “Saudi Friends, Saudi Foes” in the October 8, 2001 Weekly Standard). In fact, the station itself grew out of Saudi censorship. It has its roots in a joint-venture between the BBC Arab service and the Saudi company Orbit. The Saudis pulled out when the station began to step on the toes of the royal family. When the new emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, deposed his father in 1995, he decided to subsidize Al Jazeera to the tune of either $100 million a year or $100 million over the past decade, depending on whose press reports you believe. As a result, it has a BBC-trained, quirky, independent staff drawn from practically every Arab country and every political tendency. It certainly beats the Saudi-bankrolled Arabic-language TV, from Orbit to Arab Radio and Television (ART) to the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC). The Arab States Broadcasting Union, which admits even the region’s porno channels, has barred Al Jazeera on the grounds that it did not “conform to the code of honour of the Arab media.” For the time being, an unpredictable voice in the Arab world, independent of many of the corrupt governments and vested interests who have traditionally controlled the media, is probably doing the American war effort slightly more good than harm. Stylistically, Al Jazeera is the most western thing in the Middle East outside of fast food. It has a program called “The Opposite Direction” based on CNN’s “Crossfire.” It’s alone among Arab stations in having given an Israeli perspective on regional politics, even interviewing Netanyahu adviser David Bar-Illan during the last elections. It has angered Palestinians by showing protesters in Gaza firing mortars at Israeli troops. It has requested an interview with George W. Bush. (Tony Blair has already done one.) But let’s not be naive about Al Jazeera. It won its superb access in Kabul not because its reporters are any braver than those at, say, Agence France Presse, but because its Kabul correspondent, the Syrian Tayseer Allouni, has been a longtime Taliban supporter. It is quite possible that the channel will grow less independent as it leaves the flush of its first, experimental half-decade–and turn into a creature of the closed and intolerant culture it has rebelled against. Al Jazeera is obviously unwilling to stifle the al Qaeda viewpoint. On balance, we’re probably better off not insisting that they do. But Condoleezza Rice’s point about the potential for al Qaeda to use Al Jazeera as a code-transmitter is a telling one. Al Jazeera ought to stop broadcasting ready-made al Qaeda material. Such an embargo would be an act not of censorship but of prudence. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
