by SUKANT CHANDAN
How did Al-Jazeera, once dubbed the ‘terror network’ by some and whose staff were martyred by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, end up becoming the media war propagandist for yet another Western war against a small state of the Global South, Libya? We will not know the full details for some time; perhaps some wikileaks will help us understand later. But this much is already certain: the station is betraying gross political bias against its pan-Arab and pan-Islamic anti-imperialist constituency, reflected by its discriminatory reporting on the region based on Qatar’s interests and its relations and service to the West.
Al-Jazeera’s Smashing of Western Hegemony in Media
In the late 1990s, Al-Jazeera delivered a historic blow to Western hegemony in the media thitherto wielded through Sky, CNN, and the BBC. The emergence of Al-Jazeera was a part of the world process of growing multi-polarity — the beginning of the end of the ‘New World Order’ phase of US hegemony. In the Arab world the Gulf region started to see great political upheaval in the 1990s when the people of the region realized that their main national resource — oil — was not going to last for ever and that, if they don’t use this oil to develop their countries, then they will be left with nothing but sand dunes. It was these factors which led to the emergence of a vibrant pro-democracy movement in the Gulf, especially in ‘Saudi’ Arabia.
All media try to appear independent, but no large media ever is, including Al-Jazeera. It played a crucial agit-prop role in the early 2000s during the intense battles between the Empire and the oppressed peoples’ struggles in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Having myself undertaken international solidarity work with medical staff during the height of the siege of Ramallah in April 2002, I can attest that, for those under the Zionist state’s military curfew and occupation in Palestine, Al-Jazeera was almost the eyes and ears of the people in Ramallah, keeping us informed about the solidarity protests across the region and internationally and also keeping us buoyed up in reporting the resistance in Afghanistan, the Tora Bora battle at the time to be precise.
There were always political contradictions within the station, the patron of the station being the Gulf monarchy of Qatar, who hosts the US Army’s regional Central Command — Centcom. Despite the contradictions in the station, it seems clear that Western powers were not going to allow Al-Jazeera Arabic to launch an English-language station with the same assertive, nay militant position towards Western foreign policy. Al-Jazeera English (AJE), launched in November 2006, had to tread carefully, not crossing the invisible ideological lines drawn by the United States too, not just by Qatar’s ruling class.
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