As palavras, o meio e a difusão da ideologia da violência

Os meios de comunicação e a sua subordinação a meios difusores de ideologias. São demasiado apetecíveis para serem deixados em auto-regulação. Daí que haja, de forma consentida ou não por parte dos jornalistas, no mundo inteiro, uma apropriação do meio para espalhar a "verdade". Desta feita analisa-se a Al Jazeera.




Another Perspective, or Jihad TV?

By JUDEA PEARL
Published: January 17, 2007
Los Angeles

"IN late 2001, three months before my son, the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped, he interviewed the influential Qatari cleric Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and asked him about suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. The sheik replied with a novel twist of logic. “Israeli society in general is armed,” he said, implying that Israeli civilians — including women and children, doctors and journalists — are legitimate targets.

At the time, it was still surprising to see an authoritative Muslim cleric give religious license to the ideology of terror — granting the faithful permission to elevate their own grievances above the norms of civilized society.

Daniel would fall victim to that same ideology when he was abducted and murdered in Pakistan. After his death, I discovered that Sheik Qaradawi is the host of a weekly program on the Qatar-based TV news network Al Jazeera called “Sharia and Life.” He uses this forum to preach his new morality to millions of Arabic-speaking viewers, including Hamas operatives, Al Qaeda recruits, schoolteachers and impressionable Muslim youths. “We have the ‘children bomb,’ and these human bombs must continue until liberation,” he told his audience in 2002. Consistent with this logic and morality, Sheik Qaradawi later extended his Koranic blessing to suicide bombing against American civilians in Iraq.

A few in the Arab world have taken issue with his calls for violence. Al Ittihad, a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, editorialized in 2004 that the beheading of two American hostages in Iraq happened “in direct response to Qaradawi’s fatwa and incitement, which permits the killing of American civilians.” Yet few, in the Middle East or the West, seem willing to condemn Al Jazeera’s management for giving the cleric regular airtime.

None of this might seem to matter much to Americans except that for two months now Al Jazeera has been taking its mixture of news coverage and extremist propagandizing to our front door through an English-language station. Called Al Jazeera English, the network can be received via satellite or streamed over the Internet. It has bureaus in London and Washington, and has recruited such high-profile Western journalists as Sir David Frost as correspondents.
In part, this is promising. The Arabic version of Al Jazeera and its various spinoffs on satellite TV and the Internet are usually credited with having a positive influence on Arab society. True, Al Jazeera’s coverage has placed an emphasis on younger leaders, reformers and successful businessmen who may serve as role models for today’s Arab youth. And it has brought — as the press usually does — a degree of inquisitiveness and openness that could become a useful engine of reform in the region.

Westerners have been quick to point out these benefits. A critic for The Times said that “though Al Jazeera English looks at news events through a non-Western prism, it also points to where East and West actually meet.” Time magazine noted, “arguably nothing — including the Bush administration’s panoply of democratization programs — has done more than Al Jazeera to open minds and challenge authority in the Middle East.”

But what should concern Westerners is that the ideology of men like Sheik Qaradawi saturates many of the network’s programs, and is gaining wider acceptance among Muslim youths in the West. In its “straight” news coverage on its Arabic TV broadcasts and Web sites, Al Jazeera’s reports consistently amplify radical Islamist sentiments (although without endorsing violence explicitly).

For example, the phrase “war on terror” is invariably preceded by the contemptuous prefix “so-called.” The words “terror” and “insurgency” are rarely uttered with a straight face, usually replaced with “resistance” or “struggle.” The phrase “war in Iraq” is often replaced by “war on Iraq” or “war against Iraq.” A suicide bombing is called a “commando attack” or, occasionally, a “paradise operation.”
Al Jazeera’s Web site can be less subtle. On Dec. 12, after religious leaders and heads of state all over the world condemned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran for staging a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, the headline on the site read, “Ahmadinejad Praised by Participants of the Holocaust Conference in Tehran, but Condemned by Zionists in Europe.”