Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

[metalman]

This poll relates to this poll: What's so funny about Bill O'Reilly and FoxNews?

[Rajiv]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

For middle easterm coverage, Al Jazeera is probably one of the most reliable news sources.

On other parts of the world, it relies on the APs of the world. Of course, there are productions like Max Keiser's -- that I find very useful and full of value.

Post 2001, because of its on the spot coverage of the war, and hence a true portrayal of the horrific nature of war, Al Jazeera was negatively portrayed and harrassed by the US administration. This campaign by the US administration has been full of untrue innuendo -- including issues regarding beheading videos -- so I would say that al jazeera has been subjected to a libelous campaign by Americans - and Metalman, you are a victim of that campaign.

[Guest]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

Rajiv -

Metalman acknowledged he had distinguished between the two websites, and indicated he objected because the association had some implied quite murky underpinnings - he was probably casting a wary eye at the populist "street", as I also pointed out. This is what is meant by having one's views "co-opted" by a host with a larger agenda than your own.

This consideration is impossible to miss when entering into press partnerships with a premier Gulf States news source read by the man on the street just as much as it's read by any wonkish and politically moderate technocrat.

Even the smallest scrap of damning evidence on the US is seized on ravenously by some of the manipulators of populist opinion there. If you see populist opinion mongers as being rife in the US, why on earth would you choose to disbelieve they are not rife in the middle east?

The primary discussion on iTulip and by Max Keiser is the rot and demise of the US. That is a thoroughly valid, even critical topic. But this topic is like irresistible honey to large groups in the middle east with agendas radical enough to leave you shocked and bewildered were you to become co-opted by them.

Do you honestly think this topic is not ripe to be enthusiastically appropriated to gain a much needed legitimacy by populist groupings with agendas going a good deal further than your own? To my mind believing this cannot be so in today's middle east would be wilfully naive.

Respectfully ...


P.S. I cannot vote in the above because I agree Al Jazeera.net is a credible news source, but I think that poses the wrong question. I've tried to point out what the glaringly obvious other question is. A highly polarized local environment where such devastating critiques of the US as iTulip and Max are capable of - will be sure to carry into a whole series of unintended local political agendas which co-opt the message. What it risks getting co-opted by is potentially quite unpleasant to a secular liberal, or it certainly should be. In Max's case, part of his critique is probably subtly co-opted already, but he chooses to overlook that, referring to Saudi Arabia simplistically as a homogeneous "ally" while actually it's a very highly stratified readership indeed. The part of that readership which he does not mention holds views that would give you some grey hair quite quickly.

[EJ]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

Rajiv -

Metalman acknowledged he had distinguished between the two websites, and indicated he objected because the association had some implied quite murky underpinnings - he was probably casting a wary eye at the populist "street", as I also pointed out. This is what is meant by having one's views "co-opted" by a host with a larger agenda than your own.

This consideration is impossible to miss when entering into press partnerships with a premier Gulf States news source read by the man on the street just as much as it's read by any wonkish and politically moderate technocrat.

Even the smallest scrap of damning evidence on the US is seized on ravenously by some of the manipulators of populist opinion there. If you see populist opinion mongers as being rife in the US, why on earth would you choose to disbelieve they are not rife in the middle east?

The primary discussion on iTulip and by Max Keiser is the rot and demise of the US. That is a thoroughly valid, even critical topic. But this topic is like irresistible honey to large groups in the middle east with agendas radical enough to leave you shocked and bewildered were you to become co-opted by them.

Do you honestly think this topic is not ripe to be enthusiastically appropriated to gain a much needed legitimacy by populist groupings with agendas going a good deal further than your own? To my mind believing this cannot be so in today's middle east would be wilfully naive.

Respectfully ...


P.S. I cannot vote in the above because I agree Al Jazeera.net is a credible news source, but I think that poses the wrong question. I've tried to point out what the glaringly obvious other question is. A highly polarized local environment where such devastating critiques of the US as iTulip and Max are capable of - will be sure to carry into a whole series of unintended local political agendas which co-opt the message. What it risks getting co-opted by is potentially quite unpleasant to a secular liberal, or it certainly should be. In Max's case, part of his critique is probably subtly co-opted already, but he chooses to overlook that, referring to Saudi Arabia simplistically as a homogeneous "ally" while actually it's a very highly stratified readership indeed. The part of that readership which he does not mention holds views that would give you some grey hair quite quickly.

This is a very thoughtful reply that reminds me to say how fortunate I feel every day to have such smart, insightful, and wise members among our community here.

iTulip is only now, after nearly ten years, starting to show results from fighting on a single front, although success is still not assured. We're the Red Sox. We h ave three good games behind us but there are still plenty of chances to lose if we get distracted.

While the characterization of Al Jazeeraa as anti-American is certainly unfair, and Al Jazeeraa is at least as credible as FOX News and likely more so, opening up a new front to convince readers of this fact risks losing on both fronts.

We wish Max well in his effort.

[Guest]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

I extend my full respects to Rajiv, who's posts demonstrate he is a man of rare intelligence and decency. I hope our disagreement on this point does not stand in the way of his accepting my full respects.

[Rajiv]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

Lukester,

Thank you for the kind words.

It has been my experience that 99% of the people the world over, do not buy into the hateful diatribes. It is only that 1% who do. Most people can make out falsehoods when they are told one. However, these 99% can and do become a part of a lynch mob

-- and I am afraid that we became one (a lynch mob) after 9/11/01. I do not know who was behind the 9/11 attacks -- but I do not buy into the official story - there are too many holes in it. And if as I believe that the official story is a lie -- either by omission or by commision - then we may be hanging innocents in our desire for revenge.

[Guest]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

Rajiv -

It's maybe just my credulous view of the world, but I believe that 98% of conspiracy theories are bunk. The great majority of the time it's the quite obvious clues which lead to the real story.

On the subject of 9/11 we should note that curiously, the overwhelming majority of the participants were Saudis, yet that nation is our 'ally', yet you are not alone in believing that we must be projecting 'irrational fears' in that direction which are merely phantoms of our own unresolved domestic issues. There are psychoanalytic terms used here which may be inappropriate as the topic has more to do with planned terrorism on an industrial scale than any spontaneous American neurosis which appeared without cause.

If the agents of 09/11 are imagined to be domestic rather than foreign, conspiracy buffs must then believe that American fears circulating today about "foreign terrorists"are merely neuroses, and are standard symptoms of the spontaneous and willing slide of these people into a new form of fascist society. If we provisionally suppose there really was no foreign instigator of 09/11, we can be percieved to be merely 'projecting' irrational fears onto the world because we cannot face our "internal conflicts", or something to that effect. Seems a bit of a complicated theory ...

That's as may be.

But please note these mitigating facts - the Madrassas schools from whom the reputed suiciders of 09/11 gained their fire and brimstone are quite real, from Morocco to Indonesia, and are springing up to replace modern education wherever people can be persuaded that a Madrassa will give their children a better start in life than might a traditional secular school.

The theocratic bilge taught in the Madrassas is quite real - yet those in the West who are inspired by an idealistic notion that a greater exercise of "human understanding" will cut through the medieval obscurantism taught by these Madrassas, and thereby achieve healing between all nations, will receive a bad shock when their illusions are stripped from them further down the road. The people to whom you might address these fine sentiments regarding better mutual understanding, and a yearning for peace, are not receptive to this kind of subtlety.

Later, when we are possibly finally bankrupted by the ongoing clashes with the products of these Madrassas schools, who are cranking out theocratically intoxicated bigots at a rate sufficient to overwhelm all hopes for secular government in the old world's middle east, people like me will be posing this question to you, asking you what precisely else you might have anticipated would happen, had you exercised a little more cynicism (realism). But by then we will be old men, and the debate will be stale and academic, and devoid of future hopes for our personal lives.

In the meantime, the rest of us, the non-idealists and the agnostics and the civic minded atheists, will experience the meagre results of any experimental policy of appeasement rather than confrontation, engaged by secular nations, as they seek to at least slow down the encroachment of the Madrassas students being churned out throughout the region who are working industriously for the arrival of their textbook theocratic "nation of God".

After Bush's now discredited hodge podge of meddling to halt the influences which the Madrassas set in motion, we'll seek peace through appeasement, by earnestly employing "better understanding between cultures", while those who tried to educate us to their "vision" of a more Godly 21st century by blowing up everything within reach will simply interpret any hesitancy from the secular world as weakness. While self-doubting and progressively enfeebled Western societies retreat in a series of conciliatory gestures, those who hunger for a new theocracy will only read this as an encouragement to advance. This will be the next chapter after the current bumbling administration, and it will be even worse.

The outliers of this brave new world will be the students being churned out by these Madrassas.

The vision you follow, which views the reactions to 9/11 as a search for scapegoats, seems to discard the clues littered around 09/11 without much scrutiny. Unless one willfully declines to see it, the clues seem to lead straight to the Saudi popular "street" we have been discussing today, which led straight to the radical Madrassas schools churning out "students" with little more education than a patchy rote-memorized preparation in theology.

I may misunderstand the conspiracy theorists, but aren't they suggesting that the origins of 09/11 in the Middle East are simply false leads? Their implication seems to be instead that the events of 09/11 were a domestically instigated conspiracy, presumably ginned up as a (rather noisy) way to instigate fascism over here, and all carried out by unscrupulous people acting right within our western society. This is an idea that has made quite a few rounds.

I think this "American neurosis" thesis, where we are supposedly lashing out at the world while the true cause of 09/11 was supposedly auto-inflicted via a stealthy domestic American coup, must call all of it's believers with a siren song, because it certainly seems very popular. But in the end the reality will probably let you conspiracy theorists down badly. What you surmise to be irrational American fear, or some kind of witch hunt looking for a phantom foreign agent after 09/11, seems more likely instead to have been an rather blunt American recognition that the event was carried out by Madrassas educated theological "students" seeking to prove some absurd fealty to their cruelly reinterpreted faith.

If the above causes are the real ones, the American desire to deliver a clear message to the hosts of these Madrassas schools and to their pupils, to "explain" to them in similar demonstrative language that "proselytizing with mass demolition and murder" won't be taken lying down, should be regarded at least superficially as a rational response. If someone kills your father you presumably do not sit on your hands. Of course the regional political calculus behind the American reply was clumsy to the point of disastrous. But still, if this analysis were closer to the truth of the matter, America looking abroad for the instigators of 09/11 would have little or nothing to do with the "delusions of a lynch mob". I must disagree with your cursory analysis.

[Basil]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

I am new to Itulip and this is my first post. I did not expect it to be on this topic. But I would imagine that I am the only member of Itulip who has actually spent time in Madrasas. I have traveled throughout the Middle East and seen Madrasas in Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iran (though they are not called Madrasas in Iran) and have compared the curricula of several. I have also studied classical Islamic texts with people trained in Madrasas.

Speaking of Madrasas in a general fashion simply demonstrates that someone does not know what a Madrasa is. Madrasas exist from Pakistan to Morocco and beyond. The word simply means place of study. Some are institutes of higher learning with leading international scholars in their respective fields of study. Others are ideological training camps. Others are simply places to go to learn how to read the Quran and little more. In other words the word is used to describe everything from grade school to graduate school. If one wishes to speak effectively about institutes of learning in the Islamic world, one must distinguish what type of Madrasa and in what country if one wishes to say anything meaningful.

I do not wish to go on, but would just say that almost everything you read about the Middle East and the greater Islamic world in the MSM is even less informed than what you read about the current economic situation. If you would not base your investment practices upon what you read in the MSM then how could you derive your understanding of things Islamic.

This is not to say that there are not some major problems in the Islamic World, but if one wishes to understand them they must be properly contextualized and analyzed.

Basil

[DemonD]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

I do not wish to go on, but would just say that almost everything you read about the Middle East and the greater Islamic world in the MSM is even less informed than what you read about the current economic situation. If you would not base your investment practices upon what you read in the MSM then how could you derive your understanding of things Islamic.

This is not to say that there are not some major problems in the Islamic World, but if one wishes to understand them they must be properly contextualized and analyzed.

Spot on. I think this is where certain blogs help, and definitely people like yourself can impart your personal knowledge to help educate those of us who never have seen these things and likely never will. I look forward to reading more of your insights, hopefully you'll contribute a lot to itulip.

[Tulpen]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

...large groups in the middle east with agendas radical enough to leave you shocked and bewildered were you to become co-opted by them.

Not much worse, I venture, than America's Middle East foreign policy and in particular its relentless, one sided and blind support for Israel.

[lb]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

It depends on the affiliate.

In the past I spent a lot of time on memri.org, in some countries the anti America, Jew, and Israel bias is huge. In other countries it's nonexistent or extremely downplayed.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

I voted: yes, Al Jazeera is anti-US and anti-Isreal. Its news is biased against the West which means that Al Jazeera is pro-fundamentalist and anti-liberty.

I read Al Jazeera from time-to-time, never-the-less, because I try to gather all views on issues, regardless of whether I agree with those view-points, or not.

I am strongly pro-Isreal, pro- US, pro- Europe, pro- Canada, pro- Mexico, and pro- China. (Those are my prejudices.)

My heros: the new pro-Western and pro-Isreal President of France. (What a breath of fresh air for France and Europe! ) Also, President Ju Jin Tao in China is another hero of mine. And both Hillary and Obama are a breath of fresh air for the politics in the U.S.

[Rajiv]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

are you referring to aljazeera.com or al jazeera.net or aljazeera.info?

[Starving Steve]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

I am referring to Al Jezeera which I read on the Internet here. I take it to be a newspaper or else a TV network, much as FOX is. But whatever it is, it has a blog, or a page here, on the Internet which you can read daily. I take part in their polls and make comments there, on the odd time when I visit their website.

Another website which I visit is www.debka.com which has an extreme and uncompromising pro-Isreal and pro-settler and pro-fundamentalist (Orthodox) Jewish viewpoint. Zionist might be the best label for the rather militant and nationalistic points-of-view expressed at this website.

Debka and Al Jezeera might be viewed as mirror images of one another, much like negative and positive numbers are mirror images of each other in mathematics.

[Rajiv]

Re: Is Al Jazeeraa anti USA?

AlJazeera.com is not the same as aljazeera.net is not the same as aljazeera.info -- which are you referrring to? You didn't answer my question.