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[Ozella Vires]

Atthe end of the day, Al-Jazeera's much-touted independence looks, for the average Arabic speaking viewer, very much like Qatari foreign policy writ large: an overall Islamist subtext in content, sometimes subtle and often in your face, with an obvious predilection for supporting favored Islamist regimes from Bashir's Sudan to Hamas-ruled Gaza to AKP-controlled Ankara, and an avowed preference for the local branches of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in opposition to regional rulers anywhere else. But that is just the beginning.

The Appendix to this paper, compiled by MEMRI Research Fellow H. Miron, presents 136 MEMRI TV clips from Al-Jazeera, out of the 722 Al-Jazeera clips in the MEMRI archives, as well as 88 translations and seven analysis papers about Al-Jazeera from the MEMRI archives.

It is perhaps not so surprising that Al-Jazeera would closely hew to Qatari foreign policy goals, given the financial relationship. But among the most significant accomplishments of Al-Jazeera in Arabic over the past two decades is its decisive role in mainstreaming Islamist and jihadi thought to a mass television audience. These ideologies, of course, predated the establishment of the Qatari broadcaster; they had been circulating openly or secretly for years. Some elements of these worldviews had been taught in schools and universities, including in most of the Gulf states, for years. And you could even find some of the same hardcore worldviews on religious broadcasters funded by countries like Saudi Arabia.

But it is Al-Jazeera, ostensibly a news channel, that took these ideologies from the peripheries to a height of prominence and respect that they had not achieved before. It was an editorial decision consciously taken and maintained through the years. Even before 9/11, Al-Jazeera's flagship commentary program built up Bin Laden as an Arab and Muslim leader deserving of emulation, a worthy alternative to those in power in the region. In July 2001, an Al-Jazeera host lauded him as "the slender Bin Laden who has made the greatest power in history shudder at the sound of his name."[7] The contrast is explicitly and repeatedly made between the selflessness and nobility of the Saudi Al-Qaeda leader and the utter fecklessness of Arab regimes, including his own country. As if praising bin Laden were not enough, the program's host took a lengthy live listener's call from one Suleiman Abu Gheith, the official Al-Qaeda spokesman.[8]

One thing is certain: For years, jihadi leaders were extremely grateful for Al-Jazeera's coverage, and saw it as positive and helpful to their cause. In 2011, the late Yemeni-American sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki, one of the most important Al-Qaeda propagandists who continues to influence susceptible audiences years after his death, lauded, on one of the principal jihadi online forums, the work of Al-Jazeera (and WikiLeaks).[11] Al-Awlaki was particularly appreciative of the network's reporters covering the wars in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Al-Jazeera's highlighting of jihadi discourse and the full and sympathetic airing of their ideology continued long after those initial years of enthusiasm. Al-Jazeera not only highlighted bin Laden, but also, while bin Laden was still alive, his deputy Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri.[12]

As the years passed, Al-Jazeera, like Qatar's foreign policy, was more sympathetic to Al-Qaeda than to ISIS, especially when the two organizations clashed. The channel embraced Al-Qaeda much more closely, focusing on all the grievances that supposedly "justified" its terrorism. With ISIS, there would eventually be a sense of "this is not real Islam; they have distorted Islam," especially when all of its atrocities became public. But the channel has occasionally given a platform to people who voiced support for ISIS.

A fascinating example of how the network continued to provide oxygen to extremism is the evolution of, to many, an obscure figure, Nuri Al-Muradi, identified as a former spokesman for the Iraqi Communist Party. In June 2006, an Al-Jazeera talk show featured a long and fulsome eulogy by Al-Muradi for the commander of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (soon to be the Islamic State of Iraq), Abu Mu'sab Al-Zarqawi.[13]

Nine years later, in May 2015, we see the same obscure "Iraqi politician based in Sweden" Nuri Al-Muradi praising and giving his support to ISIS, as he is asked to explain why an online Al-Jazeera "poll" showed 81% support for the victories of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.[14] Only a few months earlier, Al-Jazeera had featured another talking head, "an Islamic scholar," pledging his loyalty to the Islamic State's Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi live on the air.[15] These were all conscious editorial choices made by the network, not necessarily driven by the demands of the news cycle.

Given that the interventions by these ISIS (or Al-Qaeda) acolytes is clothed in the language of political Islam, this is not even "leveling the playing field" between terrorist supporters and critics, but tilting it towards those using jihadspeak and getting a respectful hearing before a massive audience that would not ordinarily been able to access extremist content so easily and safely.

Going on a jihadi website in the years after 9/11 would carry a risk for ordinary citizens in the Arab world. But hearing and seeing extremist arguments within the context of a popular news channel was much more secure. And this extremist discourse would seem even more seductive when the ground has already been prepared by repeated Islamist and populist arguments about what is wrong with the world and with the powers that be in the region.

The way Al-Jazeera works when it comes to extremists was explained to me in 2015 in a very direct way by the man who was at that time the news network's director, Yasir Abu Hilala. Al-Jazeera had recently scored a media coup at the time, being the first network to ever interview the reclusive (until then) Abu Muhammad Al-Joulani, the head of the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's branch in Syria. Al-Joulani was first interviewed in December 2013 by Tayseer Alouni, an Al-Jazeera journalist of Syrian origin who had served seven years in a Spanish prison (2005-2012) after being convicted of being a financial courier for Al-Qaeda.

In late May and early June 2015, Al-Jazeera broadcast an even longer and more detailed two-part interview with Al-Joulani, conducted by Ahmad Mansour, the notorious Egyptian Islamist Al-Jazeera reporter. Abu Hilala defended doing the interview, noting that any network in the world would have jumped at the chance of such an exclusive. Perhaps. This interview was actually reminiscent of Al-Jazeera's previous airing of the bin Laden tapes, complete and without editorial reservation.

Was Al-Joulani newsworthy? Of course. But Western news channels, for example, do not air the complete manifestos of high-school shooters and white supremacists just because they're newsworthy. Indeed, the view of counterterrorism exports today is that white supremacist manifestos "have no place being broadcast on television news."[16] More remarkable than deciding to do this particular Al-Jazeera interview was the editorial decision-making process on how it was done and what questions were asked.

The interview in question was less an interview than a lengthy informercial or recruiting video for Al-Joulani, with Mansour lobbing softball questions and gushing about the safety of "liberated" Nusra Front held territory.[17] The interview also soft-pedaled Nusra's ties with Al-Qaeda, and, indeed, its old ties with the Islamic State of Iraq (it was Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi that chose Al-Joulani to head his organization's Syrian branch before the April 2013 between the two Jihadist groups).

One of Al-Joulani's boasts was his description of the forced conversion of Syrian Druze villagers under his group's control, an event that openly pleased Mansour. Al-Joulani also expressed his satisfaction at the state of Syria's Christians "who are not like the Coptic Christians of Egypt" and that as long as they paid the jizya poll tax demanded by Islamic law, they would be unharmed in a future shari'a-based Islamic regime in Syria.

Al-Joulani used the opportunity of the interview to call on the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world to take up arms against various regimes, including the one in Egypt.[18] The striking thing was not that the interview was done, but how it was framed, from the softball questions to the gushing commentary. This was not tough hard news reporting, but rather blatant advocacy for what was still at the time a branch of Al-Qaeda, airbrushed for Al-Jazeera's viewers.[19] Furthermore, according to Syrian jihad experts, the May-June 2015 interviews took place at precisely the same time that Qatar was trying to present a "moderate" face for the Nusra Front to the outside world. According to Charles Lister, an order to moderate the public face had come to Al-Joulani from Al-Qaeda leader Al-Zawahiri himself. What a coincidence that two full hours of Al-Joulani airtime advanced an important Qatari foreign policy goal![20]

As its acting director general has said, Al-Jazeera has "complete editorial independence" while it enjoys complete Qatari funding. So, another good question would be: What does Al-Jazeera say when it comes to foreign policy focusing on the West? Particularly, what is its editorial stance when it comes to the U.S.?

Here we must admit an ongoing double standard in Arab media that goes beyond Al-Jazeera. The media of some Arab regimes, even those with close security cooperation with the U.S., is often replete with anti-U.S. content. This is not only because of certain popular issues that these American allies may seek to hype, such as the cause of Palestine, but because regimes sometimes use media as a tool to shape local public opinion, indulging in hate speech and conspiracy theories far beyond a mere disagreement with unpopular American policy objectives. Keeping the masses angry at the distant Americans instead of the nearby regime has a certain utility.

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