Jordan Watch : Feeling Positive about Al Jazeera International

I have never hidden my negative attitude towards Al Jazeera's Arabic satellite channel, and my aspirations and hopes for the success of the new Al Jazeera International are based on the assumption that the English satellite will not adopt the manipulative methodology of its Arabic mother and turn out to be a more credible source of information.

Al Jazeera's Arabic channel based its popularity in the Arab street on four main pillars, three of which I agree with but the 4th is a grave mistake, and they are:

1- Exposing the Arab regimes (except Qatar) infront of their people for the first time. The Arab citizens were eager to see and witness the exposure of the mistakes done by their governments and that was a great success by Al Jazeera before it became selective in its criticism for Arab regimes.

2- Opening the way for Arab opposition groups to voice their opinons and ideas freely for the first time and that broke all kinds of official censorships and paved the way for more media freedoms in the Arab world.

3- Documenting in details all attrocities committed by the USA, Israel and other western countries against Arabs and Muslims. The footage coming from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other fields of western killings against Muslims were all shocking and raised the sense of solidarity among Arabs.

4-However, Al Jazeera comes very short of documenting attrocities committed by Muslims and it often provides justification. Al Jazeera has never provided the truth about Drafur, and has always tried to justify the causes of terrorist attackes against Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco by linking them to politics. For me I have decided to stop watching Al Jazeera's Arabic channel since November 9th 2005 when it was clearly intending to justify the horrible terrorist attacks in Amman by even using lies (secret meetings for Mosad agents and evacuation of Israeli tourists prior to the attackes) and that was a complete lack of professionalism and fundamental media ethics.

If Al Jazeera International will succeed it has to stay away from the manipulative methodology of the Arabic channel which was mainly concerned with meeting the demands of the default attitudes in the Arab street.

Al Jazeera International must address the minds and not the hearts and this is a very different game than the one practiced by the Arabic channel. I feel optimistic that it will be a success based on the spirit and content of the channel in its first day of tranmission.

It seems taht Al Jazeera Interntional is planning to be the voice and screen of the south in contrast to the north and provide credible reporting on the problems of the developing world from the perspectives of its own people and that can prove to be a huge success.

In a feature that was published in the New York Times the managing director Nigel Parsons said Al Jazeera International intends to become for the developing world what Al Jazeera became to the Arab world: a champion of forgotten causes, a news organization willing to take the contrarian view and to risk being controversial.

Mr. Parsons and others stressed that Al Jazeera International was not merely a translation of Al Jazeera from Arabic. It has separate crews and editors working completely independent of the original network. If this is true then I am sure Al Jazeera International will succeed and I will be an avid follower of it, although I will not go back to the Arabic channel. I want a channle that respects my intelligence.