I replied to an ad in the Guardian and, a few weeks later, moved to Qatar to experience history from within.<\/p>\n
Globally, millions were demonstrating against Iraq\u2019s imminent invasion in what some claimed were the largest anti-war protests in history<\/a>. But these failed to stop the invasion. Knowing the die was cast, Al Jazeera management raced against the clock to put in place a news website offering an alternative narrative to English-language readers during the conflict.<\/p>\n In the rush to get things ready, staff selection was slapdash. By the time we gathered in the website\u2019s newsroom (shared with the staff of Al Jazeera Arabic), we must have made a strange sight. The overall chief was a Qatari former fighter-jet pilot; the managing editor a Cambridge University graduate with a Lebanese mother and American pilot father; her deputy a Lebanese physicist from upstate New York without exposure to journalism; and we journalists a quixotic mix of diaspora Arabs, British Muslims, some Indian print journalists, and a token American who had grown up in Qatar. Later on, a British journalist who converted to Islam after a Road to Damascus moment following her kidnapping by the Taliban also joined. Much of the international media was in Doha waiting for the war to start, and in an effort to defuse the Western media narrative over Al Jazeera, the managing editor would give several interviews every day while we worked away preparing material for going live, even as hackers directed attacks against the website.<\/p>\n We were already part of an Al Jazeera tradition of dissent, one going back to the channel\u2019s 1996 founding. Saudi Arabia had banished BBC Arabic from its Orbit satellite for screening a series of interviews with Saudi opposition figures. The BBC subsequently withdrew funding from its Arabic service (it was the End of History, after all, and information operations were no longer as necessary), leaving a large pool of trained Arab journalists in search of employment. That was when Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer, a pan-Arabist-minded relative of the Qatari Emir, suggested Qatar invite these journalists to Doha to set up the Arab world\u2019s first 24-hour news station. It was the same year as the construction of the then-secret US base at al-Udeid, marking two corners of the triangle defining Qatari foreign policy over the next three decades: the third would be Doha\u2019s support for Sunni Islamist groups.<\/p>\n \u201cAl Jazeera at its start was doing \u2014 in a clumsy way \u2014 what the Emir wanted them to do: to be a revolutionary voice in the Arab World,\u201d said a retired US ambassador to Qatar who closely follows the channel. Like most of the other interviewees for this piece, this person requested anonymity in order to speak freely.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a certain generation of radical intellectuals on the left, we were desperate for a medium like Al Jazeera to come along,\u201d said a Palestinian former staff member, \u201cand when it did, we ignored some fundamental considerations, like the funding.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAl Jazeera was very courageous in conflicts in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had incredible access to fighters,\u201d said an American former employee at the channel. \u201cMaybe the way in which this access was earned turned out to be problematic, but they could take us to places nobody else could.\u201d<\/p>\n Initially, the Qataris omitted to recruit management along with the journalists. What followed was a case of \u201cthe inmates running the asylum,\u201d in the words of the former US diplomat. Even after 9\/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq shifted the news agenda away from covering Palestine, Al Jazeera\u2019s staff of mostly leftists, Islamists, and Arab nationalists \u201cdidn\u2019t feel as if Al Jazeera was infiltrated yet,\u201d in the words of the Palestinian journalist.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember the anger, the rage, strong feelings unifying the people involved in Al Jazeera,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The American former diplomat attended the channel\u2019s inauguration in 1998 and, after listening to a series of speeches pledging to build a free medium, wrote a cable to the State Department predicting that \u201cthere\u2019s no way this regime is going to provide free and uncensored media.\u201d<\/p>\n As an afterthought, he added that \u201cif I\u2019m wrong, this is going to be the biggest headache for my successors.\u201d<\/p>\n And headache it became. Fifteen years later, the US would first threaten and then bomb Al Jazeera\u2019s offices in Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad, Iraq, before engaging it in a rapprochement that moderated its news agenda. Along the way, Al Jazeera journalists were deported or banned by several countries from reporting, sentenced by Spanish and Egyptian courts to several years of imprisonment, killed in civil wars, shot by the Israeli military, and bombed by the US. Like Julian Assange and Wikileaks, the powerful made an example of them to discourage others from presenting awkward narratives.<\/p>\n \u201cAl Jazeera chose from the beginning to be the \u2018voice of the voiceless,\u2019 wrote<\/a> former managing editor Waddah Khanfar. \u201cThe channel built a strong bastion to separate its newsroom from the influence of the lobbies of palaces.\u201d<\/p>\n Al Jazeera\u2019s explicit round-the-clock coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (cf. Shireen Abu Akleh<\/a>), its reporting on regime and state corruption, and its explosive talk shows that set representatives of different ethnicities, sects, and ideologies against each other shattered all Arab world limits. After decades of a regionwide pretense that Israel was an illegitimate entity whose representatives did not deserve coverage, the channel eased Israeli spokespersons into living rooms in Damascus, Khartoum, and Sanaa by regularly interviewing them. On a visit to the channel\u2019s then-humble facilities in Doha, the Egyptian dictator who was to be removed by his people in 2011 wondered aloud at \u201call this noise coming out of this matchbox.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was revolutionary, gripping, and often exhilarating,\u201d said Naji Adeeb, a Syrian retired businessman who believes that the channel has gone downhill. \u201cNothing like it had been seen in the Arab world: saying the unsayable and discussing the hitherto undiscussable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMe and my colleagues were wondering why the Arab world hadn\u2019t exploded yet, given that it was horribly<\/em> governed,\u201d said the former US diplomat. “This was a room full of gunpowder and then somebody finally lit a match.\u201d<\/p>\n The Emir of Qatar had come to power through a revolution of sorts that saw him replace his conservative father. His strategy to modernize involved hosting regional dissidents, intellectuals, and activists at up to 80 state-sponsored conferences a year. \u201cYou would think that Doha existed just for the conferences, a city in the middle of the desert hosting a whirlwind of them,\u201d said the Palestinian former journalist. Usually invited to Doha by the Arab Center for Research and Foreign Policy Studies<\/a>, run by Palestinian intellectual and royal adviser Azmi Bishara, guests argued, networked, and had their voices amplified by Al Jazeera talk shows.<\/p>\n \u201cAl Jazeera gave the Arab viewer this illusion of watching \u2018free\u2019 news and talk shows,\u201d said Yamen Sabour, a Canada-based writer and analyst and co-founder of Arabic-language news site Awan Media<\/a>. \u201cHowever, the talk shows and commentary were always calculated and produced in accordance with Qatar’s policies as, for example, the normalization of seeing Israeli officials on an Arabic screen under the guise of giving a chance to hear the \u2018other opinion and voice.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, newsreader Jamil Azar, who invented Al Jazeera\u2019s signature slogan and was one of its founders, departed the channel in 2011, complaining of a lack of balance in coverage of the Syrian civil war as too pro-rebel.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/A-protest-against-the-impending-Iraq-War-in-New-York-City-in-February-2003-photo-Mario-Tama.jpg\")
\nBEGINNINGS<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Al-Jazeera-video-on-the-2003-Iraq-War.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nA HEADACHE<\/strong><\/p>\n