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Actually, it isn’t just John McCain, David Ramadan, and the Republicans who are boosting Al-Jazeera. The dirty fingers of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are in this too.
Accuracy in Media: Republicans Boost Al-Jazeera
Cliff Kincaid — August 9, 2011
Michael Calderone, the senior media reporter for The Huffington Post, has written an article which appears on the website of Arab American News that appears to “credit” Senator John McCain for helping get carriage for Al-Jazeera English (AJE) on Time Warner cable in New York.
He writes that “…U.S. political leaders have had far more praise for the network’s on-the-ground reporting around the globe. In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called AJE ‘real news’ for its coverage of the Arab Spring protests. Two months later, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) attended a dinner for the network and spoke glowingly about its impact on the revolutions sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.”
Meantime, an Al-Jazeera contributor, Republican David Ramadan, who supported McCain for president, is running for the newly created 87th House of Delegates seat in the Commonwealth of Virginia and seems poised to win. He has been interviewed by Al-Jazeera, which the Muslim Brotherhood describes as the “great Arab media organization,” and says that his mission includes “educating the Republican party on the Arab-American and Muslim community on what we need from candidates in order to support them.”
On August 10, former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese is scheduled to appear on Ramadan’s behalf at a Loudoun County, Virginia, restaurant.
The Huffington Post has done its part on behalf of Al-Jazeera, as noted by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA): “Another facet of the Huffington Post’s brand of journalism is its symbiotic relationship with Qatar’s state-financed news organization Al Jazeera. In early 2011, the Huffington Post ran a series of pieces supporting Al Jazeera’s efforts to convince major American cable companies to carry its newscasts.
[…]
Calderone is nevertheless correct in his assessment of how significant McCain’s praise of the channel has been. As we noted at the time, McCain’s praise of the terror channel “was a shocker because the day before, on Sunday, The Washington Post had finally gotten around to publishing a semi-critical article on the channel, noting its double-standards and open bias on the matter of revolutions in the Middle East. The Post even acknowledged that WikiLeaks had released a U.S. cable describing the channel as a foreign policy instrument of Qatar, the Middle Eastern dictatorship which financially sponsors it and selects its personnel.”Picking up a New York Times story by Brian Stelter about Al-Jazeera getting carriage in New York, Keach Hagey of Politico wrote, “It’s a major step forward for the awareness-raising campaign that AJE has been on since its coverage of the Arab Spring propelled it to newfound relevance this year. But so far there is no sign that the obstacles keeping the channel from achieving its true goal in the U.S.—national cable carriage—are cracking at all.”
Neither Stelter nor Hagey gave any space to critics of Al-Jazeera, an indication of how this “awareness-raising campaign” has captured the exclusive attention of these reporters, indicating that they do not want to be accused of putting obstacles in the way of its well-financed push for carriage in major U.S. media markets.
One of the big obstacles has been the channel’s anti-American and anti-Israel bias.
Interestingly, many of the concerns that we have expressed about Al-Jazeera are confirmed in a 94-page master’s thesis, “Al-Jazeera as a Political Tool within the Contradictions of Qatar,” by an Arabic-speaking Japanese graduate, Munehiro Anzawa, available on the American University in Cairo website. It is dated May 2011.
This student is able to document many of the facts that seem to have been ignored by the media cheerleaders for the channel. First—and most obvious—the channel is Arab government-funded, which obviously colors its reporting.
The student writes that “It is important to reveal how Al Jazeera’s financing by one of the most repressive governments regarding freedom of expression affects the channel’s coverage, bias, and editorial independence. It is also interesting to note that Al Jazeera’s news reporting virtually ignores the internal affairs of its financial sponsor, Qatar, or the ruling Al Thani family.”
“More significantly,” says the master’s thesis, “Al Jazeera does not seem eager to report on the internal issues of Qatar and the dirty laundry of the ruling family.”
[…]
The academic study, however, neglects many other important points, including the fact that Al-Jazeera’s Afghan correspondent, Tayseer Alouni, went to prison in Spain for being an agent of al-Qaeda. This kind of relationship explains why Al-Jazeera has been so quick to air exclusive videos and messages from Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.The study notes that a turning point for Al-Jazeera in the U.S. came when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the channel for offering “real news.” The study failed to note that her husband, disgraced former president Bill Clinton, has a financial relationship with the government of Qatar and several entities in the country. The regime is a financial sponsor, listed at between $1 and $5 million, of the William J. Clinton Foundation.
In mid-May it was revealed by Hagey at Politico that McCain had praised Al-Jazeera, becoming a shill for the terror channel. It appears that McCain was using the channel, or perhaps the channel was using him, in order to affect regime change in Libya. As a result, Islamists are poised to take control of the country.
We pointed out at the time, “McCain’s praise of Al-Jazeera was also curious because the channel, during the 2008 presidential campaign, had savaged the McCain-Palin ticket by running a piece depicting Republican voters as country bumpkins and racists. Casey Kaufmann, the Al-Jazeera reporter who did the story, contributed $500 to the Obama-for-president campaign, a violation of basic standards of journalism ethics.”
Additional research has turned up the fact that David Ramadan, a member of the Virginia delegation and Arab-American delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2008, told Al-Jazeera about his support for McCain in an article that appeared under the direct headline, “Why I support John McCain.” He wrote, “McCain is a reformer, McCain is pro-immigration, McCain is a centrist. McCain supports the US finishing the trouble that George Bush got the US into in Iraq.”
Ramadan is running for the newly created 87th House of Delegates seat in the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Republican primary election takes place on August 23. His website boasts an endorsement from House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, a Jewish conservative, and other prominent Republicans. Appointed by Governor Robert McDonnell to serve on the Board of Visitors of George Mason University (GMU), he says he is an example of living the American dream. He has lived in Virginia since 1989.
However, Ramadan’s bio also says that he is a “frequent commentator” on networks such as Al-Jazeera.
Pamela Geller, author of the new book, Stop the Islamization of America, suggests Ramadan is a Muslim Brotherhood candidate. Writing at Big Peace, Kent Clizbe, a former CIA counter-terrorism ops officer, says that Ramadan has mysterious foreign connections that deserve serious scrutiny.
Also see:
NOVA TownHall: Who is David Ramadan?
Tags: Al Jazeera, David Ramadan, Ed Meese, enemy propaganda, Eric Cantor, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Qatar
Speaking of McCain, I was talking to a neighbor of
mine at yesterday’s block party.
He is active in Republican politics & rcounted a story
about a home reception that he was at for then Speaker
of the House , Dennis Hasteret.
The story goes that McCain was there , but was not
given an opportunity to speak.
He went into a bedroom to pout & would not come out.
When Ahmadinejad sets foot on American soil he should immediately be detained until the Americans are freed from his jails
waldensianspirit wrote:
Right on!
It’s a damned shame when you have to pray that your leaders are dangerously, box-of-rocks clueless and not actively, and knowingly, undermining our country. Alas, that’s precisely where we are.
Al Jazeera is actually way more patriotic than MSNBC and CNN.
Al-Jezzera, the Obama Administration paper of record.
@ RIX:
Damn, my new kittens are more mature than John McCain, but we knew that already. He was so not ready for prime-time as a Presidential candidate.
John Difool wrote:
MSNBC and CNN are patriotic.
They’re just on the other side…
Iron Fist wrote:
More importantly it was his turn
waldensianspirit wrote:
That is what worries me about Romney. I don’t think Romney has it in him to really fight Obama, and he has the Entitlement Mentality of it’s “his turn”. As though that were really true. If it is anybody’s “turn”, it is Sarah Palin’s. She was VP last time around, after all. But I don’t believe in this bullshit of taking “turns”. Politics is War, not some game.
Wow, we are just supposed to trust that muzz running as R’s are the real deal?
How clever.
The greatest stealth jihad yet?
I’m not comfortable that a candidate named Ramadam will have America’s best interest at heart.
@ lobo91:
Speaking of networks, if the best FNC can do to provide “fair and balanced” debates on the weekends is find a mealy-mouthed conservative and a DCC flunky that repeats talking points they should just not have the debate and report the news.
If you’ve got people that will actually say something, fine.
But stop making me change the channel because you’ve brought on annoyingly stupid or partisan people and made them talk.
Rant off.
I don’t think our pols know anything abt. islam.
That and money and favors could be changing hands.
Here’s this great quote from Cicero. (Someone posted it at WZ this morning.)
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.”
“For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
— Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
-22 today
BO-hole’s disapproval rating is at -22 this morning. He has now been in the -20′s every day for 2 consecutive weeks. I can’t think of any scenario that lifts his numbers.
chickadee wrote:
Egad! ya beat me by a minute.
i’m channeling my inner southerner…must. make. biscuits!
lard or shortening….?
huckfunn wrote:
oh i can.
but he isnt a politician like bill clinton, so there will be no triangulation and move to the right
0 is an ideologue.
coldwarrior wrote:
I’ll go wake up Mrs. Funn and ax her. NOT.
@ huckfunn:
I think we’re on the same wave length.
Is he being an obnoxious insulting sob on purpose or does he really think he is a beloved king and can flaunt his power with impunity.
@ coldwarrior:
Lard.
Makes a light fluffy biscuit with a hint of natural sweetness.
coldwarrior wrote:
You’re right. I meant to say “any scenario that he would act on”. He could padlock the EPA, lift the various drilling moratoriums and send hellcare straight to SCOTUS. Ain’t happening.
yep…lard.
just read some good articles why too.
good enough for me!
@ coldwarrior:
He’ll double down on teh stoopid…
@ lobo91:
What time is it by you?
“More significantly,” says the master’s thesis,
“Al Jazeeradoes the MSM not seem eager to report on the internal issues ofQatarobama and the dirty laundry of theruling family.” community organizer, Holder, and Big Sis.lobo91 wrote:
that’s my guess.
he isnt the ‘politician’ that clinton was
@ lobo91:
After vacay:
Massive stimulus.
Tax jet owners.
Anyone in opposition is unAmerican.
Bank on it.
Maybe even ‘Obama Youth’ campaign…election is coming up.
See weaselzipper‘s reply to Maxine Walters statment as far as I’m concerned, the ‘tea party’ can go straight to hell.” ?
Bumr50 wrote:
Yuck! What would those uniforms look like. Baggy liederhosen and $200 sneakers with no shoelaces?
huckfunn wrote:
Backwards baseball caps, “bling”, baggy b-ball shorts.
@ Bumr50:
@ The Osprey:
Actually, the “Obama Yoot” campaign is underway. In Phillie they call it a flash mob.
@ waldensianspirit:
I wanna go to one of these things, find the last person in line, and see how many jobs I can get by the time they get to the door.
These people generally don’t want jobs – they want “careers” handed to them with benefits, a “living wage,” and paid vacations.
@ Bumr50:
They’re bemoaning the extra 400 billion they didn’t squeeze out of Boehner the limp ___________
chickadee wrote:
At the moment, it’s 7:12 PM on Sunday.
@ chickadee:
…needed just a touch more milk in the biscuits next time…
i think i have the hang of this
I dream of “The Peninsula” sinking one day…
Anyone who works for, or listens to Al-Jazeera for “real” news is a traitor to everything the West has fought for. While they may have better coverage on the ground of Muslim countries……put me in the ‘who cares’ column. Arab winter is the default position of Islam.
Arab Spring is a sound bite for the willfully ignorant and the just plain ignorant. (and I have more rants where that came from, lol)
Everyone,
I got some negative feedback on this article on 1389 Blog (see comments HERE).
The commenters made a valid point – worth reading IMO.