Want To See A Thriller? Watch Hitchcock Not Al-Jazeera!

This is not about the case of Al-Jazeera journalists litigated in Egypt.  I do not have before me the file on that case.  This posting has to do with a much larger issue: Does press freedom know no limits?!  Because this is the basic issue confronting Al-Jazeera as it fabricates its case around the world against the New Egypt.

For eight long and productive years, I learnt an important lesson from one great journalists source -Forbes Magazine.  From 1976 to 1984, I was retained by Forbes great co-founder, the late Malcolm Forbes.  He, and his four sons, and the editor, James Michaels, were my inspirational source.  After choosing me to be the editor of the Arabic edition of Forbes Magazine, I posed a question to Malcolm: "What is the most important department at Forbes?" With a tilt of his head, twinkle in his eyes, and an assertive wave of his hands, Malcolm Forbes drew me closer as he whispered: "The Facts-Checking Department."  How profound!!

When I began watching Al-Jazeera TV network, I felt truly ambivalent about what I was seeing.  Captivated by its global resources as it presented documentaries on Arab history.  But repulsed by its news presentations of current Arab issues.  As if I was watching the production of a schizophrenic network where the past was revered, but the present was slanted.

The Al-Jazeera's slant decidedly pointed to its own funding Mecca - The Petro-State of Qatar!!  Not one word was ever uttered evaluating Qatar as a family business.  But torrents of news and innuendos and oblique hints disparaging nearly every other Arab regime.

Al-Jazeera called itself "The Pulpit of the Pulpitless" (in Arabic: "Minbar Mun La Minbara Lahu").  OK!!  But as the channel's popularity grew, in the midst of the dearth of similar technological resources for other Arab media, a decided tone of pomposity crept in.

Interviews became marked by long leading introductions; assertive interviewers ended their questions with the arms-twisting phrase of "isn't it so," without more; frequent interruptions of the interviewees; non-ascertainable facts peppered the news programs; and clips selectively vouching for Al-Jazeera's editorial commitments ruled the airwaves.

Conclusion: ideology took a front-row seat; facts, as gleaned from facts-checking, took a back seat.  As in the sordid practice of personal injury lawyers, chasing after ambulances to get injured clients signed up, Al-Jazeera was chasing any opposition group in the Arab homeland as the only source of credible news.

One of their leading interviewees was Abdel-Bari Attwan, the past editor of "Al-Quds Al-Arabi."  He, without shame, eulogized in a full-length page Saddam Hussein the day of the execution of that mass murderer.  Called him "The Leader of the Arab Nation!!"  But "the best" of Attwan, a Palestinian who was educated for free at Cairo University, was yet to come:  On Al-Jazeera, he described the mastermind of 9/11 as "Sheikh Osama Bin Laden." (Sheikh means an Islamic scholar).

On Al-Jazeera's airwaves, Attwan advocated a resumption of war between Egypt and Israel.  Both Al-Jazeera and Al-Quds Al-Arabi, described Hamas invasion of Egypt through the Sinai tunnels as "legitimater for being the strategic depth of Hamas."  

This is not to mention daily attacks on other Arab Governments from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan to the East, to Morocco to the West.  Now fast forward to Al-Jazeera's attitude towards the turbulent scene in the New Egypt from December 2010 to the collapse, under massive popular pressure, of the fascist Islamist regime of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

Two and a half years of misery in the most populous Arab country where the Islamists for a while highjacked the Revolution of January 25, 2011; attacked the Copts and the Shiis; gloried in the burning of convents and museums; attacked nuns; burned books; manipulated university students; side-lined Al-Azhar; issued crazy fatwas; allowed uneducated preachers in mosques to celebrate a retrograde interpretation of Islam; aligned themselves with haters of secular Egypt from Hamas to Qatar to Turkey; and called for drastic revisions of security measures in Sinai.  For one fateful year, Egypt was ruled by a Taliban-like cabal with one difference: The Taliban espouse Afghanistan; a Brotherhood Supreme Guide said: "To Hell with Egypt."

Throughout that period of internal terror, Al-Jazeera raised the Islamist flag as high as Qatar wanted; Qatari petro-dollars illegally poured in; foreign NGO, without any accountability to the Government, treated Egypt as if it was a No-Man's Land; and Al-Jazeera's news reports became so one-sided as to qualify for "news fabrication."  They focused on how chaos was the daily event in Egypt.

It was a constant drumbeat by Al-Jazeera creating a world-wide false impression of a failed State.  No sovereign State on earth could allow such an organization to go on falsely destroying its fabric from within.  States have the sovereign obligation to keep national dangers outside their borders.

A sample of Al-Jazeera playing games with the facts on the territory of the New Egypt is Al-Jazeera's reporting of a non-factual article by Michelle Dunne.  Dunne is described in that article publicized by Al-Jazeera on Nov. 4, 2014 as "a senior associate in the Middle East programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace."  In her article, Dunne, whose husband was implicated in a case brought before the Egyptian judiciary against an NGO alleged intervention in internal affairs, had plenty to say through which to vent her incurable Egyptophobia.

In her own self-proclaimed expertise, Dunne denounces Egypt's measures of counter-terrorism in Sinai as follows: "There were the remarkable scene of Egyptian bulldozers demolishing houses to create a buffer zone in Rafah following allegations that militants or weapons had entered from Gaza to carry out the attacks.  While the tunnels under Rafah have been a persistent and serious problem, the total media blackout in Sinai makes it impossible to know what actually happened and whether the demolitions were truly necessary or rather a hasty exertion of collective punishment against Sinai residents."

How insane can Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment and Al-Jazeera of Qatar get!!  Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (Friends of Jerusalem), and based in Gaza, has proclaimed these terror actions to the whole world.  They have targeted both Egyptian security forces and foreign tourists.  They have declared Sinai an emirate of ISIS.  Is Dunne and Al-Jazeera so deranged as to expect from Cairo detailed and open access to military operations and measures of self-defense?  On what basis in law or fact does Dunne, through Al-Jazeera, characterize internal and sovereign defensive actions by Egypt in Sinai as "collective punishment against Sinai residents?!"  Total fabrication which is shamelessly uttered behind the facade of "press freedom."  Is it any wonder that in mid-December 2014 she was refused entry to Egypt?  Is that press freedom, on a sinister invention of news and malicious mythinformation?

To me at least, it is the kind of hate-mongering which makes of both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Al-Jazeera Network pro-conflict propaganda organizations.  Their manifest purpose is destabilizing the New Egypt.  Permanent war seems to be their lifeblood of existence in this age of chaos.  Why is this my conclusion?

• Because freedom of the press is designed to enlighten, not to obfuscate; to shed light on credible facts as the best means of mass education;
• Because freedom without limitation is the definition of chaos.  Like the Olympic connected circles, the limits of my freedom is where the outer limits of your freedom begin;
• Because the age of Nazi Goebbels teaches all of us that a steady barrage of lies about other people, whether for religious or ethnic or imperial reasons, shall lead ultimately to catastrophes like the Holocaust;
• Because it violates the UN Charter purposes of developing "friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples" (Article I, para. 2);
• Because interference in the internal affairs of sovereign States, as through negative and non-substantiated media reports, is prohibited under international law (UN Charter, Article II, para. 7) except in apartheid-like situations;
• Because defamation of States or people or faith through surface conclusions and blatant fabrication of rumors and events, such as manifested by Al-Jazeera and Michelle Dunne, are not only unethical.  They are also means of fomenting mistrust of governance.  That is especially so in countries like Egypt which is going through the dual difficult tasks of reconstruction as well as containment of ISIS-like terrorism;
• Because the "Freedom of Expression" does not apply to someone mischievously yelling in a crowded theater "Fire!" causing death and injury by a terrified stampede.

A seminal article appeared in the New York Review of Books of January 2015 by David Cole, under the title "Must Counter terrorism Cancel Democracy." In it, that legal scholar deals with government powers during national emergencies.  He says: "Properly regulated, surveillance is a legitimate governmental function in peacetime and wartime.  Every country does it; no country forbids it."  With regard to El-Sisi Administration, Al-Jazeera and Dunne seem oblivious to this reality.

The claim by Al-Jazeera to a bogus total, unbridled, unregulated, and non-substantiated stream of invented facts about sovereign States is rebuffed by law and ethics.  Their claim of credibility has been found to vanish through a permanent ideological pattern of smear campaigns against secular Egypt.  Al-Jazeera shamelessly manifested its tilt towards a defunct Islamist regime some of whose leaders are now in refuge in Qatar which bankrolls Al-Jazeera.

The Qatar/Al-Jazeera symbiosis is the clearest evidence of Al-Jazeera's absence of independence.  To Qatar, it is "His Master's Voice!!"

The New Egypt is charting its own course, come what may.  It has a secular constitution which nullified an earlier totally retrograde Islamic Constitution; a president who was fairly and openly elected by secret ballot in June 2014; a cabinet of technocrats under the steady stewardship of Prime Minister Mahlab; an upper House of Parliament in which woman, Copts, the disabled, and other previously marginalized communities and minorities are represented; lower house elections are slated to be held later this year.

And Egypt has an independent judiciary.  That judiciary, through the Court of Cassation, the highest court in Egypt, and of which Bar I am honored to be a member, is the ultimate judicial voice in the case of the remaining two of Al-Jazeera journalists.

How obscene for the New York Times of January 2, 2015, to plainly advocate outside intervention in that judicial matter?  Can the New York Times call for such intervention in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court?  How contradictory to the principle of judicial independence does the author of that article, Kareem Fahim, a clone of David Kirkpatrick, call for by-passing that judicial process in sovereign Egypt?!  

In this morass of malicious one-sidedness which goes by the misnomer of "Press Freedom," Al-Jazeera again steps in.  In that New York Times article, Al-Jazeera condemned the Egyptian Court decision for judicial review.  It arrogantly states: "Al-Jazeera said that the Egyptian authorities had a choice:

"Free these men quickly, or continue to string this out, all the while continuing this injustice and harming the image of their own country in the eyes of the world.  They should choose the former."

Yes, Al Jazeera, you, through your fabricated half-truths, know better than the leadership of the New Egypt about what should and shouldn't be done.

But thanks for making my case!!  I have always felt that you were not truly engaged in airing news backed by facts.  You, and the likes of Michelle Dunne, are engaged in imaginary thrillers.  

But when I want to see a thriller, I can assure you that you are not my first choice.  Hitchcock is!!