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Al-Jazeera: Elevating Naked Terror Over the Political

By: Dr. Sabah A. Salih

October 24, 2004

Postmodernism has nothing but scorn for objectivity, dismissing all claims of impartiality to be either misguided or entirely bogus. While it is true that men and women, being first and foremost political animals, can never function without ideological blinkers, a degree of objectivity, as Terry Eagleton argues in After Theory, is not only possible but also vital in human affairs.

Objectivity doesn’t mean trying to act like a piece of machinery: passionless, unimaginative, bloodless, belonging nowhere.  To be in a position to know about something is to be able to illuminate it.  This requires knowledge, honesty, being open to dialogue with others.

We fail to accomplish this modest degree of objectivity, adds Professor Eagleton, when we begin to dissolve reality into a mirror image of our own desires.  Such is the case with the Arabic satellite television network Al-Jazeera. 

Just as for Jean Paul Sartre anyone signing a petition protesting nuclear weapons was “a progressive” intellectual, so too for al-Jazeera any Palestinian killed by the Israeli is “a martyr.”  Both are loaded terms, easily transportable.  Rather than rendering some truth, they manifest a point of view.  Neither is propelled by what Nietzsche called “the love of truth.”  They’re both products of ideology.  Sartre’s label was an exercise in political authority by a man with a worldwide audience.  Al-Jazeera’s label, similarly, is an exercise in political authority by a network with a huge Arab and Muslim audience.  Both aim at the already converted.

Al-Jazeera’s ideological manipulation can also be seen in the way the network makes its decision regarding what to show, for how long, in what shape, accompanied by what words.  Its coverage of the situation in Iraq is a glaring example.  There is no national resistance in “Iraq” against the U.S. intervention. For one thing, the idea of Iraq as a nation state has always been a myth—a kind of hyper reality created, with the aid of colonialism, by Arab political culture.  For another, kidnappings and beheadings of the defenseless hardly qualify as acts of bravery.  But al-Jazeera, by allowing such acts to have dominance over other news, elevates naked terror over the political, Iraq the myth over Iraq the real, the one-sided over the many-sided, the monolithic over the diverse.   

In fact, the network’s coverage of Iraq is so ideologically driven that the big picture never gets told.  A fraction of the country—Fallujah, Ramadi, and Ba’quba—is given the power to define and shape political debate about the entire country. The majority is kept at bay, its narratives either embargoed or subjected to ridicule.

Gangsterism, medieval totalitarianism, fanaticism, racism, irrationalism, sexism of the vilest kind are being used by Ba’thists and Muslim fascists to railroad their way to power.  Back in 1963, it was this single singularity of terror that brought Ba’thists to power. Now, smarting from the loss of power and privilege, they think they can do it again, this time around with help from diehard fundamentalists pouring in from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Gulf region, Europe, Algeria, and elsewhere, with petrodollars footing the bill. Kidnapping a citizen and returning him to his family as body parts has long been a Ba’thist and Muslim fundamentalist creed. Cowards obviously always go after the defenseless.

No matter how racist, sexist, parochial, irrational, and ugly the Ba’thist and Muslim fundamentalist actions and words are al-Jazeera is there to promote them. A cluster of words and images that doesn’t deserve more than a passing reference is repeated over and over until there is nothing left from Iraq’s diverse narrative but Ba’thist and Muslim fundamentalist vocabulary.   This is what al-Jazeera is in the business of promoting and sustaining and exporting as “national” resistance. 

No wonder then al-Jazeera has been the favorite not only of fundamentalists from the right but also from the left. Both Tariq Ali of New Left Review and the late Edward Said have lavished much praise on the network for its so-called accurate coverage of the war in Iraq.  Accuracy here is clearly not the point.  The point is that this duo see in the network an echo of their own words and positions.

Dr. Sabah A. Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.  <Ssalih@bloomu.edu>