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Description
By MOHAMMAD EL-NAWAWY AND ADEL ISKANDAR (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 2003), 240 pp., paper, $16.00/12.99 [pounds sterling].
This is an interesting book. It opens the questions you've always wanted to ask about Al-Jazeera--even if it doesn't always answer them. It presents the background to a global intervention that is as extraordinary in its own way as that of the men who executed the dramatic suicide plane attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. When Osama bin Laden, already the US's global enemy number one, spoke to the world in praise of the attackers on 7 October 2001, the taped interview was released by the TV news network Al-Jazeera. Although most westerners would have received bin Laden via a western-based broadcaster, this was a major televised news story supplied, unusually, by a source over which the West's media had no control.
For the US government and its allies, the bin Laden message was both welcome and unwelcome--the messenger both courted and suspect. On 13 November 2001, a month after the bin Laden scoop, the apparently accidental bombing of Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul was part of the collateral damage inflicted by the US during its war campaign in Afghanistan. Two months into the war, the Arab network had delivered three bin Laden exclusives--while, in the course of it, Al-Jazeera had been the single privileged TV broadcaster... |
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