Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
A
few years back I was interviewed about some development in the Middle
East by a reporter from Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned television news
channel. Afterwards, we sat for a while and talked journalism. He
mentioned that he had previously worked for Al Jazeera. I asked why he
had left. “Too many Islamists,” he said. “They made me uncomfortable.”
It’s bizarre: We used to know a lot about Al Jazeera. At what point
did amnesia set in? The station was launched in November 1996. Two
months after al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, Fouad Ajami,
the Lebanese-born American scholar, analyzed its product in the pages of TheNew York Times Magazine.
Al Jazeera, he wrote, “may not officially be the Osama bin Laden
Channel, but he is clearly its star . . . The channel’s graphics assign
him a lead role: there is bin Laden seated on a mat, his submachine gun
on his lap; there is bin Laden on horseback in Afghanistan, the brave
knight of the Arab world. A huge, glamorous poster of bin Laden’s
silhouette hangs in the background of the main studio set at Al
Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, the capital city of Qatar.”
Ajami added: “Although Al Jazeera has sometimes been hailed in the West
for being an autonomous Arabic news outlet, it would be a mistake to
call it a fair or responsible one. Day in and day out, Al Jazeera
deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage.”
Five years later Al Jazeera launched an English-language version. To
be fair, it is editorially distinct from AJ Arabic. But, also to be
fair, two questions must be asked: Are there serious disagreements
between these sister stations? Or do they have what Ayman Mohyeldin,
once AJ English’s Cairo correspondent (and now a reporter at NBC),
called a “shared vision,” with the Al Jazeera Network’s owners understanding their various audiences and what is required to influence each of them?
Al Jazeera English’s first Washington anchor was Dave Marash, a
veteran reporter who had been a substitute host for Ted Koppel at ABC’s Nightline, for many years one of the best news programs on television. He quit after two years, explaining to the Columbia Journalism Review
that as “the American face of the channel” he had, in effect, “vouched
for its credibility and value,” and that he could not continue to do
that because, while he considered much of AJ English’s reporting
high-quality, its anti-American bias had become all too obvious.
The Al-Jazeera Network is owned and operated by the royal family of Qatar, an emirate rated
by Freedom House as “not free.” Qatar’s Wahhabi religious establishment
is hard-core but more indulgent of foreigners than are the clerics of
Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism also is the state religion. The sale of
oil keeps Qatar’s rulers fabulously wealthy, so AJ will never need to
turn a profit. If making money is not AJ’s purpose, what is?
Al Gore thinks he knows. As you have doubtless heard by now, the former vice president is selling the Current TV cable network
he co-founded to AJ. Estimated price: $500 million. That will make what
is to be known as Al Jazeera America available in more than 40 million
homes across the country. In a statement issued last Wednesday, Current
TV co-founder Joel Hyatt said that he and Gore were “thrilled and proud”
that their project was being acquired by Al Jazeera, which “was founded
with the same goals we had for Current: To give voice to those who are
not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and
diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is
telling.”
If you don’t buy that explanation, Orville Schell thinks you’re an
Islamophobe. The former dean of journalism at the University of
California, Berkeley, and a Current TV board member, Schell was asked
about Time Warner’s announcement that it will not carry AJ-America (thus
depriving it of 15 percent of Current TV’s current total reach) unless
it perceives a demand from its audience. Time Warner, he told the
Associated Press, has “probably dropped the contract because they fear
American prejudice.”
I’ve appeared on AJ English quite a few times. Like Current TV and
MSNBC, it presents itself as a voice of the Left. AJ English does not
overtly promote the ideology of Islamism, but it does present it as
mainstream, suggesting an affinity between Islamist and leftist values.
Whenever I’ve been on a program, I’ve had an opportunity to provide my
analysis and opinions. But, invariably, I will be outnumbered: At least
two other guests, as well as the interviewer, will vehemently disagree
with me. Anyone versed in Strategic Communications 101 will recognize
this as a technique designed to marginalize one set of views and promote
another.
The Current/AJ deal brims with ironies: For one, Al Gore, Internet
pioneer, paladin of the fight against global warming, and archenemy of
carbon fuels, is about to have his bank account inflated by an estimated
one hundred million petro-dollars, and he will “proudly” serve on the
advisory board of a media outlet owned by a dictatorship that advocates
government censorship of the Internet. In that role, he can be expected
to use his political influence
to ensure that cable executives continue to charge cable subscribers
for a channel those subscribers haven’t asked for. Second, Gore had
previously refused to sell Current TV to Glenn Beck because the
conservative commentator — unlike Al Jazeera — is “not aligned with our
point of view.” Third, according to the New York Times, “Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1.” (Sadly, they missed that deadline.)
Quite a few of my learned journalistic colleagues have been cheerily
asserting that Al Jazeera America will make a net contribution to the
free market in ideas. At a time when American print journalism is
hemorrhaging financially, a time when saying anything that might be
interpreted as offensive to Muslims can be — quite literally — hazardous
to one’s health, a time when American diplomats are actively negotiating international laws that would restrict freedom of speech regarding Islam and Islamism, I’m not confident they’re right.
One more reason to be less than optimistic: Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is the host of Al Jazeera Arabic’s most popular program, Sharia and Life.
Qaradawi endorsed Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to execute novelist Salman
Rushdie for blasphemy, called what Hitler did to Europe’s Jews “divine
punishment” (adding that “Allah willing, the next time will be at the
hand of the believers”). In 1991, one of his acolytes, Mohamed Akram, a
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, wrote a memorandum,
later obtained by the FBI, asserting that Brothers “must understand
that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and
destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its
miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that
it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other
religions.”
Is Al Gore really “thrilled and proud” to be associated with such
“independent and diverse points of view”? Is this what he means by
“speaking truth to power”? Might asking him these questions be a net
contribution to the free market in ideas? National Review
— Clifford D. May is president of the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on
terrorism and Islamism.
