Dan Abrams
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Our friends over at Al Jazeera television have gotten their hands on another "exclusive," a tape that U.S. officials now say appears to be Osama bin Laden hailing the attacks in Bali, Yemen, Kuwait, Moscow. If it is authentic, which it appears to be, this would indicate bin Laden is alive. It aired on the network that supposedly prides itself on being the independent voice of the Arab world.
But you know what? More and more, they're not looking like an independent station. More and more, they're looking just like a state-sponsored mouthpiece as we see for many oppressive Arab regimes.
Al Jazeera has become the voice of Osama bin Laden. Every time al Qaeda wants to heap praise on some sort of act of terror or make cowardly threats on civilians, they know they can turn to their friends at Al Jazeera for airtime, even promotion and special graphics, almost always portraying al Qaeda in a positive light.
I've talked to many people who spent considerable time watching Al Jazeera. It's clear, Al Jazeera is almost uniformly anti-American. But that doesn't trouble me. Let them criticize.
We can take it. But there are certain issues that do not have two sides, where there's a right and a wrong.
Al Qaeda is not America's enemy; they're the enemy of civilization.
For Al Jazeera to even treat them as
one side of a two-sided conflict demonstrates a fundamental
misunderstanding about what al Qaeda is doing and who
they really are.
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JWR contributor Dan Abrams anchors “The Abrams Report,” Monday through Friday from 6-7 p.m. ET on MSNBC TV. He also covers legal stories for “NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw,” “Today” and “Dateline NBC.” To visit his website, click here. Comment by clicking here.
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