Lock up of Al Jazeera's correspondent

Category: Europe, World Affairs Topics: Afghanistan, Al Jazeera Views: 3733
3733

Al Jazeera's correspondent Taysir Alouni is in a Madrid jail for no other reason than challenging the Western and distinctively the American narrative of the Third World. 

Alouni is not a terrorist, and Spanish High Court judge Baltasar Garzon knows this very well. In fact, it appears that Alouni was arrested - first in September 2003 - before the charges against him were even engineered. 

Various reports spoke of considerable American and Israeli influence in concocting the prosecutors' list. The warm-hearted and brilliant journalist had suddenly become a suspected terrorist mastermind. 

Alouni's real crime, however, was his unmatched contribution to journalism during the American war and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. 

While Washington wished to convey one very well-orchestrated - and largely fabricated - narrative of the war, Alouni, the last standing journalist in Afghanistan, told another. 

He was little concerned with what the well-dressed Pentagon military brass had to say about the precision of their "smart bombs", which smartly wiped out entire villages and took the lives of thousands. 

Alouni's footage and on-scene reports countered the White House claims. He narrated a completely different story, where flattened houses, blown up bodies and limbless children were the main characters. Alouni's reports were not unsubstantiated propaganda. 

They were coming live from faceless mountainside villages near Kabul, from over-flooded and critically under-equipped hospitals, and of course from morgues and fresh mounds of earth, where mass graves were being dug as heaps of bodies stood waiting. 

One might make the claim that Alouni's lone well-documented account of Afghanistan will disturb and defy the official American liberation story for many years to come. 

According to the prevailing conventional wisdom of US foreign policy, Alouni committed two grand mistakes. 

The first is obvious; he exposed the holes in every Department of Defense assertion that Afghans were not targeted by the war and thus offset the outlandish claim that the US military action against Afghanistan was meant to liberate the people of that country. 

Second is the less obvious, that deals with the right to narrate. 

Throughout history, the West understood the Arab and Muslim world based on its own interpretations of that world, and cared little for the East's own self-perception. 

Thus Western designations of the Middle East did not necessarily reflect the Middle East as much as it reflected its interpretation by Western narrators. 

Grave Consequences 

While such a practice seems harmless as far as literally works are concerned, in politics and war the consequences are grave. 

Taysir Alouni

For example, "Saddam cannot be trusted" is a diluted remake of "Arabs cannot be trusted", a uniting theme among many Western intellectuals and Orientalists. The fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction changed nothing. 

Moreover, the fact that in the town of Fallujah alone, more Iraqis were killed than those who died in the attacks of September 11 should not essentially translate that both tragedies are equal, for after all, the Fallujah victims are Arabs. 

(One must mention that the Western narrative celebrated those deaths as a victory against insurgency and labored to pin a civilized face to the mass graves. On the other hand, the mere linking between US foreign policy and 9/11, most recently by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, could warrant a nationwide backlash and overt charges of treason.) 

The tragedy becomes two-fold when one realizes that the dominating narrative of the West has taken over the Arab world as well. 

Not only does the West interpret the Middle East to a Western audience, but the Middle East trusts no other interpretation of itself, albeit unreliable and unrepresentative, unless it is Western. 

This is, of course, anything but atypical since it widely conforms to the indoctrination process that most colonized Third World countries experienced. 

However, as dominating as the Western narrative may be, there have been some serious attempts to confront it. Perhaps Al Jazeera television has been the most successful in that attempt, and undoubtedly, Alouni has been at the forefront of that success. 

In the post 9/11 era, the Western media celebrated Al Jazeera, for the latter's mission was seen as complementary to the Western press's constant attempt to "expose" Arab countries and "highlight" their lack of democracy, and so forth. 

So it is no wonder why Al Jazeera was quickly labeled the "CNN of the Arab world". This was not a mere badge of honor, but an indication of the faulty assumption that Al Jazeera was a conformist, rather than a truly independent and critical media outlet. 

The defining moment was the US war on Afghanistan. It was then and there that Al Jazeera seemed to rebel against the role to which it was entrusted. 

It was no longer the island of democracy airing out the Arabs' dirty laundry in accordance with Western standards of right and wrong. 

But it loudly violated that unwritten agreement that forbade the historically and culturally subdued from crossing over the great divide, narrating the realities of the Arab and Muslim world, not only to Arabs and Muslims, but to the Western world as well. 

Never before in the history of broadcast journalism was an Arab man aired live around the world, every single day, reporting on American war atrocities and helping deconstruct myths that plagued and defined the Western interpretations of Muslims for centuries. 

Alouni not only showed footage of blown-up babies, but he helped us understand how fantastically human the Afghans are. Killing them with impunity was no longer an easy option. 

This is precisely why Taysir Alouni is in a Spanish jail. The phony charges against him were the work of various intelligence agencies, all of them Western. 

He suffers from serious ailments and his pain, says his wife Fatima, is at times unbearable. 

I have not met Alouni, but working for Al Jazeera channel myself, his posters surround me. His presence lingers among his colleagues, who are forever grateful for his unequalled contributions to the field of journalism, a field he made very much human, very much personal. 

"Free Taysir", a new poster has just been posted on the wall beside me. Free our right of self-assertion, free our narrative, and free our daily existence of the tainted colonial legacy that sees us Arabs as subjects, never orators. Neither Alouni deserves this, nor do we.

Ramzy Baroud is a veteran Arab-American journalist. A regular columnist in many English and Arabic publications, he is editor-in-chief of PalestineChronicle.com and program producer at Aljazeera Satellite Television.

He is also the editor of the anthology: "Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion."

To buy "Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion" CLICK HERE


  Category: Europe, World Affairs
  Topics: Afghanistan, Al Jazeera
Views: 3733

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Older Comments:
NASIR FROM AMERICA said:
We must make some form of effort to free him such demostarions,letters to the un,france,germany italy,greece,sweden canada,egypt,iran and etc.

We need to keep this from happening again.

this upsets me too much :(!!!!!!!
2005-03-11

PETER FROM USA said:
I've done a little research and changed my mind. There was a great article on Al Jazeera in the NY Times today; it went in depth about the origins of Al Jazeera, its operations, and, of course, the US's attempts to interfere. People here need to understand that freedom of the press means just that, freedom of the press, nothing more, nothing less. Al Jazeera is not the whacky propoganda militant nut-house that people here (in the US) think it is; but looks to me to be a beacon of expression and free voice in an area of the world that most needs it. Insha Allah, we will overcome oppression against those who seek to stifle the voices of freedom.
2005-03-09

MOHAMED MOHAMUD FROM U.S. said:
When one western correspondent is kidnaped, every time we turn our TV on there is some part of the story, we barely or never hear these unjustice acted being committed on other correspondents. the same as the deaths of others. this is their freedon and democracy which some countries are buying, including muslims. well, be careful what you wish for. let all of us pray for the release of our brother Taysir. Allah is capable of everything. Insha'allah may Allah bring him out from there.
2005-03-09

PETER FROM USA said:
I think there are three sides to every story: the sides of the two parties involved and then what really happened. I wonder what the other two sides are in this case; perhaps if we knew we might be able to draw a reasonable conclusion in the matter. That said, I find it hard to believe that the US would be able to convince the Spanish to jail a journalist just becasue they don't like his views. In fact, I seriously doubt they would even bother to try.
2005-03-06

AMIN21 FROM USA said:
Maybe I am being harsh...
the use of the patriot act against Muslims in general have been problematic...
and of course the story of the pentagon is not entirely accurate...
What government tells accurate stories after all?
But Al Jazeera and co... and their close ties to terrorist leaders and frequint knowledge of the location of terrorists can hardly be considered a good counter... since the only thing they intend is to get more ratings and produce shock and emotion in order to get more money for advertising... much like Foxnews or CNN... Stations that are based on capitalism and are seperate from the government are concerned with their audience... Al Jazeera just like Foxnews... plays to its primary audience and does tell them anything far out of the range of what they expect to hear. News is not a source of information in the case of capitalist news programs... nor a source of propaganda... It is a source of entertainment... and its propaganda only mirrors those views that the come from propaganda that the viewers already believe... State run media in dictatorships are the opposite they directly spout off propaganda whether it is believable or not... The competition of the capitalist stations while the state run ones still exists is interesting... State run medias in the 1st world are pretty good (PBS BBC)
2005-03-05