American media outlets rarely quote the Qatari-based newspaper Al Jazeera, mainly because its bias toward the Arab/terrorist point of view is hard to miss.
That doesn't stop most major U.S. media from using Al Jazeera "stringers" to cover stories in Gaza, though. This has led to many controversies, especially when the Israelis revealed that several released hostages fingered an Al Jazeera writer as one of their captors.
It's actually a lot worse than that. A story in The Free Press details that there's no such person in Gaza as a "non-Hamas-approved" reporter. Al Jazeera in Gaza has participated in hunting down, capturing, and torturing other journalists who run afoul of Hamas.
According to an anonymous Gazan activist, "It's important that you have to be connected to Hamas, so that you can do it [reporting] in the mountains, especially in Gaza, because the situation is moving on the way through Hamas. Hamas is the first one who is involved in the management of (news)."
To most of the Third World, Al Jazeera is a trusted news source from the Middle East. The reality is something totally different.
“You have to be affiliated with Hamas to work at Al Jazeera,” another activist told The Free Press. “Hamas is the primary authority deciding who gets hired and who doesn’t. So the majority of Al Jazeera staff are an inseparable part of Hamas.”
The Israel Defense Forces have previously accused several Al Jazeera journalists of being active members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, pointing to documents recovered in Gaza as well as photographs with Hamas leadership as evidence of their affiliation. Among them was Anas al-Sharif, the Al Jazeera correspondent killed in an Israeli strike in August, whom the IDF identified last year as a Hamas operative.
Al Jazeera did not respond to our request for comment, but has previously denied that its journalists are affiliated with Hamas.
Another Al Jazeera journalist accused of moonlighting for Hamas—and one frequently cited by Gazans themselves as a central enforcer of Hamas’s repression of journalists—is Mohamed Washah, the network’s Gaza bureau chief. In February, the IDF released images, purportedly obtained from Washah’s computer, which show the Al Jazeera journalist in military fatigues, wielding rocket launchers and assembling drones.
“Mohamed Washah is a journalist with Al Jazeera and the head of [the network’s] operations in the Gaza Strip,” said one Gazan journalist who told The Free Press that he had been a target of Hamas. “But he is also a member of the Al-Qassam Brigades and works in Hamas’s internal security centers. He conducts investigations, incites, and directs Hamas’s executive security to break people’s limbs, arrest journalists, terrorize them, and slander their reputation.”
Lovely man.
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During last spring's anti-Hamas protests, Al Jazeera staff allegedly assisted in identifying dissidents and collaborating in their capture.
This has led to the people of Gaza turning against Al Jazeera.
“Many others also had their limbs broken and their phones smashed,” another activist told us. “Al Jazeera, through its journalists under Mohamed Washah’s direction, tried to buy the loyalty of families so people would not protest against Hamas. They unleashed their security force against civilians, breaking many people’s limbs. Sadly, Al Jazeera is complicit with Hamas in what things have come to.”
This complicity, CPC chief operating officer Michael Nahum said, is why Al Jazeera itself has become a target of public anger in Gaza: “The symbiosis between Al Jazeera and Hamas is so widely known that we’ve even seen popular protests of thousands of Gazans denouncing Al Jazeera for not covering anything unfavorable to Hamas. When they denounce Hamas, they also denounce Al Jazeera and their journalists by name.”
American media outlets rely on Al Jazeera stringers for background on stories they're covering and even some copy. It's one reason the bias in favor of Hamas is so pronounced.
Gaza casualty figures are rarely reported as originating with the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health. Hamas atrocities are seldom mentioned. Unless you're reading other sources of news (the BBC and Agence France-Presse (AFP) have the best foreign desks in the world), you'd hardly know Hamas was the brutally oppressive terrorist government it is.
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