- So, B'nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress want
to prevent Canadians from watching Al-Jazeera, the Arabic all-news TV network.
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- Keith Landry, president of the CJC, which plans to file
an intervention with the CRTC opposing a proposal to make Al-Jazeera available
to some Canadian cable subscribers, says Al-Jazeera's broadcasts aren't
"consistent" with Canadian values, are "racist" and
promote "hatred" against Jews. "My concern is that I have
seen coverage on Al-Jazeera in which they have broadcast hate speeches
by individuals who promote anti-Semitism, without any kind of balance or
context."
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- Strange. That's eerily similar - "a clear and outrageous
exercise of hate propaganda" - to the Canadian Muslim Forum's critique
of Izzy Asper's CanWest Global TV network. The CMF filed a 13-page complaint
with the CRTC about Globalís recent documentary, Confrontation at
Concordia, which focused on last year's battles between Jewish and Palestinian
groups at the Montreal university. The difference here is that the network's
alleged hatred was directed against Muslims, specifically Palestinians.
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- One man's hate, it seems, can be another's good journalism.
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- Which is the danger of hate speech laws in the first
place.
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- But I digress.
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- Let us consider the relative merits of Al-Jazeera's news
service versus, oh, let's say CNN, which already takes up two slots on
the cable TV channel-changer.
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- Quick now, how did the world first learn Osama bin Laden
was alive and sort-of well and living somewhere where the Americans couldn't
find him? Or that Saddam Hussein and his sons weren't under that mother
cluster bomb the Americans dropped in the middle of Baghdad, killing a
bunch of innocent people?
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- If you said CNN, consider yourself gonged out of this
game.
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- Long after Al-Jazeera broadcast audio or video tapes
of both men, alive and well as could be expected, CNN was still aping the
Bush administration's imaginatively hopeful line that the enemy leaders
were "probably" dead and playing the coy is-he-or-isn't-he game
until long past its best-before date?
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- Let's continue with our quiz, shall we?
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- Which TV network was the first to broadcast the heroic
rescue tale about that cute young U.S. Army private, Jessica Lynch. You
remember? She was part of an Army maintenance company that took a wrong
turn and got ambushed by Iraqi soldiers. According to the story, Pte. Lynch
single-handedly held the enemy at bay, Rambo-style, until, suffering gunshot
and stab wounds, she was finally overpowered, taken prisoner, tortured
and Lord-knows-what-elsed for eight days. U.S. Army Rangers and Navy Seals
- machine guns firing, night vision cameras rolling - finally stormed Nassiriya
hospital in a daring midnight raid, fought off a platoon-load of evil Saddam
fedayeen and saved her. "Some brave souls put their lives on the line
to make this happen," an emotional Gen. Vincent Brooks, the US spokesman
in Doha, confided to a roomful of pliant journalist-secretaries, "loyal
to a creed that they know that they'll never leave a fallen comrade."
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- Where did you first hear that?
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- Yes, the right answer this time is CNN.
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- Problem is CNN had it all wrong. Again.
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- Pte. Lynch was never shot or stabbed. Her injuries were
consistent with a "road traffic accident." Iraqi soldiers took
her to a hospital where doctors gave her the only "specialist bed."
She was well cared for and given three bottles of blood, two contributed
by medical staff because blood was in short supply there. At one point,
an Iraqi doctor even tried to deliver her back to the American side, but
U.S. troops opened fire on the ambulance, forcing it back to the hospital.
Even after the Americans were told there were no Iraqi soldiers in the
hospital and medical staff wanted to hand her over, they charged in guns
blazing "and cameras rolling" anyway. There was no resistance.
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- My point is not that we should ban the jingoist, "our-boys"
CNN from Canadian airwaves ó though that might not be such a bad
idea ó but that we should allow Canadians access to as many different
viewpoints as possible so we can see events as others see them and make
up our own minds about what is true and what is not.
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- Seems to me that would be "consistent" with
Canadian values too.
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- Stephen Kimber is a professor of journalism at the University
of Kings College and a columnist with The Daily News in Halifax, where
this column first appeared.
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- Copyright © 2001-2003 the authors
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- http://www.rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?x=23627
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