In an interview which the website said a Yemeni freelance journalist had held with Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born preacher said he had been a teacher of the Nigerian suspect in the Dec 25 attempted bombing of the US-bound plane.
“The mujahid brother, Umar Farouk (Abdulmutallab) … is one of my students. Yes, and there was contact between us. But I did not issue a fatwa (religious edict) to Umar Farouk for this operation,” Awlaki was quoted as saying.
Latest Updates: al-jazeera RSS
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johnpi
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johnpi
‘The UK is not a banana republic.’
Comment made in reference to the UK’s apology to Israel for issuing an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister.
Al Jazeera editorial:
The groveling apology to Israel, after the British ambassador was summoned for a reprimand by the Israeli foreign ministry, is the type of reaction expected from a banana republic, not from Great Britain.
Should the foreign secretary entertain Lieberman, a Jewish settler himself and a resident of Nokdim, a West Bank settlement considered illegal under international law? What a contradiction.
The official policy of the UK government is that all settlements in the lands occupied in 1967 are illegal and violate UN Security Council resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Not the kind of thing you’ll be reading in Al Jazeera anymore if Haim Saban gets his hands on Al jazeera.
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aziz
Indeed – long past due time for Obama to speak with Al Jazeera. (via @mohamed)
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johnpi
Al Jazeera’s Arabic language edition claims “Ardi,” a recovered skeleton of a 4.4 million year old ancestor of Ardipithicus, “disproves Darwin’s theory of evolution.”
Lina Malkawi translated the Al Jazeera article and posted her translation to her blog, which according to a Google search, has since prompted pages and pages of condemnation from inside and outside of the Arab world (and of course approval from Harun Yahya).
Al-Jazeera, which is considered by many to be the most professional Arabic news organization–the so-called “CNN of the Arab world” – has reported the story of the discovery of the oldest “human” skeleton by saying that it refutes Darwin’s theory of evolution. I translated the report below from Arabic word by word with a screen shot of the original Arabic story beneath it.
It proves how agenda and ideologically-driven Al-Jazeera is and how they are willing to forgo journalistic professionalism to further their agenda.
Here’s the first two paragraphs of what she translated:
American scientists have presented evidence that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong. An international team of researchers specialized in the origin of the human race in “Ken” State University (It’s actually Kent State but they spelled it wrong) and the University of California (-Berkeley, but they did not add it) have unveiled the oldest known evidence of humans on earth, which is an Ethiopian human skeleton dating back about 4.4 million years, which was named “Ardi.”
The team announced Thursday that Ardi’s discovery proves that humans did not evolve from ancestors that resemble chimpanzees, which refutes the longstanding assumption that humans evolved from monkeys.
The team has made no such announcement, and evolutionary theory has never posited that humans descended from chimpanzees.
The story only appeared in the Arabic language edition. Salman Hameed believes that Al Jazeera did not publish this in English because it is still trying to establish its credentials in the English language press, and this ‘nutty’ article would have been too damaging.
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johnpi
Arch-neoconservative Haim Saban is reportedly seeking a 50 percent ownership stake in Al Jazeera, according to Richard Silverstein. He writes, “Imagine the possibility of co-opting Al Jazeera’s Israel coverage. It’s an Aipac wet dream.”
Here’s Glenn Greenwald describing Saban in an article about one of the deeply compromised, warmongering foreign policy ‘experts’ he promotes through the “Saban Center for Middle East Studies,” a Washington thinktank.
The above-the-political-fray [ken] Pollack is employed by the “Saban Center for Middle East Studies” at Brookings — so named because it is funded with many millions of dollars by billionaire Haim Saban, an Israeli-American neoconservative who was a 2004 supporter of George Bush, was a close associate of Ariel Sharon, and spent the 1990s persuading Bill Clinton (with millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic Party) to be more supportive of Israel.
In a 2004 glowing profile, the NYT described Saban as “throwing his weight and money around Washington and, increasingly, the world, trying to influence all things Israeli,” and in that article, Saban told the NYT: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”
Richard writes, “If the emir of Qatar is seriously entertaining a Saban bid either he’s in financial difficulty or else he’s smokin’ some powerful weed.”
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Kawthar
A Guantanamo detainee used one of his weekly phone calls to his family to speak with an Al Jazeera reporter.
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aziz
I want my Al-J TV!
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aziz
What is it with these little middle-eastern countries that think they can get away with censoring the free press?
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johnpi
Media: If you value honesty, then I hope you would agree with me that getting Al Jazeera (or another network with uncompromising journalistic values like it) on US cable would be a great improvement to the potential for civic life and democratic decision-making here in America.
Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.
For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing.
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thabet
