Tarik
Hamdi, IOL Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON,
April 1 (IslamOnline.net) - Dish Network, which hosts the
Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera telecasts is under
pressure from many right-wingers, neo-conservatives, Zionists and
others to drop the Arab channel from their network.
This
has led concerned viewers, who consider it blatant censorship, to
mount a call-in campaign to Dish Network to withstand the pressure and
allow the flow of news from both sides of the war on Iraq.
Hackers
who many believe may be connected to the Pentagon, have already hacked
the Doha-based Al-Jazeera’s newly-minted English language website.
The
just launched English site had started publishing the first pictures
of Iraq's prisoners of war when a barrage of junk messages crippled
the site.
According
to Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, one enterprising hacker even
used fake Al-Jazeera letterhead to fool an Internet company into
letting him redirect visitors away from Al-Jazeera to other locations
such as porn sites and a page that displayed an American flag with the
message: "God bless our troops!"
BBC
Special Correspondent Fergal Keane, who was awarded the Index On
Censorship Inaugural Award for Outstanding Commitment to Journalistic
Integrity, pointed out that so much has changed in the Arab world
since the last Gulf War.
The
introduction of satellite television stations such as Al-Jazeera has
transformed the information landscape: the agenda is no longer
dominated by Western news outlets or by the craven and awful
state-controlled media.
Hour
by hour, Arab families follow the progress of this war, and it is
being mediated for them by Arab reporters.
The
information war is being lost in the Arab world, partly because the
old sources of information no longer hold sway, and at least partly
because nobody wants to give the so-called “coalition of the
willing” the benefit of the doubt.
Keane
pointed out that Al-Jazeera has changed everything, and Western news
outlets or state-controlled media no longer dominates the agenda.
Such
a powerful presence of a medium not doing the Anglo-American angle of
the war, has hurt U.S. propagandists who would have liked the world to
believe that “precision” bomb is a reality and that the invaders
are being welcomed by the Iraqis.
In
unveiling the truth, Al-Jazeera has given rise to the voices of the
street that suggest the new Arab world may be anything but friendly to
the vision of U.S. President George Bush’s warriors.
Forbes
magazine noted that even as hackers knocked out Al-Jazeera's English
news site, diverting some visitors to images of an American flag, the
TV network fought successfully to keep a panoply of vital
English-language advertising information available via its main Arabic
site.
Al-Jazeera
claimed 161 million visitors and 811 million page impressions in 2002,
plus a breakdown of the Internet audience by region (54% in the Middle
East, 39% in North America and Europe, 7% other) and attractive
demographics (65% of visitors 35 years old or younger).
According
to Sawsan Susie Sirri, a spokeswoman for Al-Jazeera in Doha, there has
been a tripling of traffic to its Arabic website since the war began.
Web
use is lower in the Middle East than in the West, but now that
Al-Jazeera has established a beachhead, it wants put forward its claim
of advertising to an affluent audience.
Airlines
and consumer goods purveyors are already among its leading
advertisers, and it also hopes to sign up a large number of Western
firms.
Some
American firms, including General Motors and Kraft Foods have stuck to
their Middle Eastern marketing plans and are staying with the network.
