In order for that to happen, a Shabak rep. Will have to provide statement that Haaretz poses serious threat to the national security of Israel. Call me when that happens (spoiler: it won’t).
Now that would make an interesting hn story.
[EDIT: sorry, having read the bill again, it's also required for Haaretz to be "a foreign news channel"]
Considering what Haaretz is, banning them would not be a good idea. Even by the standards of this genocidal regime, that would be such a rare event of censoring. I think a more gradual and coercive strategy would be applied there. Deployment and outcome of that, if it were to be done, would be a case study.
The article's content evokes a bit of Orwelllian irony though, Minister of Communications threatening to ban the long(est?) standing news outlet.
They will not be banned. There is zero evidence for this.
There is a big difference between banning what can only be described as a fake news outlet controlled by the adversary government of Qatar vs. banning the most important or second most important independent newspaper in the country.
When _that_ happens then the completely unjustified outrage in many comments here will be justified as that would indeed be an unprecedented step.
As someone who was only familiar with Al Jazeera's English reporting (and thought it was pretty good), it was eye opening to check out their Arabic website translated into a language I speak. Maybe Google Translate was erasing some nuance, but I saw a huge number of controversial, disputed, or downright false claims that were reported uncritically as facts.
It's all looking like pretty standard news stuff to me.
And I don't know about you, but I see "controversial, disputed, or downright false claims that were reported uncritically as facts" all the time even in mainstream US publications.
So I'd need to see some evidence here that Al Jazeera is particularly worse.
Your second claim seems to being mistaking their role as telling absolute truth. The very first sentence makes it clear that they are reporting an official government statement, and the next that Israel disputes it and says the PLJ was responsible. This seems very normal for war reporting and I note that they’re very careful to attribute each claim so the reader can decide how much to trust it.
Edit: your first source is a pro-Israeli advocacy group run by a former AIPAC employee, which has marked its coverage of the war with things like baselessly claiming reporters were in on the October 7th attacks:
Given that in this case they ran a report by a witness, and then publicly updated that to say that a Hamas investigation had called her credibility into question, it’s interesting to note how carefully the “Honest Reporting” writer relies on uncited insinuation or tries to distract your attention to statements by people who are not part of al Jazeera. Again, it’s not great that they ran a story by someone who lied but that’s a hazard of breaking news coverage and it’s hardly unique in the field.
> then publicly updated that to say that a Hamas investigation had called her credibility into question
I don't think there's much of a question, the claims were just fabricated, according to Hamas themselves.
By "publicly updated", do you just mean quietly deleting the articles with false information? As far as I know, they never acknowledged the error and published a retraction, which calls into question their legitimacy as a news organization.
I was referring to the lead in that “Honest Reporting” article which was about one of their employees doing the opposite of this claim by correcting the record:
Now, I do think they should have put out an official statement pointing out the unreliability of the interviewee rather than simply yanking the video but a single unreliable witness interviewed in a tumultuous event which is promptly dropped seems to fall well short of establishing a lie. All news organizations interview people who turn out to be wrong or misleading, so we’d want to see more than a single interview to establish whether there’s a pattern of poor vetting or running a story after evidence has come forth that the witness is unreliable. The public has rather strongly expressed a desire for immediate news coverage rather than waiting for lengthy review and corroboration.
I don't really take issue with publishing the allegation (it's credibility might have been lacking, but that's difficult to judge), just quietly yanking the false information. Wouldn't any legitimate news agency do some form of retraction, such as adding a prominent note at the top of the original article?
To be clear, I think they should have updated their liveblog to add a link to the subsequent Hamas statement calling its accuracy into question. That said, I think some of this comes into questions about the format - this wasn’t a specific story but one of many breaking news details in a tumultuous event, and it’s far from unprecedented within the industry.
As a good example of how messy this can be, consider this story:
None of that is mentioned on that story and the only correction is a minor detail.
Now, to be clear, I am not saying that it’s okay for Al Jazeera to be sloppy if the NYT is sloppy but rather that we should be consistent in our standards and they should probably be higher for everyone. The public and especially people covered in these stories deserve better.
I've been following the Screams Without Words story and I don't think it's really comparable to something that was basically confirmed to be false. The NYT stands behind the report
> We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation which was rigorously reported, sourced and edited.
A lot of the "debunking" seems fairly weak in my opinion. E.g. Gal Abdush's brother in law made a rather baseless statement that "the media invented" Gal's rape. Really the article was reporting what Israeli police believed, mainly based on (non-public) video evidence which the Times reporters also reviewed.
I think it would be comparable if Israeli police retracted their claims and stated that Gal was not raped. Then surely the NYT would make some kind of clear correction/retraction, rather than quietly deleting (part of) the report.
Specifically, that is the position of the intelligence agencies of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and also the conclusion of investigations by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. That's really the best we know about it.
I have no idea how all those newspapers could manage >>independent<< investigations, as the Israeli army banned journalists. The first time [that I saw] CNN reported on something they actually filmed was The Israeli army pointing at tunnels.
The "Summary" is clearly biased and absolutely not "The best we know" depending on who is "we"
I have no idea about the reasons of the explosion, but contesting the palestinian dead toll without [credible] sources is politics.
I dare say United Nations might have a more balanced approach, and they cite the enclave health authorities when they say that as of April 22th there are 34,000 deaths. No other source is cited for some reason.
I have no idea how all those newspapers could manage >>independent<< investigations, as the Israeli army banned journalists. The first time [that I saw] CNN reported on something they actually filmed was The Israeli army pointing at tunnels.
BTW, CNN is now much less biased towards the israeli narrative. During 2023 [Latam] CNN seemed a Netanyahu's outlet more that anything. France24 and DW >>seem<< neutral right now. Spain outlets have mediocre coverange, and Latinamerican outlets are only citing random news from other outlets.
The Wikipedia "Summary" is clearly biased and absolutely not "The best we know" depending on who is "we"
I dare say United Nations might have a more balanced approach, and they cite the enclave health authorities when they say that as of April 22th there are 34,000 deaths. No other source is cited for some reason.
You're giving a ton of weasel words here: most likely (but not certainly). All that word salad of wishy washy makes it clear that the fog of war is still present regarding those events.
Describing the report as credible is not accurate. Given that many news outlets retracted their initial claims and the official statements, it is very likely that there is enough evidence that Israel did not bomb the hospital and that the reported number of casualties is inaccurate. You using the "fog of war" argument to dismiss his claim—which was honest enough to say "not certainly"—is irrelevant. You could say this about almost every other reported event in Gaza.
If you include the surrounding context, that al Ahli had been targeted before, and since, and that other hospitals had also been not only targeted but actively sieged for days, at is in fact credible that the Israeli military targeted and hit the Hospital.
Now remote forensics on the site makes it implausible that the initial reports of an Israeli airstrike were true, however we still haven’t ruled out other types of munitions by the Israeli military.
Note that the initial reports of those supportive of Israel were also false. They claimed that they captured the rockets which they claimed hit the hospital on camera. It turned out this footage was of an unrelated rocket which got completely destroyed in air. Al Jazeera was actually one of few media outlets which correctly hypothesized that this rocket was unrelated to the incident.
The fact is, we still don’t know what happened, all we know is that many of the initial reports were false. There was a lot of lying involved to win the narrative (especially by Israeli officials), and there are at least two very credible hypotheses on what happened.
It’s not worse at all. Actually probably the opposite, I learn some crazy stuff watching Al Jazeera and sometimes don’t believe it and go off researching it … and wow it’s very concerning. It seems almost certain to me there has to be some conspiracy amongst US publications to conceal certain information around Israeli-Palestinian conflict and history. As one example, read up on Ben Gvir, current National Security Minister … it’s totally crazy.
Unfortunately, whenever anything is being posted on this topic, we get to see so many comments such as this.
> It seems almost certain to me there has to be some conspiracy amongst US publications to conceal certain information around Israeli-Palestinian conflict and history
No evidence was provided, just another unfounded conspiracy theory. What can we take away from this?
It’s hard to provide proof of such a conspiracy due to the nature of the conspiracy is to omit information. It’s really only an impression I have when watching France 24 and AJ amongst other non-US news sources and then comparing to US sources.
For examples of stories or topics that appear to be dramatically underreported in the US:
- extremist positions of Israeli cabinet members. Including associations with Zionist terrorists, obviously very anti-Muslim/Arab but also including anti-Christian positions
- Israeli settlers expansions and history of aggressive actions
- famine conditions in Gaza
- and most simply the very high levels of casualties in Gaza, including children and women in huge numbers.
I really don’t ever hear any of those items mentioned even in left leaning US media. Now you might say well France and Qatar are biased due to more Arab listeners. Maybe a bit yeah because I think I hear less on Hamas atrocities perhaps than in US media.
Every media is biased.
Now per my other comment, once you criticize either side then you get automatically labeled as on the other side, our instinct is to use Hero-Villain frameworks, not Villain-Villain. Once you break out of that both leadership and politics on both side look really bad and weighing evil is not a good approach.
As far as worse, I'm not conducting a longitudinal study or anything so I can't compare their rate of "fake news" compared to Fox News or MSNBC or whatever your control group is.
Anecdotally I've noticed the biggest delta between their English and Arabic reporting in the immediate aftermath of major events. For example after the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, the English version of their reporting was along the lines of "According to a Gaza Ministry of Health spokesperson, 500+ people were killed. A Hamas spokesperson said that the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike, launched via an F-16 or F-35." They made sure to hedge and make clear that their sources might be biased.
This[1] seems like the sort of Arabic coverage I remember seeing in the past, a much more definitive statement just saying that the occupiers massacred 500+ martyrs.
Unfortunately Google Translate doesn't play nicely with the wayback machine so it's tedious to build up a library of concrete examples.
The oldest example I can find was passed by the Knesset in July of 1986. I'm not very familiar with Israeli laws so it's totally possible I'm missing prior examples from before 1986... That's just what I found after a few minutes of search engine and wikipedia research, limited to English pages.
My understanding is that the degree to which "freedom of speech" is protected in the USA (a country I'm more familiar with) is actually pretty rare globally
I was expecting links to comparative articles that showed the discrepancies you suggested were there. Not phrases that whilst I can have translated by Google have no context.
Took the same path recently. Probably the easiest thing to point to if you're looking for something to convince people of Al Jazeera's nature, (besides specific articles), is the incredible amount of time and editorial space devoted to Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the arabic channel (before his death). The man had an audience of 60 million people for a decade and a half, and could reasonably be called the face of Al Jazeera Arabic. He has caused a lot of problems through that platform that hopefuly only the most radicalized westerner won't view as monstrous.
Probably no one who needs convincing is willing to read the ADL on him, but you can basically pick your source.
Here's a video of him asserting that "Hitler was a god given punishment upon the Jews, (not that the holocaust was as bad as they say)" on Al Jazeera TV.
Just to clarify: that clip was broadcast on a separate channel called AJ Live (“Mubasher”). It’s a 24/7 channel that basically broadcasts entire live events and re-runs - think press conferences, speeches, etc. I would compare it to something like C-SPAN in the US.
Now, how much editorial input AJ has over this channel, that I don’t know.
> the incredible amount of time and editorial space devoted to Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the arabic channel (before his death). The man had an audience of 60 million people for a decade and a half, and could reasonably be called the face of Al Jazeera Arabic. He has caused a lot of problems through that platform that hopefuly only the most radicalized westerner won't view as monstrous.
I don't know Arabic, but I am Muslim, and Yusuf al Qaradawi is probably most known as a preeminent Islamic scholar. Any mosque you go to will likely have a work by him because his scholarship on the Quran and Hadith (not necessarily his views on current events) are very renowned. I'm not sure what makes him so radical and evil to be honest. He has written tons of scholarly works about Islam, interpretation of Islamic rules and laws, etc. And from looking online I see he was on Al Jazeera hosting a program called "Sharia and Life". These kinds of call-a-sheikh / Islamic info shows are pretty common in the Muslim world and probably have more viewership than news channels. Something Americans probably might not understand...
But it makes total sense for Al Jazeera Arabic (a channel with possibly a 90% Muslim viewership) to have a Muslim ask-a-sheikh show.
Scholarship on the Quran means what, to you, exactly?
To me it just sounds that he's an expert in convincing people that it is god's will to implement his agenda. Taking the Quran as a source of absolute truth and then taking the further step of handing the reins of interpretation to some "preeminent scholar" is a recipe for exactly the kind of extremism that you see plaguing the Islamic world.
Your and my claims about what Qaradawi is are not mutually exclusive, and are in fact deeply correlated.
> Scholarship on the Quran means what, to you, exactly?
The guy famously studied for like 20 years at Al-Azhar getting a bunch of degrees in Islamic scholarship from the largest mainstream Islamic school in the world. That's what I mean.
>To me it just sounds that he's an expert in convincing people that it is god's will to implement his agenda
Can you cite some controversial or not seen before analysis from any of his works? Most of his publications, that I'm aware of, are pretty standard interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence. It's nothing that would shock or surprise an average Muslim, imo.
>Taking the Quran as a source of absolute truth and then taking the further step of handing the reins of interpretation to some "preeminent scholar" is a recipe for exactly the kind of extremism that you see plaguing the Islamic world.
That's actually the kind of stuff he and other modernist Islamic scholars (Israr Ahmed is a similar scholar but for South Asia, where I'm from) were against. They both championed the idea that the Quran and Hadith are pretty clear and don't need expert opinion for many things. That people should take the time to read Arabic and read Quran and hadiths and they would not have much need for Sheikhs.
In general, this type of "democratic" or "non-hierarchical" view of Islamic scholarship is pretty modern. Older peoples (before the "extremism" you're talking about ostensibly) would have been much more hierarchical and rigid about the need to consult scholars rather than attempt to learn things oneself.
> Your and my claims about what Qaradawi is are not mutually exclusive, and are in fact deeply correlated.
So then you agree it's not a big deal that Al Jazeera has him on their network, since he's a pretty mainstream scholar? Okay, thanks for the chat I guess
I believe that you don't have the perspective to understand my claim, because you are a believer. I would very much like you to try though.
I claim that religious scholarship and religious fundamentalism are one and the same. You're arguing that Qaradawi was an Islamic scholar, I'm arguing that he was an Islamic fundamentalist. However, in all religious scholarship, there are further choices to be made once you are a fundamentalist. The book contradicts itself (intentionally, as it's more important that people who believe different Islams both be able to call themselves Muslim), and Qaradawi had further used his position of "celebrated religious scholar" to assert that it is Shari'a to annihilate the Jews, and used his general credibility to deny the severity of the holocaust. That's just this clip.
You can't become a religious leader without being a religious scholar, and you can't lead an extremist sect without leaning on that classification pretty heavily.
Rather than assuming anything about me, just ask. That's what an online forum is for.
> I claim that religious scholarship and religious fundamentalism are one and the same
This is straying quite a bit from the original claim, that Al Jazeera was wrong to have the scholar on the air. But if you believe, as you claim to, that religious scholarship and religious fundamentalism are the same, then you can't really begrudge the network for having him on, for they could not have any religious scholar on who was not a fundamentalist, according to you. And at least they picked a very mainstream one, no?
That logic out of the way, what do you describe as "fundamentalism"? If the idea that the Quran is the literal, unchanging word of God is fundamentalist, then yeah, all Islamic scholarship will be fundamentalist. If non-fundanentalisn is described as beliefs not orthogonal to the fundamental beliefs of the religion, then yes, you'll be right.
It depends on what you mean.
> The book contradicts itself
In what way, relevant to the discussion we are having where you seem to be most concerned with Qaradawi's anti-Semitic remarks? There's a whole litany of irrelevant arguments we could have about contradictions in the source material, but what specific contradiction do you think he can exploit to make questionable claims in your mind about Israel and/or Jews?
> is Shari'a to annihilate the Jews, and used his general credibility to deny the severity of the holocaust.
So the clip you linked does not say that. Sharia is law. What he's echoing is the belief that sometimes calamities in the world are punishments for moral failings of groups of people. Many religions believe this. It was even insinuated by Muslim scholars that loss of dignity and faith by Muslims was what led to the calamity suffered by the Palestinians. [1]
Is it anti-Muslim to believe that the moral failings of billions of Muslims can cause many Muslims to face calamities as we see today? I don't think so. Many Muslims believe that. Likewise, I don't think it's wrong to believe this about any people, and that's what he's saying in this clip.
If you believe people are not collectively punished by God as groups, that's fine, but there are very clear examples of this happening in religious source material (Sodom is the main one). And as such, I think the only questionable element is him saying "they exaggerate" when referring to the Holocaust. And yes I disagree with that. But it's not an Islamic scholarship issue, that.
We are all trained starting from childhood to use a Hero-Villain framework when observing conflicts and it leaves us very confused when the real world is closer to Villain-Villain situation.
Anytime I ever bring up say Kissinger and the crazy realpolitik actions he took, or now this lunatic Ben-Gvir in Israel I’ve recently learned about, other people are trained to see me as a communist or anti-semite immediately, because if I object to a US figure, I must be with the other side, same with Israel.
I don’t really know how to navigate this problem to be honest.
At the risk of being downvoted as the parent comment. There were many reports in Israeli media showing their reporters framing a false narrative around the conflict.
To be fair, I think that blocking etc. is a dumb move by the government. Even though they are clearly a very biased organization the damage of closing their offices is probably worse than the alternative.
The fear mongering of the top parent comment is unjustified and not exactly accurate. I'm physically in Tel Aviv and can access the Al Jazeera website just fine. News outlets can't be closed and there's no "great firewall" in Israel. There is a censor but its usage is relatively limited in the age of the internet.
Examples of Al Jazeera bias include a famous video of a Gazan interviewed by a reporter blaming Hamas for everything and the reporter immediately cutting it off so it won't break the narrative that everyone in Gaza blames only Israel.
They're the ones that promoted the fake hospital bombing and they are the source of most fake unsubstantiated stories. Their Arabic language channel is far worse than their English coverage.
They made up fake stories about IDF soldiers raping in Gaza and obviously didn't report about the actual rapes by Hamas.
They refuse to interview people who can actually answer questions legitimately in Arabic such as Yosef Hadad since that would let their audience receive unfiltered truth.
Not every news source need report on every story. Especially in times of war, it's important to read every side's coverage of both themselves and the other side.
"However, at Shura Base, to which most of the bodies were taken for purposes of identification, there were five forensic pathologists at work. In that capacity, they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia."
"200 bodies were documented. These teams did not document a single case of sexual assault or cases of genital mutilation. "
"the intelligence material collected by the police and the intelligence bodies, including footage from terrorists' body cameras, does not contain visual documentation of any acts of rape themselves. "
That is very selective reading of the article ignoring some core facts. Forensic post mortem analysis can't be done on 1,400 bodies most of which were mutilated and many burned. There were just not enough experts available to do that work.
There are many testimonies. Including from the rapists themselves. According to Hamas's interpretation of the Quran rape is legitimate as part of Jihad.
Nowhere have I mentioned the conflict nor have I mentioned whether reporting on it is easy. Not blatantly lying is pretty easy though and Al Jazeera fails that test.
More importantly, Al Jazeera is not merely reporting on the conflict, they have been „reporting“ about many other things for a long time. That’s enough data for me that can be compared to the sum of ALL other outlets.
None of that is surprising either - Al Jazeera is a government propaganda tool, run by a dictatorial kingdom that ranks rather low on freedom of the press.
The fact that you drew a comparison to BBC is telling.
> The fact that you drew a comparison to BBC is telling.
That indeed was a specific choice - you could also state that it's a state-run "propaganda tool". It's also going to have a western (specifically UK) based view on the media it's reporting on. The same is true of Al Jazeera, or the Australian Broadcasting Company.
That, in and of itself, does not mean it is "blatantly lying". No news agency is without bias, and believing so is naive.
Does Al Jazeera have areas for improvement that are likely to not materialise due to the context in which the company is based? Sure, but that's also true of Fox News, CNN, the BBC, ABC, or random Reddit commenters.
I didn‘t ban it and the Israeli government certainly didn‘t ask me for my opinion. They had their own reasons and their own evidence and I only gave you _my_ reason for considering it fake news, which most of it is.
For now. They are likely to be the next outlet banned. The government has been openly threatening them for a year or so now.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-23/ty-article/is...