Like I said in a previous article, Al Jazeera just can't win. Whatever it does, authorities in the west see it as what one commenter here described as "a terrorist training camp", or Bin Laden Channel, while governments here see it as zionist, Blasphemous, and in fact Haram.

I've already talked before about how Bahrain banned Al Jazeera on the fact that it was pro Zionist. Well, now there is an official Saudi fatwa (religious edict) forbidding watching it. Not to be left out, Sheikh Saleh Fawzan, a member of the high committee for religious scholars in Saudi Arabia, has labelled watching Al Jazeera Haram, and that it is against alshar3 (rules of Islam) to watch it. According to him, "it Broadcasts poisons" that comes from the reformist opposition and also has a Pro-zionist agenda.

Does anyone see how ridiculous this is? A lot of westerners consider it a terrorist, anti-American and Anti-Zionist company; Islamists see it as a pro-Zionist company, Infidel company. Each, like I said in a previous post, only sees what he wants to see and forgets the rest. Westerners tend to only pick up the stories about Bin Laden and Palestine/Israel, and disregard the rest, and then complain that it is BinLaden Station (that's probably because, though, most of the western imbeciles who criticize it have never watched it, but go on what Fox News or the Washington Post reports about Al jazeera). They forget to mention that Al Jazeera is the first station in the middle East to regularly hold debates and talks with oppositions and reformists in the Middle East. They forget to notice that before Al Jazeera we did not have any kind of proper News in the Middle East, and had to settle for a video version of HELLO! magazine showing the places each high ranking politician visited everyday. The Islamists, on the other hand, tend to forget that Al Jazeera has probably the best coverage of Iraq and the Palestinian/Israeli confllict from an Arab viewpoint, and focus on the fact that it holds interviews with reformists, modernists, and liberals.

poison 

The result? The oxymoron of a pro-American, pro-zionist, pro-islamist, anti-zionist, anti-American, anti-zionist station?.

How about you just recognize it as it is, and just say that it's a station that offers each camp the right to air its view??

The Qatari Al Raya newspaper, however, had good reply to Sheikh Fawzan. If there was one station to ban under strict religious rules, which would it be? Nope, it would not be the low-quality MBC channel which just shows skantily clad women shaking their ass all the time (I don't mind watching that every once in a while, but it definitely does not stimulate a person intellectually, rather it's stimulation in another way), or programmes like Big Brother (which the Islamists are supposed to be against). Of course not, it is sponsored by Saudi government money. How can THAT be Haram. No, it had to be Al Jazeera, the first ever hard hitting political and news channel in the Middle East.

Do you think his fatwa came from a personal ijtihad (scholarly endeavour), or might it have been just a tad influenced by the Saudi government?

¶ 11:07 PM