Thomas C. Mountain

By : Thomas C. Mountain

:: Al Jazeera’s Arabic TV channel has been promoting both ISIS and Al Queda/Al Nusra for years now. ISIS and Al Nusra representatives appearing on the channel are greeted with “welcome back brother” and when finished are told to “go with god”. Rayan Mishaal, founding Director of the ISIS-Aamaq news agency, was a regular guest and when he was killed in Syria Al Jazeera Arabic offered their on air condolences.

One entire program featured an AJ Arabic senior anchorman arguing in support of a genocide in Syria of the Alawite religious minority (which the Presidential Family hails from) as being the best solution to the Syrian peoples problems (see Nervana1 or Hayder al Khoei for more).

When the Arab Spring broke out, or was instigated from abroad, in 2011, Al Jazeera Arabic TV channel, a fiefdom of the Qatari Royal Family, went into hyperdrive against the Assad government in power in Syria and forced most of the authentic journalists at the station to quit in protest. Some of them formed new TV channels, including Al Mayadeen TV, based in Lebanon, which has since been kicked off both the Saudi Arabsat and the Egyptian Nilesat channels, though Al Jazeera Arabic and AJ English are both still carried by both satellite systems never mind the so called “Boycott of Qatar” by the Saudi lead coalition.

The Nato War Against Libya in 2011 was the watershed moment for AJ Arabic when they launched a racist terror campaign with star reporter Hoda Abdel Hamid saturating the airwaves with hate speech falsely claiming that Gaddafi had sent Black, African mercenaries to rape thousands of the wives and daughters of Libyans in a wave of rapine and mayhem spreading across the country.

Fear of black sexual predators, playing right smack into the most backward and racist tendencies of a people only a generation, if that, removed from nomadism, Hoda seemed to instinctively know how to panic the Libyan Arab population and upwards of a half a million Libyan Arabs fled their homes to supposed protection in the Al Queda and later ISIS controlled east of Libya, Serenaica of old.

This racist hate speech was a complete fabrication and when challenged on this Hoda Abdel Hamid was forced to return to Libya only to completely fail to find any trace of African Mercenaries or a single woman who had been raped. This was the same campaign that saw Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice claiming that Qaddafi’s fighters were being given viagra to fuel rape and pillage against their own people, giving fresh meaning to lies and damned lies.

As a result of this racist incitement to violence hundreds if not thousands of African guest workers were lynched by Libyan Arab death squads, with their tortured, burnt bodies hung from bridges or dumped in the desert. I attended funerals for Eritrean victims of these racist lynch mobs and the images of the tortured and burnt alive Africans, broadcast for the whole world to see, could only resurrect memories of similar lynchings of black men committed throughout the former slave states in the USA well into my lifetime.

This war crime, what amounted to an ethnic cleansing of Libyan Arabs and mass murder of African guest workers is no different from other war crimes that have had perpetrators, both military and civilian, indicted by the International Criminal Court. Of course to be indicted by the ICC requires White House approval so don’t hold your breath that Hoda and the rest of the journalistic hoodlums at Al Jazeera Arabic TV will ever face justice for their crimes against the Syrian, Libyan and African people.

The western media has been pumping “support free speech” in its defense of Al Jazeera English but almost completely blind when it comes to shining the light of day on the Al Jazeera Arabic TV channel and its promotion of “Terror TV” by its support for ISIS and Al Queda over its airwaves internationally. In the case of AJ Arabic “Journalism Is A Crime” putting a lie to its sister station’s claims otherwise.

:: Thomas C. Mountain is an independent journalist in Eritrea, living and reporting from here since 2006. See thomascmountain on Facebook and Twitter or best contact him at [email protected]

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