Al Jazeera hypocrisy: Provided Syrian rebels with satellite phones, confirms Al Jazeera in bed with the globalists

Ex-employee: Al Jazeera provided Syrian rebels with satphones
RT News
Published: 04 April, 2012, 23:38


Demonstrators holding Kurdish and Syrian opposition flags gather during a protest against Syria's President Assad in Qamishli (REUTERS/Shaam News Network/Handout)

Al Jazeera has supplied Syrian rebels with satellite communication tools to ensure telephone and Internet connection, claims Ali Hashim, a former correspondent of the Qatar-funded channel. The equipment was smuggled from Lebanon, he told RT.

The channel paid $50,000 for smuggling phones and other tools across the Syrian border to ensure they would get an inside picture, claims Ali Hashim.

A month ago, Hashim and two other correspondents working for Al Jazeera in Lebanon, stepped down from their jobs over a dispute over how the Arab Spring should be covered. Reporting popular unrest in Bahrain and Syria revealed the acutest differences between the men and their employer.

“The channel was taking a certain stance. It was meddling with each and every detail of reports on the Syrian revolution. At the same time it was almost covering up what was going on in Bahrain,” recalls Hashim.

The journalist says Qatar authorities actually decided the channel’s agenda and created their own version of the Syrian crisis.

“We went to the border between Lebanon and Syria. There it became obvious that militants entered Syria from Lebanon to clash with the Syrian regular army, which was 3 kilometers away from the border,” Hashim told RT.

“We took photos of those people, but the channel declined them. I was asked to forget about the militants and to return to Beirut,” he says.

In an earlier interview with the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, Hashim called Al Jazeera’s policy “informational suicide.”

The Syrian government has repeatedly slammed the unbalanced coverage of the uprising by some Arab news channels. But Hashim remarks that both sides of this conflict are playing dirty: while some media are siding with the rebels, omitting reports of the militants’ atrocities against civilians, the Syrian regime’s media behave as if there were no calls for freedoms and reforms in the country.

Syria has been engulfed by a popular uprising against President Bashar Al-Assad for over a year now. Opposition forces submit daily claims of people killed in fights with regular forces. The reports are hard to verify as the state remains closed to most foreign journalists. Nonetheless, the UN estimates over 9,000 people have died in the conflict. The Syrian authorities maintain they are fighting foreign insurgency, which has taken lives of over 2,000 troops.

Aljazeera is part of the global white-wash campaign: Ex-Al Jazeera reporter

‘No independent journalism anymore’ – ex-Al Jazeera reporter
RT News
Published: 14 March, 2012, 12:04
Edited: 14 March, 2012, 15:14

Former Al Jazeera correpondent Ali Hashem

Television channels have turned into political parties, pushing the agenda for some outside forces, former Al Jazeera correspondent in Beirut, Ali Hashem, told RT. Hashem has come in spotlight after resigning from the television citing its bias.

In emails leaked by Syrian hackers, Ali Hashem vented his anger over Al Jazeera's one-sided coverage of Syria and its refusal to cover the events in Bahrain. In an exclusive interview with RT, the former Beirut correspondent Hashem refrained from discussing his resignation, but stressed that these days, independent media is a myth.

“There is no independent media anymore. It is whose agenda is paying the money for the media outlet,” he said. “Politicization of media means that media outlets are today like political parties. Everyone is adopting a point of view, fight for it and bring all the tools and all the means they have in order to make it reach the biggest amount of viewers.”

It is now the job of the viewer to compare the news from several different sources and then make his own conclusions, the journalist believes. “Today we are in the era of open source information and everyone can reach whatever information he wants.”

Hashem said the problem with this picture is that some news outlets can reach bigger audiences than others. “What they say will [seem] to be a fact while it might not be the fact,” he said.

Mass media should be “immune” when it comes to war and conflict, as this guarantees freedom of speech, Ali Hashem believes.

“In the year 2006, Israel bombarded Al-Manar television because they said Al- Manar was doing propaganda war against Israel,” he said. “Al-Manar was on one side of this war and they were supporting the Hezbollah and the resistance and the war against Israel. But does this give Israel the excuse to bombard Al-Manar? Certainly not.”

“We should as journalists, whatever our point of view is, (because it is clear there is no independent journalism anymore) have the right to say whatever he wants safely, without being threatened to be bombarded or killed or executed or arrested,” Hashem concluded.

Al Jazeera has recently suffered an exodus of key staff members from its Beirut Bureau: correspondent Ali Hashem, managing director Hassan Shaaban and producer Mousa Ahmad.

The professionals cited bias in the channel’s coverage of the Arab Spring, especially the events in Syria and Bahrain, as the reason for their departures.