Apparently, news is too upsetting to be seen.
From cnn.com:
Government ministers have been critical of the Arab-language network, saying it has been airing dangerous, inciteful images and reports. Among those images are videos of people abducted in the recent wave of kidnappings.
"I got an order from the National Security Committee to close Al-Jazeera starting from today for one month just to give them the chance to readjust their policy against Iraq," said Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib.
When asked why, al-Naqib said "you know exactly" what the network has been doing.
Now, I've read the english portion of aljazeera from time to time. I don't read it ALL the time, so it's quite possible that one day when I was sleeping in, they decided to just lay down a headline like "kill whitey" to spice things up. But from the articles I have read and the headlines I have seen, they've reported news. Kinda like what you'd expect from a news outlet. It's not really surprising to me that the whole war thing might have cast a bit of gloom over the news. When there are abductions, bombings, and frequent power outages, shouldn't they report on that? I think it's understandable that the heartwarming human interest stories might be few and far between.
But more importantly, what the hell are they trying to accomplish? If someone's trying to increase iraqi support for US involvement and the interim government by shutting down what is arguably seen as one of the last bastions of non-puppet media in iraq, then they're fucking screwed. I can't even count the ways that this is going to fuck with their shit.
People will be pissed. The US will be seen as even more oppressive than before. Stories of abductions, murders and assorted atrocities aren't going to disappear! They will simply be passed through less official means, destroying even a trace of credibility or accountability. Bad things don't stop happening just because you stop talking about them.
AlJazeera may well have been biased against america. But it's existance was something at least. It was a show of good faith to the people of Iraq: that even with everything going on, some dissent might be allowed.
But what's also important, to me at least, is my faith in my country. As if it wasn't shot to hell already, this has pretty much done it in. A country that is so afraid of it's own actions that it tries to eliminate public proof of those actions is not a country I'm particularly proud to live in.
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