SINGAPORE, June 4, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Saturday, June 4, accused Al-Jazeera Arab news channel of encouraging militant groups by broadcasting beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq.
"If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al-Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what's wrong. But America is not wrong. It's the people who are going on television chopping off people's heads, that is wrong," told a security conference in Singapore.
"And television networks that carry it and promote it and jump on the spark every time there is a terrorist act are promoting the acts," Rumsfeld charged.
More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq in the past year. Some have been released but about one third have been killed.
Nicknamed the CNN of the Arab world, the Doha-based Al Jazeera is the most-watched channel in the Arab world.
Launched in 1996, Al-Jazeera ranked the fifth most influential global brand in an annual survey by Brandchannel.com.
It won over millions of Arab viewers before and during the US-led war against Afghanistan, and aired exclusive footage of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks.
The channel has angered some Arab governments as well as Washington with its coverage of the war in Iraq and interviews with Arab dissidents.
Inaccurate
Al-Jazeera's media spokesman, Jihad Ballout, denied the allegations.
"Al-Jazeera has never ever shown a beheading of any hostage," he was quoted as saying by the channel's English Web site.
"While we work hard to give a comprehensive and balanced account of everything that goes on in Iraq - people clearly have a right to know what is happening on the ground - we have never broadcast images of a hostage being beheaded," Ballout said.
He pointed out that beheading videos were readily available on the internet and had made it on to other television networks.
"And because of Al-Jazeera's reputation, people mistakenly attribute the pictures to us."
Reuters confirmed that Al-Jazeera has often shown video of hostages pleading at gunpoint for their government to withdraw its troops but never broadcast killings posted on Internet Web sites by militants.
Bombed
In September, Rumsfeld said that "over and over again we've seen that Middle Eastern television channel Al-Jazeera that seems to have a wonderful way of being Johnny-on-the-spot a little too often for my taste".
On April 8, 2003, US forces hit with missiles Al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad, killing its correspondent Tariq Ayyoub just a few hours before rolling into the capital.
The channel officials charged the missile attack was a “deliberate” strike, recalling that Al-Jazeera office in Afghanistan had been hit in November 2001 during the US-led invasion.
On April 9, 2004, the United States asked Al-Jazeera team to leave Fallujah after the channel aired footages showing the American forces violating a ceasefire in the western Baghdad city.
US-allied Iraqi authorities have closed Al-Jazeera's office in Iraq indefinitely, drawing condemnation from media watchdogs, including Reporters without Borders and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.