Al-Jazeera's Poster Boy
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Meet the new poster boy for Al-Jazeera (search). His name is Basem, and he’s an 18-year old from Saudi Arabia (search) who came to Iraq to kill Americans.
Here’s what he says led him to the Jihad:
“We saw the Americans massacring the Iraqis. We saw the siege on Najaf, We saw that Imam Al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling for Jihad. Those were the things that made us come here... We saw the pictures of the Abu Ghraib (search) violations, a naked woman violated by an American soldier. We saw our brothers, the prisoners, naked.
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Interviewer: Where did you see these pictures?
Basem Saleh Jamil Kassar: I saw them on Al-Jazeera TV, on the Internet, occasionally pictures appeared on the Internet. This was what motivated me.
After seeing images on Al-Jazeera that portrayed Americans as evil and Jihadists as heroes, Basem was shocked to discover that the real story was a lot different. “This is what damaged our reputation. The Jihad (search) fighter is now perceived as a man who wants to blow up and kill innocent people.”
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Fortunately only a few are foolish enough to act out Al-Jazeera’s cockeyed vision of Jihad in Iraq, as Basem did. But for millions of Muslims, Al-Jazeera’s vision of Iraq is still gospel.
(Our thanks to the Middle East Media Research Institute for its translation of Basem’s confession.)
And that’s the Asman Observer.
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