Within hours of Sheikh Hasina’s deposition by a student-led mass uprising, Al Jazeera was busy reporting that Indian citizens were spreading racist, Islamophobic fake news on social media.
Despite their headlines, it isn’t clear that Al Jazeera actually found any racists among India’s 1.4bn citizens. Their reportage dwelt instead on hearsay and a few examples of erroneous posts circulated on Facebook. They also failed to mention the very real specter of the 1971 Hindu genocide, today’s incitement for the formation of a Muslim super-state stretching from Jharkhand to the Chinese border and Arunachal Pradesh, and very credible polls that suggest Bangladesh now favors driving non-Muslims from Bangladesh. Say what you want about its bias and obtuseness, Qatar’s global news network has good reason to cover this crisis with cheap allegations of Hindu racism.
Al Jazeera’s breathtakingly narrow scope for interpretation of major civic events abroad reflects the paucity of Qatar’s civil society at home. A one-party Emirate of 350,000 citizens, served by indentured workers (largely Hindu Indians), and governed by a Wahabi regime of Islamic law, Qatar bans any religious iconography in public, has named its infrastructure after Islamic warlords and prophets and comprehends political nuance in flat terms of ‘revealed truth’ and ‘haram’. The tiny emirate has a long list of infractions to defend, particularly in the field of upholding the freedoms of ethnic minorities, particularly Hindu ethnic minorities.
But for the 430m viewers who tune in to Qatar’s state PR machine worldwide, the attempt to rebrand Bangladesh’s uprising of Islamic fundamentalism in terms of civic protest is nothing new. Islamic coups typically benefit from an allegiance to naive secular visionaries at the outset. It is easier to attack the visionaries’ opponents than to address the obvious floors in the vision, which inevitably leads to the accusation of Islamophobia and finally to general sympathy with the Islamic struggle. Al Jazeera follows the same formula in stirring up anti-semitic hatred and race riots in the USA and will join any secular cause – even those strictly banned in Islamic law such as Gay Pride – to attack those who stand against political Islam.
Using global events as vehicles for securing influence, Qatar’s bid to mediate for superpowers is no secret and is written into its state constitution. Their position as a wealthy ally of America and Europe depends upon stirring up fractious regimes against the West and then acting as a broker of goodwill under the glare of their PR machine.
Amazingly, this tiny emirate has now turned itself into a de facto embassy for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas. It also gained a foothold in Europe during the breakup of Yugoslavia, where Al Jazeera’s channel in tiny Bosnia rose to become second only to its global English network.
Given Qatar’s disruptive bid to divide and mediate, it is very alarming that Al Jazeera now wishes to act as a global arbiter in Bangladesh. However, if they persist in their line that Bangladesh is lifting themselves to a new height among the free nations of the world, Al Jazeera will undoubtedly have bitten off more than they can chew.
The truth is that the interim government in Dhaka has already set about renaming Bangladesh’s infrastructure after Islamic prophets, and there is a constant onslaught against Hindu religious symbols and structures like Temples. Hefazat-e-Islami extremists and their Jamaat-e-Islami allies are known to all worthwhile journalists for their unjust treatment of the Hindu minority and the Islamic firebrand Dr Khalid Hossain has specifically attacked the Bangladesh’s ties to India. If Al Jazeera wishes to complain that Hindus have overestimated their exposure to this coup, then India will certainly not bestow upon them the laurels of oppression and press censorship.
In summary, the message projected at the West is that the protests were wildly successful: a Prime Minister was deposed, statues of the founding fathers were toppled in the capital, and state nepotism was afforded to the descendants of the genocidal war (without splitting hairs, of course, about whether these were the perpetrators or the inflicted), were slashed from one third to a meager 5%.
Bangladesh’s true progress – unlike that of Qatar’s Iranian and Afghan allies – will now unfold under the scrutiny and running commentary of the world’s largest democracy – India. Al Jazeera’s narrative will die, for once, where it should: In the limelight.
Qatar must consider whether they can afford for this to happen to their chuntering media network. Backing the wrong horse in Bangladesh certainly seems like an extremely high price to pay for a state whose fragile hegemony depends on using that same network to blindside Western democracies.
Stefan Tompson is the founder of Visegrad24, a Warsaw-based social media news company. He has covered conflicts in East Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
