AlJazeera's pro-US shift seen reflected in its misrepresentation of the Sadr statement

BadeelIraq (Iraq alternative), a resistance-oriented site, takes AlJazeera to task for misreporting the purport of the Sadr statement yesterday (see two posts back, Friday April 25), when it reported on its Friday telecast that Sadr had "called on his followers for a truce".

The gist of what Sadr actually conveyed, BadeelIraq points out, was not that at all.

The bottom line of the statement was clearly about bolstering nationalism, and the war against the occupation until liberation, rejection of security agreements with the occupier that are enslaving, inviting the Iraqi army and police to fight alongside them against the occupation. This was an attempt to drive a wedge between the government and its armed forces, building on the precedents of what happened in Basra, when the Iraqi forces refused to fight, and the repeated news of [similar] uneasiness among the Baghdad forces, particularly considering most of the those people [in the Baghdad Iraqi forces] are from Revolution/Sadr City and Shaala.

When AlJazeera reported that this the statement constituted a "call for a truce", the BadeellIraq writer says, "What AlJazeera said and what it intimated, rises to the level of a clear falsehood, propaganda and sectarian bias, inappropriate for any news agency of weight and importance..."

And they reproduce yesterday's entire statement by Sadr, and they link to the Sadrist website where it was posted. It is worth noting that BadeelIraq is not a "Shiite" website by any means, rather it is located somewhere on the secularist end of the Islamist/Sunni/secularist spectrum of traditional resistance-supporters. And what it is doing here is defending Sadr's nationalist position against the distortions of an Americanized AlJazeera.

As far as the basic Sadr-enemy-of-Iraqi-forces theme is concerned, there are of course just as striking illustrations in the English-language reporting of yesterday's message. For instance: "Sadr changes his tune, calls Iraqi forces 'brothers'" (McClatchy). "Iraq's Sadr tells fighters to observe truce" (Reuters). And of course the best of all, with that special sauce, this summary by the friendly blogger: "Muqtada is offering an olive branch to his former ally turned deadly foe, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki seems in no mood to accept it".

The BadeelIraq writer explains that it is in the Americans' interests to foster sectarian fighting, and to suppress any indications of a common anti-occupation stance. This item is headed up with a mocking image superimposing the pastel-and-music American-owned Radio Sawa logo on top of the AlJazeera logo.