Nadene Goldfoot
News out of the Middle East Arabs has its competitors. Al Jazeera is the most well known with its TV programs already shown on You tube. 
Al Jazeera is a free-to-air international Arabic news channel based in Doha, Qatar that is operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera Media Network. The channel is a flagship of the media conglomerate and hence, is the only single offering to carry the name as simply "Al Jazeera" in its branding. It is owned by the Qatari government, is one of the world's largest news organizations. It provides extensive news coverage through 80 bureaus on a variety of media platforms in several languages, including Arabic and English.
Besides Al Jazeera News, there is Abel Rashed on Al Arabiya. It is a Saudi owned free-to-air television news channel based in Dubai. It is broadcast in Modern Standard Arabic to a pan-Arab audience and also in English. As a response to Al Jazeera's criticism of the Saudi royal family throughout the 1990s, relatives of the Saudi royal family established Al Arabiya in Dubai in 2002. According to a 2008 profile in The New York Times of Al Arabiya director Abdul Rahman Al Rashed, the channel works "to cure Arab television of its penchant for radical politics and violence". Al Arabiya is said to be the second most frequently watched channel after Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia.
Rashed on Israeli and Palestinian conflict
“It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims. We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.”
- Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, Saudi journalist in London.
On February 18, 2021, Rashed has written that "In Tehran’s Eyes, Biden is a Pushover...." If the current US administration wants Iran to return to the negotiating table and discuss the nuclear deal and the war in Yemen, as well as preventing the collapse of the regime in Baghdad, then President Biden needs to flex his muscles....Iranian sanctions are Trump’s greatest gift to his successor, President Biden, who now has the power to increase them and put even more pressure on Tehran’s extremists to force them to return to the negotiating table or risk the collapse of their regime."
Before joining Al Arabiya, Al-Rashed was the editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, and worked for a long time in Arab broadcasting. He lived for a time in London and was educated in the United States. When he joined the network as general manager in April 2004, he was considered by many as a pro-American choice and has also been an outspoken critic on Islamic fundamentalism. In this interview with FRONTLINE/World's Greg Barker, Al-Rashed addresses criticism that he is pushing a pro-American agenda and talks about Al Arabiya's role as the voice of moderation in the region's news wars. He also takes aim at his rival, Al Jazeera, for what he calls its selective and hypocritical coverage of the Mideast.
They broadcast from Dubai. Here's why. "Dubai is just a location. It's not really a place for events. This is the easiest place to set up a TV station, you see. This was important for Al Arabiya, which was established three years ago when Dubai was just starting to grow [as a media hub]. Now they have built a media city with so many TV stations in it. Every single TV station you see around us in this neighborhood is actually beaming to Arabs outside. It doesn't matter whether you are on a boat or you are on the Empire State Building in New York; the location really doesn't matter. It's a matter of technology connecting us with the viewers. But we exist with cameras and correspondents and transmitters and so forth everywhere."
One of the criticisms against you is that you don't really cover Saudi Arabia particularly well because you receive funding from there.
Sure, it's not just funding. It's not the Saudi government only. As a matter of fact, we have difficulties with all the governments in the region. In Sudan, they closed down our office for a while, and you have to appease them to a certain point so they don't close down your office. If they close it completely, you will not be able to have news or views there. So, are you telling me I'm compromising? I am compromising, yes. But you have to understand the circumstances. And every single TV station in the region does this.
Did you interview Hezbollah?
We interviewed a lot of Hezbollah. We interviewed Nasrallah [a Hezbollah leader and Shiite cleric] before the war, obviously. During the war, he tried to take a side, and he decided to take a side against us, indirectly, I would say. We provided heavy coverage of the war, all the way from the borders where the Israeli tanks moved in, all the way to the north near the Syrian-Lebanese borders. We were literally everywhere there.
Al Jazeera did not mention anything about how the Americans decided to keep El-Adid as their biggest military base in the region. Complete silence on this -- absolutely. When Americans moved from Saudi Arabia and they went to Qatar, it was never mentioned at all. Total silence now for six years. When Qatar was built by the Israelis during the Lebanese crisis, it was total silence. It was us who brought the news. They [Al Jazeera] never mentioned it at all. All they mentioned was that Qatar gave $200 million to the Lebanese as assistance. I can give you a long list of things that Al Jazeera doesn't show on television, and I can give you also a long list of things I don't show on television about the Saudis. So we are equal in this matter, I think. They never mentioned an Israeli office, which is only probably one mile away from the station -- never, not once. They interviewed Israelis everywhere except in Qatar, you know. And they bashed Mauritanians, Jordanians, Tunisians, for having Israeli offices there. They bashed them literally -- all the time. You can see blood on the street, but they never mentioned the Israelis on Al Jazeera at all.
It's a hypocrisy. The English channel they launched yesterday or the day before yesterday, (IN ARABIC... they call the ones killed Palestine martyrs. In The English one, they call them just dead people. While they are martyrs in one language, they are just dead in the other language. That's hypocrisy.
About American Forces in Iraq
We don't call them occupiers, no. We call them American forces in Iraq, because, legally or technically speaking, the U.N. decision is that the government of Iraq invited them now. Before, we used to call them occupiers, but the U.N. decision changed that. But we allow our people on television -- I'm talking about the discussion panels -- to use whatever language they want. They call them occupiers; they call them freedom fighters -- whatever they want to call them, it's their business. In news, we should stick to the rules, one of which is to remain neutral.
On Israel-Palestine Issue
"To begin with, without resolving the Palestinian-Israeli issue, it’s not possible to address this problem substantively. I see the brunt of the issue as political and not religious: Before Jews and Israelis were our obsession, there was anti-Portuguese sentiment in the eighteenth century, anti-Turkish sentiment in the nineteenth century, and anti-British sentiment in the twentieth century. As the underlying conflicts were resolved politically, the cultural clashes subsided," said Al-Rashed.
Al-Rashed also said that "Without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, prospects to do so are severely constrained. A resolution of that conflict, whether along the lines of the “Arab Peace Initiative” presented by the late King Abdullah or some other approach, will make it much easier to improve relations among Saudis, other Arabs, Jews generally, and Israelis.
Reflecting on how to progress relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, Al-Rashed suggested a creative, economic-based incentive that could also work to make the ties between both countries more official, through incorporating Israeli Arabs into the Arab world's work force. "If the question is specifically what can be done now—before the conflict is resolved—to increase connectivity, perhaps a new step would be for Saudi Arabia to formally lift its ban on work visas for Israel’s Arab citizens, and for Israel to welcome and foster Arab Israelis’ professional deployment to any Arab country. From a Saudi perspective, the case for doing so can be made openly in terms of the virtue of empowering all Palestinians, on either side of the Green Line. In seeking out the most qualified Arabs in Israel to work anywhere in the Gulf, moreover, we will inevitably find those who have achieved success in the mainstream of Israel’s economy and society—the tech sector, manufacturing, medicine, and so on. When they travel to the GCC states (Gulf Cooperation Council —ed.), their human networks and professional partnerships will effectively travel with them. Thus, they can serve as a human bridge, as Israel moves toward a political solution, gradually enabling partnerships between the broader populations of both sides."
"Normalization with Arab Israelis should be initiated by the Arab League in Cairo, which historically has been the lion’s den of resistance to normalization," continued Al-Rashed. "To them we might say that, after all, many Jewish Israelis hold dual citizenship and are free to work almost anywhere in the region with their non-Israeli passport. Meanwhile, most Arab Israelis are banned from working in Arab countries because they hold only Israeli citizenship. In a similar vein, many Israeli companies are already exporting goods to Arab markets through foreign corporate entities, while Arab farmers in Israel cannot sell their tomatoes in the Gulf market."
Algemeiner noted on November 20, 2013, that :" Al Arabiya's Chief, Abdel Rahman al-Rashed , wrote: Obama was boosting Iran's confidence to become a nuclear country. "
We all note that Trump put a stop to that by doing everything in his power, a lot of sanctions, to halt his ability to reach their goal of making atomic weapons to use on the USA and Israel.
My comment: Now that Israel and 4 Muslim countries have first made peace pacts with each other, we will see what ventures will take place without raising havoc on Israel's security issues. First things first, after all: Israel's security.
In 2020, The Daily Beast identified a network of false personas used to sneak opinion pieces aligned with UAE government policy to media outlets such as Al Arabiya. They're critical about Turkey’s role in the Middle East, as well as Qatar and particularly its state media Al Jazeera. Twitter suspended some of the fake columnists' accounts in early July 2020.
Resource: https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/
a/israelpalestinetruth/
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/newswar/war_rashed.html
https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2812686/abdulrahman-al-rashed/tehran%E2%80%99s-eyes-biden-pushover
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4890656,00.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera
https://www.algemeiner.com/2013/11/20/al-arabiya-chief-obama-boosting-irans-confidence-to-become-nuclear-country/
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