A Canadian Al-Jazeera journalist and former Cairo bureau chief, on trial in Egypt and facing a potential lengthy jail term for allegedly secretly belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, has charged that the news organization "duped" him.
The case of Mohamed Fahmy has opened a revealing window on the chaotic state of things at Al-Jazeera and political machinations between Egypt and Qatar, whose royal family owns the embattled news group, Fox News reports.
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Struck by abysmally low U.S. ratings and a lawsuit alleging that sexism, anti-Semitism and racism are endemic at Al-Jazeera, the network's CEO, Ehab al-Shihabi, has resigned, and other journalists, like one-time CBS executive Marcy McGinnis, have followed suit, Fox News reports.
McGinnis said she left because the newsroom was "in disarray behind the scenes" adding, "I didn’t want to be there anymore because I didn’t like the culture of fear."
In a blistering editorial published in The New York Times, Fahmy said that after
Al-Jazeera's Arabic language branch Mubasher Misr was banned by Egypt in 2013 "because it was perceived as a Qatari-sponsored propaganda mouthpiece for the Brotherhood," he was led by Al-Jazeera brass to believe that the English language version still was permitted to publish.
However,
he wrote in the Times, "I have since realized how deeply I, like the viewing public, was duped. I came to see how Qatar used Al-Jazeera as a pernicious, if effective, tool of its foreign policy."
He discovered that while, "Al-Jazeera’s Doha executives used the Cairo bureau of Al-Jazeera English to give their scheme a veneer of international respectability, they made us unwitting pawns in Qatar’s geopolitical game."
This, he stated, was accomplished by re-dubbing Al-Jazeera English language broadcasts into Arabic while adding inflammatory language directed against Egypt, as well as providing cameras and using propagandized footage from Muslim Brotherhood activists inside Egypt.
Though Al-Jazeera has made claims of journalistic integrity in a part of the world not known for tolerating free speech, Fahmy wrote in the Times, "Al-Jazeera’s managers crossed an ethical red line. By attempting to manipulate Egypt’s domestic politics, they were endangering their employees.
"I have come to understand that Al-Jazeera’s noble-sounding claims are nothing but a glossy whitewash."
The lawsuit filed against the network states that a top executive made comments such as, "Whoever supports Israel should die a fiery death in hell" and removed women from projects and excluded them from meetings on the basis of their gender, Fox News reports.
Now Fahmy, who already has spent over 400 days in an Egyptian prison, has filed a lawsuit in his native country, Canada, against Al-Jazeera, seeking $83 million.
"My anger, however, is not directed primarily at the prosecutor, the judiciary or the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi," Fahmy wrote. "It is aimed at my employer, Al-Jazeera.
"The network knowingly antagonized the Egyptian authorities by defying a court-ordered ban on its Arabic-language service. Behind that, I believe, was the desire of the Qatari royal family to meddle in Egypt’s internal affairs."
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