Al-Jazeera Files $150M Claim Against Egypt for Harassment of Journalists

The Al-Jazeera news network has filed a $150M arbitration claim against the government of Egypt, making good on a three-year-old threat to seek redress for what it describes as the persecution of its journalists.

Al-Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, filed the complaint before the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, D.C., because Egypt’s actions are said to be a breach of a 1999 investment treaty between Egypt and Qatar.

The UK Guardian reports that Al-Jazeera complained about several of its journalists facing harassment, after the military regime of current President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi, which in turn came to power after the fall of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Among the offending actions were detentions based on what Al-Jazeera calls “spurious and politically-motivated charges,” and others based on no stated charges at all.

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A 2012 critique from Oren Kessler at the Middle East Quarterly said Al-Jazeera was playing another double game by offering U.S. viewers content, on Gore’s old network, that was dramatically different from what the company broadcasts throughout the Middle East. Kessler noted that “virtually all of the channel’s journalists” were either “leftists, pan-Arab nationalists, or Islamists,” on a mission to stoke Muslim resentment against Arab governments engaged in corrupt relationships with Western powers – the very same narrative pushed by the Muslim Brotherhood when Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt. (Mubarak’s iron-fisted ways and long history of kleptocracy made this narrative very easy to sell on the streets of Cairo.)

Kessler noted Al-Jazeera’s history of support for Osama bin Laden, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Taliban, faulting Western politicians for being too eager to give the network a clean slate, especially when they were eager to nourish the Arab Spring into the whirlwind of pluralistic, democratic reform it never actually became.

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Read the full article here.