Al Jazeera and Zarqawi

Al Sharq al Awsat ran a piece today claiming that Hamid Hadid, who was the director of al Jazeera's Baghdad office until it was closed down a few months ago, is the brother of Omar Hadid, an alleged lieutenant of Abu Musab al Zarqawi.   Expect to see this story hitting the predictable locations soon.

Al Jazeera just issued a statement flatly denying any relationship between Hamid Hadid and Omar Hadid - not siblings, not cousins, not friends. [here's the English version]

I don't actually know anything about it one way or the other, but I'd have to think that the Jazeera guy would know if the terrorist were his brother, and would know the professional costs of lying about it, and would have found some other, less easily checked excuse ("I haven't seen him in ten years").  Most likely the Al Sharq Al Awsat reporter was just lazy, saw the last names, smelled a great story, and then the editors rushed into print a politically useful story without sweating whether or not it was "true."

You'd think that this would be pretty easy to check on.  Isn't that what journalists are supposed to do before they, you know, publish front page stories claiming that a prominent media organization is being run by a terrorist's brother, while insinuating that this no doubt explains a lot about its coverage of Iraq, and so forth?   

Oh well... I smell another Qaradawi Fatwa Affair coming on, where the "fact" of the "terrorist's brother runs al Jazeera" lives on long after the story is refuted.  We'll see. 

Comments

[Abbas]

just remember that Al Sharq al Awsat is of the tools of AL SAUD royal family that loath Al Jazeera

Abbas

[Michael]

I have no idea what al-Arabiya's TV broadcasts look like, but their website is something to behold of late. The current top headline:

"Falluja fighting led by al-Qaeda-trained former bodyguard of Saddam"

Which is just the same al-Sharq al-Awsat report, of course. It's been like this since I started checking their Falluja coverage a few days ago. Yesterday they led with "reports from Iraqi press" about all the nasty stuff that jihadis left behind in Falluja. I kind of like Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, but this is getting rather Beirutish.