Al Jazeera clearly have their own biases, but outright banning them would be a bad sign.
They seem to be the only news station with reporters on the ground IN Gaza, so a ban could be seen as shutting the last (official) window of information, which does not sound good at all.
They’re also owned by the Qatari government so like, don’t believe them if they tell you the slaves that make up 89% of Qatar’s population are enjoying prosperous and fulfilling lives
Not just Israel and western governments that have accused them of an Islamist bias. The Palestinian Fatah party has also previously accused them of bias towards Hamas. At one point they closed down Al Jazeera's offices in the West Bank.
The English language version is apparently less openly biased than the Arabic version.
Proposed earlier this week by Israeli communications minister Shlomo Karhi, the regulations would allow officials to “halt media broadcasts and confiscate broadcast equipment if an outlet’s output is seen to harm national security, public order, or serve as a basis for ‘enemy propaganda,’” according to the Times of Israel.
“We are deeply concerned by Israeli officials’ threats to censor media coverage of the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict, using vague accusations of harming national morale,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said in a statement.
“Israel’s pattern has been that, in times of war, there’s military censorship,” Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Washington Post.
In 2008 Israel accused Al Jazeera of being a “tool of Hamas,” the Palestinian militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, and launched a boycott of the station.
At the time, the executive secretary of Israel’s Foreign Press Association, Glenys Sugarman, told Reuters that “changing the law in order to shut down a media organization for political reasons is a slippery slope.”
“[But] during the intifadas, during wartime, there’s a persistent sense that Al Jazeera, as a station, is rooting for Israel’s enemies,” Alterman said.
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