Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin On Mideast Revolution, U.S. News, Glenn Beck's Caliphate Theory
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NEW YORK -- Egypt's government banned his network and its military threw him in jail, but Al Jazeera English correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin says he feels vindicated as the country takes its first steps towards democracy.
It's often been a challenge to find words to convey what's been happening in the Middle East during the last three months, but Mohyeldin has tried. In the process, he's become something of a celebrity in his own right. While touring the United States on a short break from assignment in Cairo, Mohyeldin spoke with HuffPost about the whirlwind year so far.
His trip is aimed in part at advancing his network's campaign for pickup from U.S. cable providers, so he has appeared on "The Rachel Maddow Show" and "The Colbert Report" to make the case.
"You kind of are left wondering why, despite all of this progress, and despite all of this, American cable companies have completely remained behind," Mohyeldin said. "It seems like the most instinctively anti-capitalist, anti-democratic thing."
Mohyeldin said he believes part of the continued reluctance to pick up Al Jazeera is due to stereotypes, perpetuated by "former American officials," about the network. He also worries that negative American impressions of Arabs in general have played a role.
But given that international news has come to be seen generally by U.S. networks as a money pit that pays few dividends in terms of ratings, Al Jazeera is certainly at least battling conventional market wisdom. Polls notwithstanding, Mohyeldin said he holds little regard for that attitude and its "arrogance in assuming that Americans don't care what happens abroad" -- and he expressed disappointment with the options presented to U.S. audiences instead.
"There's just no place to get good international news in the United States," he declared. That includes, he said, Fox News Channel, which is not quite an Al Jazeera rival but does have personalities who like to sound off on foreign affairs.
Citing Fox News host Glenn Beck, who has conjured an elaborate conspiracy theory about a future Muslim Brotherhood-run caliphate looking to stretch across the Middle East with the aid of a grand Islamist-communist alliance, Mohyeldin quipped, "I wonder if he actually knows that Marxists and Islamofascists have nothing in common."
There has been a tendency among some U.S. analysts to view recent events in the Middle East largely through the prism of what they will mean for Islamic extremism. Mohyeldin was critical of that approach, but said that doesn't mean the Muslim Brotherhood won't play any role in Egypt.
"You have to make a very clear distinction between the revolution and the post-revolution," he argued. "Yes, in the post-revolution political atmosphere, Islamic parties can rise to power, you can have Muslim Brotherhood parties become players in Egypt's political arena. That does not mean that the revolution was led, or started, or was an Islamic revolution started by the Muslim Brotherhood."
Many of Al Jazeera's on-air journalists referred to Egyptians taking to the streets as "pro-democracy" demonstrators -- a term more partial to the protests' aims than, say, "anti-government," and the sort of editorial decision that the authorities took as a provocation. Mohyeldin said he is at ease with that choice. "I never met a single protester in Egypt who said, I don't want democracy, I want dictatorship," he said.
So far, Al Jazeera has fared well under the military government, he added: "I think it's safe to say that post the departure of Mubarak, Al Jazeera has been relatively untouched in Egypt by the authorities."
Of course, as Mohyedin noted, Al Jazeera is still technically banned in the country -- and the revolution's gains remain fragile.
The same is true elsewhere in the region. Across the border in Libya, one of the network's cameramen has been killed, four of its employees have been held by the government, and the wave of change sweeping across the Middle East has come up against a sea wall of repression.
Al Jazeera's employees have paid a heavy price for their work in the past decade. Mohyeldin himself has not been seriously harmed but was detained briefly in Egypt during the protests, which he said underscored the fact that hostile governments "still view journalists as legitimate targets."
Other international networks, Mohyeldin said, have placed too much weight on the recommendations of security consultants. "At the end of the day, you always as a journalist have to balance the responsibility and the weight of what it is that you're doing with the security assessment," he said.
Did it take a revolution for Al Jazeera English, still something of a junior sibling to the original, Arabic-language Al Jazeera, to find its voice?
No, Mohyeldin said, the voice has been out there. "I think the world has finally heard what Al Jazeera's been doing," he said.
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First Posted: 03/23/11 04:09 PM ET Updated: 05/25/11 07:40 PM ET