Al-Jazeera TV, Website Disagree About U.S. ‘Occupation’

Are U.S. forces in Iraq a military “occupation” of that country, particularly since the American forces set up an interim Iraqi government in June? The question led to an internal dispute between executives of al-Jazeera and that Arabic satellite television channel’s English-language website.

The Guardian reports that senior editors at al-Jazeera’s broadcast headquarters in Qatar stopped using the term “occupation” in June but that staff of al-Jazeera’s English-language website disagreed with that policy and continued until last month to use “occupation” and to describe militants in Iraq as a “resistance” movement.

“The English website did not change for some while,” a source inside al-Jazeera told The Guardian. “It went backward and forward and the channel told the website to stop using ‘occupation’ and ‘resistance’ — so it did, for about a week. The manager of the Internet section thought the channel was wrong, so it went backward and forward again, until he was overruled by the managing editor, Waddah Khanfar.”

An al-Jazeera spokesman said the channel had decided to follow the United Nations in dropping the word “occupation” after the interim government took over in June. “Whatever terminology we use has to have reference to internationally recognized terminology,” the spokesman said. “When we used ‘forces of occupation,’ before the handover of authority to the interim government, this was a definition used by the U.N., even by the U.S. itself. It was legitimate then to talk about occupation forces and, consequently, about resistance. We changed at the end of June. It was a very tough call.” He said al-Jazeera had received no pressure from the Iraqi or U.S. governments to change the terminology.