Reporter Hoda Sherif (from her Al Jazeera Web page)
For several decades Al Jazeera has been one of my most informative and trusted news sources. It has a very well-managed Web site; and, while it has not (yet?) found a home on my xfinity television channel, I can still view the programs through a YouTube app which can easily be directed to the Al Jazeera English | Live Web page. That said, the Web site today served up one doozy of an article written by Hoda Sherif, whose Web page (on the Al Jazeera site) identifies her as “an Egyptian-Iranian investigative conflict reporter and writer based in Cairo, Egypt.”
Sherif does not limit herself to Cairo or the Middle East in general. Yesterday she contributed to Al Jazeera’s reporting on the Columbia earthquake. That said, this morning she hit a “mother lode” with her latest contribution. Title and subtitle of the article are as follows: “Trump warns of ‘jihadists’ ruling in Washington as Democrats show momentum; Trump labels US Democratic nominees ‘jihadists’ in inflammatory remarks made in the Oval Office.” If that is not enough, the first three paragraphs should provide you with what you need to know (even if you are a Republican):
United States President Donald Trump has described Democratic candidates in the midterm US elections as “jihadists” in an apparent reference to Muslim Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed securing his party’s nomination for the Michigan primary elections last week.
The pronouncements fuel a proliferating wave of Islamophobic discourse among Republican lawmakers and elected officials in the sprint to lock down ballots ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“We have jihadists being elected all over the place, whether it’s communism [or] jihadism,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “A friend of mine called up, he said, ‘You know […] you should use the word jihadist’, that’s what’s happening. If you take a look at what’s happening in other countries, I’m not really sure that’s the way we want to live.”
Back in my student days, we used to call this “rabble rousing.” However, given my recent account of what it is like to go for a walk in the park and encounter the National Guard, I would say that it is hard to tell which gatherings are “rabble” and which are not! Put another way, every day seems to make it harder to extract the signal from the barrage of noise.
Nevertheless, I have yet to find a reason to dismiss Al Jazeera for not being a trusted source. To the contrary, reporters like Sherif to go great lengths to make their points as clear as possible. If even the most faithful Republican can justify the aforementioned Trump quotes as trustworthy, then I would be happy to let him/her explain the reasoning to me! If Sherif were not living in Cairo (which I once visited decades ago), I would be only too happy to shake her hand!
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