Samir Khader

Let’s not forget the war started in Afghanistan. We were there. And people in the States did not want to see it. I cannot forget that all the U.S. networks, and the BBC – which I believe has the best standards in journalism – used to take our pictures of the effect of the bombing in Afghanistan and show, for example, a school that was bombed by the Americans and the bodies of children lying on the premises; then they said that these pictures have been broadcast by Al Jazeera but "these allegations cannot be verified by independent sources." Fuck you! You have the pictures. What do you mean independent sources! C’mon!

Sometimes I feel that executives in these big media organizations are just jealous. They don’t have access. They cannot imagine that people of the Third World can think. They think that an Egyptian journalist or an Algerian journalist cannot do a good job. I remember we had an Afghani journalist who was reporting for us on the Taliban and he went to Peshawar and managed to meet a lieutenant of bin Laden and then managed to meet bin Laden. But when we narrated the story on Al Jazeera, the first reaction from an American network was "how could an Afghan journalist who lives under the Taliban show such initiative!"