Aljazeera Channel misleading the Mauritanian Audience…?!!

Elycheikh Ahmedtolba

Media is sometime misused and meant to mislead people through indoctrinating and imbuing them with certain ideological assumptions. This dangerous aspect of Media devices is a common feature of many countries across the world or more specifically within the 'savage' country where democracy is disguised in the overcoat of despotism. A country like Mauritania in which Media, since the heyday of independence, has been totally monopolized by the government and tainted to deceive people for praising or eulogizing the regime even though there is nothing worthy mentiong.

This has been the situation in Mauritania over the last two decades when the peacefulness of desert was disrupted by the introduction or rather invasion of dish-satellites. In a striving and underdeveloped country like Mauritania, people are always ready to consume blindly everything outlandish. This period marked a new era of alienation and devastation for the local/universal discrepancies. Mauritanian audience has been trained to be more concerned about the outside issues rather than his inside persistent discontent.

This process of alienation and transformation of the collective consciousness was fuzzy with the advent or emergence of Aljazeera Channel in our nomadic and curious society before we reach enough stage of fulfilling the minimum of conceptualizing the public awareness and set out the cornerstone of shaping a nation, which would have red-lines for the national security in relation to the external threats. Aljazeera TV spread quickly in Mauritania like a fire in the bush because of the lack for any preventive policy, protecting people from being passive audience addicted and enslaved by the ideology of Aljazeera or any other channel.

Now, it is no longer secret that Aljazeera Channel has a targeted audience and predetermined policy aimed at instigating and agitating Arab masses to hate their governments and to believe firmly that Middle East conflict is the only legitimate and just struggle in the world; all Arab people and Muslims should speak and defend the same issues without being able to think beyond the editorial manifesto of Aljazeera Channel which is fraud and misleading millions of Arab people around the world, including our society in the clear.

I would like through this brief note to enlighten the public, including myself that Aljazeera Channel is trying to sow the seeds of destruction and devastation through its programs about Mauritania and interviews that have been recently conducted. For instance, last week Aljazeera was inviting someone from the government who personally attacked some of the public figures who are representing a great portion of the society.

Aljazeera Channel is also trying to escalate the internal problems of Mauritania via accentuating the racial and cultural retaliations between the different components of our beloved country on the background of Arabic/French polarization. It is trying to say that Mauritania is an Arab country and not African, while we know undoubtedly that Mauritania is both Arab and African and cannot be but the two together, felling together and live for each other.

Aljazeera Channel is not only playing the role of dividing our society, but rather alienating our people from their nation and land. Now, most of our uninformed and innocent people think that Aljazeera is the most reliable and credible channel in the Arab world due to their oblivion and their inability to communicate with the outside world and see the other green side of the world; through this alienation the Mauritanian audience believes in the Middle East conflict and think that Arabs and Muslims are victimized. This schizophrenic situation is due the misleading ideology of Aljazeera, people do not care for our nation and our people but we try the best to solve others' problems.

I think, it is time to rethink and reconsider the latent discourse being the outspread of Aljazeera Channel in our society, trying to understand why the Mauritanian audience is the most loyal and faithful to Aljazeera among all Arab countries?

It is, however, worth mentioning that Aljazeera has been banned in Mauritania twice during the time of former president Maawiya when he realized that Aljazeera is intervening with the internal political process of the country and poisoning Mauritanian audience who was still governed by the law of nomadism and desert.
Why Aljazeera is not covering equally and objectively all the conflicts taking place in our world? Is the struggle in Middle East more important that the conflict in North Africa? Are not Muslims scattered and dissiminated everywhere in the world living peacefully and sharing the same values with Western societies? Why Aljazeera is creating and producing hatred and hostility instead of peace and tranquility? Do not need mutual respect rather than misunderstanding?