• Arabic television station and satellite network launched in 1996, funded by Emir of Qatar
• Known as the "CNN of the Arab world" and "Jihad TV," it claims to have 50 million viewers
• Osama bin Laden's outlet for video messages
• Its Spanish reporter was arrested for terrorist ties to bin Laden's Al Qaeda
• At least two of its Iraqi reporters and one executive had secret connections with, and apparently worked for, Saddam Hussein's intelligence service
• Praised Democratic candidate John Kerry and did positive reporting from 2004 Democratic National Convention
• Gave airtime to racist David Duke to claim that Jews knew in advance of 9-11 attack on World Trade Center and stayed away
• Described Islamist suicide-homocide bombers in Israel as "martyrs"

Al Jazeera is a television station and satellite channel based in Qatar, a small oil-rich nation adjoining Saudi Arabia on a peninsula in the Persian Gulf. In Arabic Al Jazeera means "the peninsula."

In 1996 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service Arabic language TV station shut down after two years of operation, rather than submit to censorship and other political pressures in Saudi Arabia. Months later, Al Jazeera was launched in adjacent Qatar. Created by a $150 million grant from the Emir of Qatar, the new Arabic language broadcaster hired many of those who had worked for the Arabic BBC station.

"Al Jazeerans didn't really seem like Arabs," wrote Michael Wolff about covering the Iraq War from Qatar in 2003 in New York Magazine. "The Al Jazeera guys (and even sometimes women) were polyglot, urbane, sexy in a radical-chic sort of way."

Today Al Jazeera rivals the global viewership of BBC World Service and since January 2003 has had an agreement to share its reports with the BBC.

The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was born in 1950 and graduated in 1971 from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England. In June 1995 he came to power by overthrowing his father in a bloodless coup. An enlightened ruler by regional standards, he has promoted public education and a degree of democracy in his nation. When U.S. forces left Saudi Arabia, the Emir invited their redeployment to Qatar.

The press is government-controlled in most Arab nations. Al Jazeera quickly won millions of viewers because it aired seldom-heard criticism of Arab rulers - at least those outside Qatar. Its slogan is "The opinion and the other opinion."

Al Jazeera's business plan has been to become profitable through selling ads. Saudi Arabia has pressured companies not to advertise on Al Jazeera, however, and the broadcaster has continued to depend on subsidies of up to $30 million per year from the Emir to remain solvent. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Al Jazeera, Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer al-Thani, is a cousin of Qatar's Emir. Wolff infers that the drive to expand its viewership and attract advertisers may be the dominant factor shaping Al Jazeera's style and content.

"It's pretty hard to adequately describe the level of bloodiness during an average Al Jazeera newcast," wrote Wolff. "It's mesmerizing bloodiness. It's not just red but gooey. There's no cutaway. They hold the shot for the full viscous effect. It's vastly grislier than anything that's ever been shown on television before. It's snuff-film caliber. . . . The Al Jazeera correspondents seem a little sheepish about their network's over-the-topness."

"The better Al Jazeera does, the angrier the Arabs become," wrote Wolff. "The more anti-U.S. and anti-Israel, the higher ratings it gets."

Most Americans first heard Al Jazeera mentioned after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that crashed skyjacked airliners into the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers and murdered nearly 3,000 people. Soon thereafter Al Jazeera began repeatedly broadcasting a videotape of 9-11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden praising and explaining these attacks by members of his organization Al Qaeda ("The Base"). Al Jazeera refused to explain where or how it obtained this videotape, and refused to impart to others any information that might have helped them track down bin Laden. It also refused to stop airing the inflammatory video, despite U.S. concerns that the footage might contain coded messages to other Al Qaeda agents around the world.

"The CNN of the Arab world" is how some describe Al Jazeera, but others call it "Jihad TV," a megaphone that amplifies and glorifies Islamist terrorists, anti-Semites and other fanatical foes of Israel and the United States.

Al Jazeera broadcast the blood libel that Jews had been warned by Israel's Mossad in advance about the 9-11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and thus had stayed home that day. Al Jazeera interviewed, as one of its "experts" making this claim, the American former Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party leader David Duke, without clearly explaining to its Arab audience who and what Duke is.

Al Jazeera routinely has described Islamist suicide-homocide bombers in Israel as "martyrs," and Palestinians as Israel's victims. Its newscasts and on-air discussions are staged to show its 50 million mostly-Muslim viewers a relentlessly visceral, emotion-charged drama in which Jews, Israel and Americans are almost always cast as villains, infidels and evil-doers.

"Al Jazeera has an editorial line and a way of presenting news that appeals to the Arab public," said U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003. "They tend to portray [U.S.] efforts [in Iraq] in a negative light."

"You don't have to look too closely to find that Al Jazeera also inhabits the far side of the ideological moon," wrote Wolff, "and is as responsible for the region's departures from reality as anyone." By amplifying the views of terrorists, giving a one-sided view of bloodshed in the Middle East, and encouraging both fear and loathing, Al Jazeera has at a minimum abetted terrorism. At a maximum, Al Jazeera's reporters and executives have crossed the line between commentary and complicity by working hand-in-glove with terrorists.

In May 2003 Al Jazeera sacked its chief executive Mohammed Jassem Ali, reported the British newspaper The Independent, after Iraq government documents captured after the fall of Baghdad revealed that he and two Al Jazeera reporters had secretly worked with, and probably for, agents of Saddam Hussein's brutal intelligence agency the Mukhabarat. All had played roles in Al Jazeera's pro-Hussein and anti-American reporting.

But Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Baghdad refused to resign after a pan-Arab daily newspaper in London reported in November 2004 -- erroneously, he claimed -- that he was related to the "main aide" of Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who in several videos used a knife to behead kidnapped people. In August 2004 the interim government in Iraq had temporarily closed Al Jazeera's bureau in Baghdad in the interest of national security.

In September 2003 Al Jazeera's star reporter in Spain, Tayssir Alouni, was arrested after an investigation found that he had maintained "frequent and continuous" contact with the leader of bin Laden's Al Qaeda cell in Spain. This Al Jazeera reporter also had close contact with a German-based businessman who may have funded 9-11 skyjacker and Al Qaeda agent Muhammad Atta in Hamburg.

Al Jazeera "is a dangerous force," wrote Johns Hopkins University Mideast exert Fouad Ajami in a late 2001 New York Times Op-Ed article, "and should be treated as such by Washington." Ajami accused Al Jazeera of glorifying the Taliban, romanticizing bin Laden, and exhibiting a "virulent anti-American bias."

In March 2004 Al Jazeera praised Democratic presidential nominee-apparent, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry. Al Jazeera was invited to cover the Democratic National Convention, and did so with remarkably positive reporting.

Al Jazeera is available throughout the United States on the satellite DISH network, and by 2002 it was already being seen by 175,000 people in North America who paid to watch it.

In 2004 the Canadian government approved access to Al Jazeera on Canadian cable systems, even though on the day of this announcement Canada was continuing to refuse such access to Fox News Channel.

Al Jazeera writes that its Arabic Internet site is one of the 50 most visited web sites in the world. Its original service provider in the United States was raided by the FBI in September 2001 and subsequently convicted of several crimes, one of which was knowingly taking money from an investor who was a member of the terrorist organization Hamas.

Al Jazeera says it has 30 news bureaus around the world, with plans to expand in London, Kuala Lumpur in Muslim Malaysia, and Washington, D.C.

In March 2003 Al Jazeera launched an English language web site. Its managing editor is former BBC employee Joanne Tucker, the Lebanon-born daughter of an American father and Lebanese mother, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom and was educated at Cambridge University.

In November 2006, Al Jazeera launched an English-language network in the U.S. and around the world. Former Nightline correspondent David Marash, an American Jew, was named to anchor one of the network's daily broadcasts.