January 18, 2023 - 12 PM ET

Al Jazeera is a news network financed entirely by the gas-rich country of Qatar and reaches a vast audience of approximately 45 million viewers. We have recently experienced a hyper overreaction of many in the Arab world regarding the incoming government of Prime Minister Netanyahu, which might be contributing to an erosion of relations between Israel and many of her Sunni Arab neighbors. What exactly is Al Jazeera saying to their viewers in Arabic, and how does that differ from what they are saying in English? In their Arabic broadcasting, are they simply sticking to the facts, or are they exaggerating and distorting what they are informing their people about in this critical region of the world?

Here to tell us about this is Hillel Frisch, who has recently completed an extensive study of Al Jazeera.

About Hillel Frisch:

Hillel Frisch is a scholar at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy, Professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and former Senior Researcher at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies. Amongst his latest studies are “Rethinking the “Arab Spring”: Winners and Losers,” Middle East Quarterly (2021), “The Palestinian Military, Two Not One,” Oxford Handbook on Military and Security Studies (2021), “Jordan and Hamas,” Handbook on Jordan, 2019, and “Assessing Iranian Soft Power in the Arab World from Google Trends,” The Journal for Interdisciplinary Middle Eastern Studies 2019.