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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

There's a very interesting investigative documentary by Al Jazeera that shows how Israel funds and manages the Israeli lobby in the UK. I'll look for the link and edit this comment.

Edit: Here is a link to part 1 of the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceCOhdgRBoc. You can follow the "Up next" link to watch the other parts; there are 4 parts in total.

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Not sure that the mouthpiece of the ruling family of Qatar is a reputable source for anything, much less any topic involving Israel.

To complete the circle, however, Al Jazeera's China related journalism is excellent. And generally they seem to push the envelope in what they cover.

And for their home turf, would you like to suggest a better source for middle-east related news?

I'm a huge fan of Al Jazeera for some issues in the Middle East, but I think the best all-round news source for the region is Middle East Eye[1]. Their journalists have a no holds barred approach to sensitive topics in the region.

[1]: http://www.middleeasteye.net/

I've never heard of Middle East Eye, but I'm always looking out for more sources of news so thanks for the link.

Do you happen to have any specific articles handy, or general topics, that you feel they covered better than other news sources?

Their best coverage is on topics related to the Gulf states. In particular, the arrests of human rights activists [1], the inner workings of the Gulf monarchies [2,3,4,5], and other similar topics which are rarely if ever covered by other news agencies, let alone state news agencies in the Gulf.

I've only linked a sample of articles I could remember off the top of my head. Their archive has many more articles on similar topics.

[1]: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uae-jails-academic-10-year...

[2]: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-yemeni-president...

[3]: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/revealed-senior-uae-royal-...

[4]: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/revealed-uae-backed-plan-y...

[5]: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uae-eyes-military-expansio...

To be fair, this was a minor scandal that was covered by all the press in the UK.

as a rule, alj's reporting for things outside of the middle east are reliably pretty good. inside the middle east they have more obvious biases, particularly w/r/t qatar. if you have specific quibbles with anything said in this documentary, by all means raise them, but if you're just going to throw shade without any specific substantiation then you probably shouldn't bother.

You might be able to say that about AJ Arabic, but AJ English is an entirely different entity. You'd actually be surprised how much autonomy AJ English is given in its reporting.

Also, you could say AJ's reporting on Israel is biased, but why do you dismiss everything else? AJ has some of the best journalists in the world and continually pushes the barrier in its reporting worldwide.

Until you just referred to them as AJ, I had no idea that they were the same as Al Jazeera. I saw videos on YouTube by AJ and just figured they were some other entity.

Ah yes, I believe that's their US branch. IIRC, the AJ America news channel didn't do so well, so they pivoted to an online-only presence and rebranded to AJ+.

You'd be amazed how many branches Al Jazeera has worldwide. Heck, they even have AJ Balkans[1]!

[1]: http://balkans.aljazeera.net/

If you don't want AJ's take on it, read it from haaretz:

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.763768

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.765533

Even if you read both sides, it's hard to tell whether or not it's a loud mouthed idiot who thinks he's hot shit, or something more insidious like AJ and some Brits are insinuating.

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