In its 30th year…this is Al Jazeera’s “secret mix” in the face of attempts to silence it | news

With an abundance of pain and pride, Al Jazeera Network moves towards its thirtieth year, burdened with the memories of its martyred correspondents, but it proceeds with confident steps, as if every blood shed by its correspondents and their families has become new fuel that supplies it with life.

In a report prepared by Majid Abdel Hadi, Al Jazeera, as it welcomes its third decade, appears as if it were standing on the brink of pain to announce a new birth, combining noble sadness and professional stubbornness.

In its twenty-ninth year and before, the network faced an unprecedented war over sound, image, and truth. Its correspondents were killed in Gaza, the families of some of them were exterminated, and their homes were razed to the ground, because they chose to remain witnesses to the genocide and not partners in silence.

In Gaza, the lenses were not directed from behind security lines, but from the heart of the fire. The reporters there were filming under the barrage of shells, knowing that each broadcast might be the last.

Coverage continues

Some of them mourned themselves before being martyred. They said live: “Coverage continues on Al Jazeera, even if Anas is assassinated and all colleagues are assassinated.” The sentence was not a slogan, but rather a blood-soaked commandment, which the channel adhered to as if it were an unbreakable covenant.

Between the tears of loss and the glow of martyrdom, Al Jazeera maintained its image as a voice that breaks the wall of Arab and international silence, as it has always done since its first launch in the late 1990s, when it was described as the stone that stirred the stagnant media pool.

From the moment it launched from Doha, it broke the monopoly of official platforms and opened the space for a bold new voice that confronts authority with questions and grants people the right to look at themselves in the mirror without falsification, but it has not escaped the suspicions of the Arab world nor the cunning of its opponents.

At its beginning, many wondered: How could a channel originating from a small Gulf country have this much freedom? It was thought that the experiment would be curbed quickly, but those who worked to establish it heard a clear promise that freedom of speech in it would not be less than its counterparts in the most open countries in the world.

Business philosophy

That promise turned over the years into a philosophy of work and a way of life, and into what could be called “the secret mixture” that created the legend of Al Jazeera, and in a quarter of a century and more, the network turned into a major journalism school that graduated successive generations.

After the founding generation came young people who were not born when it was launched, and they became the new faces that millions see today on the screen, in whose eyes the same dream shines, and in their voices the echo of the first generation that learned that journalism is an attitude before it is a profession.

But the painful irony is that many of these young people fell as martyrs in Gaza, because they adhered to the most difficult lesson: to tell the truth, even under bombardment.

Despite the wounds, Al Jazeera did not stop moving forward. It did not choose to commemorate the martyrs with heavy silence, but rather opened new platforms in its digital space, to accommodate more voices and freer pens.

Clarity and stability

From there, hundreds of colleagues of Anas Al-Sharif, Ismail Al-Ghoul, Hamza Al-Dahdouh, Ali Al-Jaber, Muhammad Al-Hourani, and Tariq Ayoub continue their march, carrying the camera and microphone as a banner against oblivion.

Every time the war machine tried to silence it, Al Jazeera’s voice became louder. Every time an office was shut down or a reporter was threatened, a new window was born overlooking the truth. A network with this history cannot be broken, because it was not built on fear, but on boldness, and it was not created to go along, but rather to question, reveal, and confront.

And here is Al Jazeera, after years of rise and tribulations, standing on the cusp of a new decade, with the blood of its martyrs, the passion of its youth, and the pulse of its audience extending to four corners of the earth, and moving forward at a steady pace in a time when the media is retreating from its role, to remain a witness and a martyr at the same time, paying a high price for its word, but it does not compromise on its meaning.

This is the “Jazeera mixture” that is not written in a secret recipe, but rather is watered by the sweat of the field and the glow of truth, that the word remains free, no matter the cost.