Middle East Wonderbra

Najwan Simri Diab

I stopped counting at 10 pages when I decided to find out how many Google hits highlighted the Al-Jazeera Bra story. Yet, as Khaled Abu Toameh tells in his article, Al Jazeera's Bra: Freedom of the Media in Arab World, good luck finding instances of Al Jazeera making a big fuss when Arab regimes threaten its reporters. 

As he says, "Last month, Kuwait closed the office of Al-Jazeera over coverage of a police crackdown on a public opposition gathering.

"A few weeks earlier, Morocco decided to expel Al-Jazeera journalists because of their "irresponsible" coverage of the North African kingdom. Al-Jazeera has also been banned from covering the current riots in Tunisia. Recently, Al-Jazeera reporter Mohammed Bader was detained for a month by Egyptian security forces. The Fatah and Hamas governments in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have also been targeting Al-Jazeera, each for its own purposes. But for the Qatari-owned station and many in the Western media, these violations in the Arab world do not seem to be as important as the bra incident in Jerusalem."

And never mind that, "Earlier this month, Hamas issued threats against Jivara Budairi, a female correspondent for Al-Jazeera. Her crime was that she reported a hunger strike declared by detainees in Hamas-run prisons in the Gaza Strip." Needless to say, Al-Jazeera hasn't made much of this story.