Yet the website's editorial cartoon of the day, which looked at the Taliban's comeback in Afghanistan, showed the Islamic terrorist movement in the worst possible light, depicting a Taliban fighter leering through grotesquely large teeth, lolling barefoot on the ground next to a NATO soldier he has just killed.

Seaman says the GPO has given Al Jazeera International every cooperation in setting up here. "We've cut red tape for them even more than we ordinarily do for other foreign news services because we certainly hope they will have a positive effect in the Arab world."

HOWEVER, THE experience of Arabic-language Al Jazeera staffers in Israel, especially at the hands of the IDF, has not been so pleasant, to say the least. One of its reporters, Awad Rajoub, was arrested at his home near Hebron a year ago and held for six months in administrative detention. The IDF said he had "threatened state security," and was under suspicion for activities apart from his journalistic work, but an Israeli court ordered his release last May on account of insufficient evidence. "I was beaten and treated like an all-out criminal," Rajoub said afterward.

An Al Jazeera crewman was shot in the foot by Israeli soldiers while filming in Nablus after the start of the summer war in Lebanon. At just about the same time, the station's Jerusalem bureau chief, Walid al-Umari, was arrested twice and questioned whether he was broadcasting the precise sites of Hizbullah's rocket attacks to help Hizbullah gets its range. Both times al-Umari was released after a few hours, and Seaman confirmed his statements to investigators that Al Jazeera's footage did not divulge where Hizbullah's rockets were landing.

The station described the IDF's shooting of its crewman in Nablus as a deliberate "attack," further accusing Israeli authorities of "constant hindrance and obstruction of their work" from the time the war began. Reporters Without Frontiers accused Israel of initiating "repeated, deliberate acts of violence against the staff."

Khaled Amayri, who edits local material for Al Jazeera's English-language website, was quoted as saying the network's journalists were "often arrested [by the IDF] and then released without anyone knowing what they are accused of. What's more, not only are we often stripped of our accreditation, but we are also often told it is treason to work for Al Jazeera."

Neither Seaman nor Oron would comment on these accusations.

If Israel has been hard on Al Jazeera's people, the US has been much harder. In recent years American forces have bombed the station's headquarters both in Kabul and Baghdad - accidentally, according to the US - in the latter case killing a correspondent. Al Jazeera reporter Sami al-Hajj has been sitting in Guantanamo since 2001, when, on his way to Afghanistan, he was detained as an "enemy combatant" by American forces. A couple of years ago the US-sponsored Iraqi government shut down Al Jazeera's office.

A year ago the British tabloid Daily Mirror, citing an unpublished British government memo, reported that in a meeting with Blair, President George W. Bush suggested targeting Al Jazeera as an enemy operative, but that Blair talked him out of it. The US derided the report as "outlandish" and Blair called it a "conspiracy theory," but this likely did little to allay Al Jazeera officials' suspicions that they were in America's gunsights.

Another Al Jazeera reporter, Taysir Allouni, who interviewed bin Laden after 9/11, is serving a seven-year sentence in Spain - the victim of a major 2004 Al Qaeda terror strike - for being a financial courier for the organization, a charge he has denied.

YET WHILE Al Jazeera has angered the US, Israel and some other Western countries with its coverage, it has angered several Arab regimes much more. The station was shut down in Algeria after it reported on army massacres there, and in Bahrain, where it was reportedly accused not only of being anti-Bahrain, but also of being pro-Israel! The Saudi royal family's reaction to Al Jazeera's criticism was to set up, in 2003, a rival Arabic-language TV station, Al Arabiya.

Al Jazeera is the first Arab TV station to give full access to homegrown critics of Middle Eastern regimes (except the Qatari regime, its owner). This has won the station widespread praise for bringing a new, even revolutionary, freedom to Arab world debate. However, the dominant homegrown critics of Middle Eastern regimes happen to be Islamic fundamentalists, not democratic reformers, and while the reformers do get air time, the fundamentalists get much, much more. This can be defended as sound journalism - giving proportional weight to differing views - but it also serves the political ideology of Al Jazeera - and Qatar - which is Islamism, according to Weimann.

Thus, Al Jazeera embodies something that is believed in the West to be a contradiction, an impossibility - democratic Islamism.

The station's slant is "pan-Arabic, pan-Islamic," said Weimann. "It serves the Muslim world community. It certainly tends toward an anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli view in its depiction of clashes between the West and the Islamic world. It clearly takes the Muslim side, the Palestinian side in those clashes."

But at the same time it does give access to liberal Muslim democrats, and to American and Israeli voices, which was previously unheard of on Arab TV. The station promulgates Islam by featuring talks by religious leaders, but these sheikhs often discuss Islam's view of personal, family matters, including even topics such as impotence and homosexuality, which is certainly a first for Arab television. Al Jazeera also put on a greater proportion of women presenters and reporters than is customary for an Arab station, Weimann noted.

Yet then again, Al Jazeera opens itself to charges of serving the cause of terrorism, Weimann continued, with its exclusive broadcasts of Al Qaeda's incendiary calls to arms. "No one on Al Jazeera will ever speak in favor of terror, of course, yet the station airs interviews and tapes of Al Qaeda without any comment, without any critical discourse," he maintained, noting that Al Qaeda's leaders are apparently satisfied with this arrangement.