Viewers join in with phone calls and emails. The calls are not filtered and there is no time- delay to protect against abusive language. It's all live, anything can happen - and it frequently does. Qassem himself once remarked on air that all Arab leaders are bastards: the furore lasted for weeks.

The secret of the show's popularity, he says, is that it breaks all the Arab world's taboos. "We tackle the most sensitive issues, be they political, religious, social, cultural or economic. We were the first to do a hot debate on secularism and Islam.

"In the past, in the Arab world, you couldn't even talk about the price of fish, because that might endanger national security as far as the security services were concerned."

....In the seven years since it was founded by a decree from the Emir of Qatar as the Arab world's first independent-minded news and current affairs channel, al-Jazeera has earned a reputation that inspires love and hate in almost equal measures. Its motto, emblazoned in Arabic on the station's publicity brochure, is "al-ra'i ... wal ra'i al-akhr" (opinion ... and the other opinion).

That has not stopped critics from calling it the Bin Laden channel, although they forget that it also broke new ground in Arab television by interviewing Israeli politicians. Now, with war in Iraq looming, some are beginning to call it the Saddam Hussein channel.

"Yes," says Mohamed Jasem al-Ali, managing director, "we are Bin Laden's channel, we are Saddam's channel. We are the CIA's channel, Mossad's channel - all of them. [Guardian] Yep, they've pissed everyone off:

Because of al-Jazeera's willingness to push the envelope, it has been expelled from Kuwait, Jordan and Algeria. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the State Department called its coverage "inflammatory" and complained to Qatar about repeated airing of a 1998 interview with bin Laden. In November 2001, U.S. forces bombed its Kabul office. The Pentagon called it an accident; al-Jazeera officials said otherwise.

Its coverage, particularly on talk shows that give wide license to Arab nationalist and Islamic opposition figures and no-holds-barred call-in programs, has caused diplomatic problems between Qatar and virtually every Arab country. In December, Saudi Arabia boycotted a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha because of al-Jazeera's coverage. A month earlier, Bahrain's information minister accused the network of being "in the pay of Zionism." On a tour of the network's modest, one-story studio, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt once famously shouted: "This matchbox! All this noise is coming out of this matchbox!" [Washington Post]

For a comprehensive compendium of news stories about al Jazeera, go to the al Jazeera page at Cursor.