A while back, the television-radio network Al Jazeera considered offering $10,000 to anyone who could prove that the network had broadcast footage of an actual beheading by the insurgents. Although many in the region served by Al Jazeera remain adamant that such footage had been aired, Al Jazeera insisted that it had never shown the act itself. An ingenuous observer wondered why the suggested award was a mere $10,000. Inasmuch as the network knew that it was innocent of such a broadcast, why not offer a million dollars? What do you have to lose, if you know that documentary evidence can’t be forthcoming?

To frame the case against Al Jazeera on its alleged broadcast of a beheading is to commit the offense wryly described years ago by George Tyrrell. “The Jesuits,” he wrote acidly, “score off the exaggeration of their critics. Accuse them of killing three men and a dog, they will triumphantly produce the dog alive.” The point here being that what Al Jazeera does, day after day, is mischievous in a different sense from merely producing graphic shots of beheadings. What it does is give publicity, much of it favorable, to the kind of people who engage in beheading.

Al Jazeera is heard and viewed by an estimated 40 million people in the tender and volatile Middle East. It is broadcast from Qatar, which is formally friendly to the West. That oil-rich little state nominally owns AJ, though it is currently trying to privatize it. AJ has been spending $120 million a year and losing $40 million or $50 million. (Qatar makes up the loss with a subsidy.)

Although the network provides around-the-clock news and commentary and entertainment, the poison resides in the news dispatches, which are anti-American and anti-Israel. AJ’s management replies to its critics that, after all, it is merely engaged in discussing the news, and the excesses of Israel and of President Bush are fair and legal subjects to bring up – so what is all the fuss about? So confident is AJ of its future, it is beefing up its bureau in Washington, D.C., and has provided itself with handsome $7 million quarters to do this comfortably. Already it is licensed to broadcast in Canada, though it is too early to say whether the Qatar mix will be unchanged.

The indecision of the American government in facing the aggressions of the network brilliantly illustrates the special immobilization of liberal reasoning. “Administration officials,” reports the New York Times, “have been nervous to talk about the station, being sensitive to charges that they are trying to suppress free expression.”

Well, yes. Al Jazeera has described American operations in Iraq in such a way as to provoke from Donald Rumsfeld the charge that its coverage is “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.” American troops are portrayed by Al Jazeera as wantonly attacking Iraqi civilians and holy sites.

It defies reason that a country at war should cavil at doing what can be done to suppress rank misrepresentations of American conduct. Its broadcasts were banned, beginning last August, from Iraq. Meanwhile, the lure of anti-Semitism is, of course, powerful and perhaps not even containable. The French government has denied a base to al-Manar, the terrorist Hezbollah’s television network, reflecting the steady rise in the Muslim population in France and a desire not to mobilize it with anti-Semitism.

The dogma that nothing should interfere with the free expression of thought is, after all, a dandyish application of John Stuart Mill to inflamed situations. When there are suicide bombers wading into mosques and schools and buses, and killing men, women, and children, attempts to examine what it is that moves them to such activity are reasonably made. If the news commentary the entire Near East region receives stresses the spiritual nobility of killing in the name of Allah, something should stress the nobility of putting such advocates out of business.