The Washington Post runs an unbelievable whitewash of Al Jazeera today, by former Nightline producer Joanne Levine (now a shill for JihadTV), with the headline howler of the week: Al-Jazeera, as American as Apple Pie.

Many Americans automatically think “terrorist TV,” or “Osama bin Laden’s network.” They see al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language channel based in Qatar, as the al-Qaeda leader’s mouthpiece, broadcasting his videotaped messages of jihad.

Yet the truth is that al-Jazeera is a pioneer of news independence that the U.S. government once lauded for bringing freedom of the press to the Middle East. Now it’s planning to broadcast worldwide, including in the United States. But as its Arab owners work to make that a reality, the prejudice here persists, and those of us who work for the network find ourselves running, at every turn, into resistance, rejection and racism.

Extreme Mortman has their number: Beware Al Jazeera’s Public Diplomacy.

Levine writes, “most people in this country have never watched al-Jazeera.” I have. Before I joined New Media Strategies, it used to be part of my job, when I worked for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the U.S. government agency that runs America’s international broadcasting efforts.

What did I see? Constant victim-based images that peddled what America was doing to Iraqis and what Israel was doing to Palestinians. I saw program after program, promo after promo, feeding into the notion that Arabs are being routinely victimized by the rest of the world, catering to an overwhelmingly anti-American audience.

Sometimes the approach is quite subtle — hidden behind the cloak of “showing both sides.”

For instance, at the same time in early 2005 that the Senate was holding confirmation hearings for Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, al-Jazeera was airing a documentary re-enactment of Abu Gharib.

And how did al-Jazeera mark the most recent anniversary of 9/11? The network showed the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11.”