As if Al-Jazeera’s importance to the western viewers needed proving, last week internet provider Lycos announced that the number of searches for “Al-Jazeera” outstripped searches for the word “sex” by three to one.

In the first public interview conducted at Oberlin by satellite feed, Hafez Mirazi, Washington Bureau chief of Al Jazeera, the Arab television news network, spoke to students and faculty on Monday in King 306. Mirazi’s talk ranged over Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the war, Arab public opinion, and an explanation of certain events in Iraq.

Although Iraqis are “relieved that Saddam is gone,” he said, they have little love for the Americans, “especially because of the perceptions that the U.S. was behind the sanctions against Iraq.”

“Many people there consider themselves as against the U.S. as they are against Saddam. Also, the Shiites that the U.S. relied on in the south felt that they were betrayed once before in the aftermath of the Gulf War, when the U.S. let Saddam use helicopters and war planes to attack them.

Although Iraqis were reluctant to fight for Saddam, Mirazi explained, the history of the first Gulf War made them unsure whether to actively oppose the Americans.

“Some of them tried to defend against the invading troops,” he said. “But when Baghdad fell, when they saw that the Republican Guard and the army was pushing for civilians to fight while they themselves were hiding, and the regime was running for its own life” the civilian population backed down, he said.

Mirazi also sought to clear up some confusion regarding Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the war.

Al-Jazeera did not, he said, regularly use the word “martyr” when referring to fallen Arabs. The only occasion when that word was used, he said, came when an American tank killed the Al-Jazeera camera man in Baghdad. “That was the only incident in which we used the word ‘martyr,’ in that conflict,” he said, and even then it was used in the “secular sense.”

Mirazi also defended Al-Jazeera’s use of the phrase “invading troops,” rather than “coalition forces.”

“Legally speaking, any foreign troops that would get in by force, they call it an invasion,” he said, noting that the term applied “even in surgery or in medical terms.”

Mirazi also praised American print media’s coverage of the war, while chiding electronic media sources as lacking depth.

“I always remind my audience in the Arab world that we have to make a distinction between the print media and the electronic media” in the West, he said. “The electronic media has been doing a bad job. But the print media is really a shining example of investigative reporting, the kind of coverage that people should be proud of as a free media.”