Pelosi, McCain salute Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera may not be having much luck getting its English channel onto American televisions, but Washington, at least, continues to be smitten.
At the opening night of the Al Jazeera U.S. Forum on Monday night, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney could be spotted milling among Al Jazeera top brass on the balcony of the Newseum while waiters passed non-alcoholic refreshments.
Over dinner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. John McCain praised Al Jazeera’s role as a catalyst in the Arab Spring uprisings before a room of journalists ranging from New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to Ayman Mohyeldin, the face of Al Jazeera English’s reports from Tahrir Square.
‘I’m very proud of the role that Al Jazeera has played,” Sen. McCain said. “When that young man who was humiliated by the police in front of his friends and compatriots and family decided to burn himself to death, that would have been confined in earlier years to a single isolated incident, and it was Al Jazeera, it was Al Jazeera, that spread the story time and time again, so that it permeated the conscience, not only of the Tunisians, but of countries throughout the Arab world. So I congratulate you.”
He said he was proud to have been the first U.S. senator to travel to Al Jazeera’s headquaters in Doha (“not a bad place that you’ve got going on there”) and sit for interviews.

“We live in a new era,” he said. “What Al Jazeera has done is achieved something that all of us I think want to achieve, particularly as we grow older, and that is to make a contribution that will last and will be brought to future generations that lie ahead of us. I want to assure you that these young people who were able to watch Al Jazeera and be inspired by the example of others is a remarkable achievement.”
Leader Pelosi, whose district includes Twitter’s headquarters in California, said that credit for the Arab Spring must be shared by social networks and Al Jazeera, but agreed that both played a vital role.
“Whatever it was, it was a great combination, so I congratulate you on Al Jazeera’s role,” she said.
She said in her travels to the Middle East, she’s heard young people, women and dissidents speak in an almost unanimous voice about their motivations for the protests.
As she put it: “We are tired of our rulers. We are weary of war. We think that our rulers, our leaders – they didn’t really call them leaders, but our rulers – use the excuse of war, the threat of violence as an excuse not to create jobs or build a future for us. We don’t even know if they know how to do that.”
She also called for the release of the two Al Jazeera journalists now being held in Libya and Iran.
But she opened her remarks with a nod to the fact that, not so long ago, so much praise of Al Jazeera from such a high-ranking member of Congress might have been somewhat controversial.
“I’m very delighted to be here with Senator McCain,” she said. “When I accepted this invitation to speak here this evening, I didn’t realize that he was going to be here until I arrived. You can just imagine how happy I was to see him, because I was preparing for the onslaught of criticism that I was going to receive. But now I’m covered!”
The room erupted in laughter.
Wadah Khanfar, director general of Al Jazeera, pushed back, gently, against the conspiracy theorists trying to lay to much credit, or blame, for the Arab Spring at Al Jazeera's feet.
“We do not make revolutions," he said. "We are not behind revolutions. Revolutions are made by people themselves. People have decided that they are tired of the humiliation that have seeen over the last few decades.”