Al-Jazeera’s correspondent Taysir Alouni is currently in a Madrid jail, for no other reason than challenging the Western, and distinctively the American narrative of the Third World.

Alouni is not a terrorist, and Spanish High Court Judge Baltasar Garzon knows this very well. In fact, it appears that Alouni was arrested first in September 2003 — before the charges against him were even engineered. Various reports spoke of considerable American and Israeli influence in concocting the prosecutors’ list. The warm-hearted and brilliant journalist had suddenly become a suspected terrorist mastermind.

Alouni’s real crime, however, was his unmatched contribution to journalism during the American war and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. While Washington wished to convey one very well orchestrated and largely fabricated narrative of the war, Alouni told of another.

Taysir was little concerned with what the well-dressed Pentagon military brass had to say about the precision of their “smart bombs”, which smartly wiped out entire villages and took the lives of thousands. Alouni’s footage and on-scene reports countered the White House claims. He narrated a completely different story, where flattened houses, blown-up bodies and limbless children were the main characters.

Alouni’s reports were anything but unsubstantiated propaganda. They were coming “live” from faceless mountainside villages near Kabul, from overflooded and critically underequipped hospitals, and of course from morgues and fresh mounds of earth, where mass graves were being dug as heaps of bodies stood waiting.

One might make the claim that Alouni’s well-documented account of Afghanistan will disturb and defy the official American “liberation” story for many years to come.

According to the conventional wisdom of US foreign policy, Alouni committed two grand mistakes. First, he exposed the holes in every Department of Defense assertion that Afghani civilians were not targeted by the war.

Second is the less obvious, that deals with the right to narrate.

Throughout history, the West understood the Arab and Muslim world based on its own interpretations of that world, and cared little of the East’s own self-perception. Thus Western designations of the “Middle East” didn’t necessarily reflect the Middle East as much as it reflected its interpretation by Western narrators.

While such a practice seems harmless as far as literary works are concerned, in politics and war the consequences are grave. For example, “Saddam cannot be trusted” is a diluted remake of “Arabs cannot be trusted”, a uniting theme among many Western intellectuals and Orientalists.

The fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction changed nothing.

But unfortunately the dominating narrative of the West has taken over the Arab world as well. Not only does the West interpret the Middle East to a Western audience, but the Middle East trusts no other interpretation of itself unless it’s Western.

Of course there have been some serious attempts to confront it. Perhaps Al-Jazeera television has been the most successful in that attempt, and undoubtedly, Taysir Alouni has been at the forefront of that success.

In the post 9-11 era, the Western media celebrated Al-Jazeera, for the latter’s mission was seen as complementary to the Western media’s efforts to “expose” Arab countries and “highlight” their lack of democracy, and so forth.

The defining moment was the US war on Afghanistan. It was then that Al-Jazeera seemed to rebel against the role assigned to it. It was no longer the “island of democracy.” Once the US launched its war on Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera started narrating the realities of the Arab and Muslim world, not only to Arabs and Muslims, but to the Western world as well.

Apart from showing footage of blown-up babies, Taysir helped us understand how fantastically human the Afghani people are. Killing them with impunity was no longer an easy option.

This is precisely why Taysir Alouni is in a Spanish jail. The phony charges against him were the work of various intelligence agencies, all of them Western. He suffers from serious ailments and his pain, says his wife Fatima, is at times, unbearable.

I haven’t met Taysir, but working for Al-Jazeera channel myself, his posters surround me. “Free Taysir”, a new poster has just been posted on the wall beside me.