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If flirting with danger was a show, then it’s The Opposite Direction—Aljazeera’s weekly live show first aired in 1996, hosted, researched, written, and prepared by Faisal Al Qasim. The show often ends in violence, physical altercations, and diplomatic crises. It’s not an exaggeration when I say a live show alone caused foreign policy disputes.

Faisal invites two extremely polarized opinion holders live and streams their debate, often on controversial topics, to its extreme ends, sometimes ending in physical altercations. But these are not the worst endings; the show single-handedly is a reason for the increased numbers of political prisoners in the region. Some guests drop heavy bombs of radical or regime-opposing arguments that often end them in shackles and underground black sites.

The purpose of the show, though, is not to harm those with anti-governmental opinions. Its whole purpose is bringing these views to life, to ensure a dynamic debate. This antagonized many governments in the region so much so that five Arab countries withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar—Aljazeera’s base—in protest of the show.

The Middle East and the Arab world have been, for the longest time, the melting pot of conflicts, wars, and neocolonialism, with no space for transparency or dialogue. The melting pot is surely sealed by a dictatorial, foreign policy, tyrannical planted lid. If you open it up, you better be ready to handle the steam, which many fragile regimes in the region can’t.

Thus, a show like that in such a politically hot environment makes shows of the two-party systems such as the United States’ and its CNN’s Crossfire look like children’s programs. This is not your typical Trump or Biden debates. These debates are often life-threatening.

One example is a series of episodes where Faisal hosted Sheikh Muhammed Fazazi, a very radical Islamist described by Faisal as one of his strongest and most articulate guests he had on the show. The radical scholar dominated the debates against a secular guest as well as Syria’s grand mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, which ended with him being sentenced to 30 years in prison and tortured out of his sanity.

The example of Fazazi, who was later sentenced as a terrorist, is a very interesting one because it shows you that when a system quenches the voices of certain opposing ideologies and opinions, even if they are of no good, it makes their holders stronger and sharper than those with system-aligning views, who have it easy. Therefore, many times when the free and easy ideologists get into an unconfined debating Colosseum like The Opposite Direction with the dark and quenched side, they more than often have no chance of fighting back because they are not used to the heavy shots. A real-life example of the butterfly and the cocoon fable.

There is nothing in this world without an agenda or bias behind it, neither the good nor the bad, and Aljazeera’s The Opposite Direction is no different. Agree with the show or not, you have to respect Faisal’s effort in creating a free and real dialogue in the Arab world, something that is missing in the region, as Faisal says;

“Dialogue is something missing among the Arabs. It is missing in schools, as much as it is missing everywhere else in the life of the Arabs… Through programmes such as mine, we hope to implement new rules, those that educate the Arab human being to listen, not only to his own opinion, but to that of the other side as well. The debate-based media must enter in force and strongly in the political life of the Arabs, whether the Arab regimes like it or not.”