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Hezbollah's on air but not everywhere

Are the United States and its allies urging bans on Al-Manar because it incites violence or because it criticizes them?

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published May 31, 2005

	[Times photo: Susan Taylor Martin]
	Mona Noureddine hosts an Al-Manar show called Under 20. It fields questions from Arab youth about health, jobs and relationships.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Al-Manar TV, run by the militant group Hezbollah, leaves little doubt about where it stands.

It calls Israel the "Zionist enemy."

President Bush is "stupid and crazy."

The United States is "waging war against Islam."

With its gruesome footage and supercharged rhetoric, the Beirut-based network has long been a bane of Israel and its allies. In December they got partial revenge - French authorities banned Al-Manar from TV there and the United States declared it a terrorist organization in a move that has knocked it off the airwaves in many other parts of the world.

"It's not a question of freedom of speech," a State Department spokesman said. "It's a question of incitement of violence."

To others, it's a clear case of censorship.

"It shows the duality of American society - on the one hand you want democracy and openness and on the other you're trying to suppress views you don't like," says Abdallah Bouhabib, Lebanon's former ambassador to the United States. "I don't watch it but I don't want the government telling me I can't watch it."

Arabic for "the beacon," Al-Manar says it does what most Western media do not - shed light on what's really happening in the Middle East. In Al-Manar's view, that is U.S.-supported Israeli aggression against Palestinians.

"We cover the Palestinian issue not because they are Palestinians but because we sense their torture and suffering," says Ibrahim Farhat, the public relations and advertising manager. "We focus on the crisis and problems in the region, and this is what Arabs and Muslims care about."

Founded in 1991, Al-Manar operates out of a heavily-guarded building in a poor Muslim area of south Beirut. Armed men check vehicles for bombs; visitors must go through a metal detector and leave their passports or other ID at the front desk.

In the well-equipped newsroom, staffers work under monitors showing dozens of channels, including CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera, the leading Arab satellite network.

Like its competitors, Al-Manar offers a range of cultural, educational and sports programming. Though the network has an anti-American slant, it features U.S. teams that are wildly popular in the Mideast - among them, the Chicago Bulls and the Miami Heat.

"We have many programs that are not political," says Mona Noureddine, a recent college graduate. She hosts a Sunday show, Under 20, which fields questions from Arab youth about health, jobs and relationships.

It is Al-Manar's news programs, though, that cause the controversy.

"Al-Manar is the propaganda arm of a recognized terrorist organization," says Avi Jorisch, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. "It is terror television 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

In his book Beacon of Hatred, Jorisch criticizes the network for some things that arguably are no worse than what is seen or heard in the West. While Al-Manar says Bush is "stupid," an aide to a former Canadian prime minister once called the president a "moron."

More troubling are what Jorisch calls "persistent messages of incitement and glorification of violence."

Al-Manar, he says, was the first network to broadcast a report that 4,000 Israelis were told to stay home from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Though false, the story gave rise to a rumor still widely believed throughout the Muslim world: Jews and Israel were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

When violence flares, Al-Manar newscasts are filled with grisly footage of Israeli strikes against Palestinians. Some of it is shot by Al-Manar's own crews in Gaza and the West Bank; other scenes are pulled off Israeli TV, which Al-Manar constantly monitors.

In one case, Jorisch says, a Palestinian woman who had watched Al-Manar "incessantly" blew herself up outside a Jerusalem supermarket in 2002, killing two Israelis. The network denies it encourages suicide bombings.

"Palestinians have enough suffering to do such an act - they are not going to wait to see Al-Manar to go blow themselves up for a righteous cause," says Tamara Mattar, who writes the daily English-language newscast.

"The main instigator is Israel and the Israeli occupation, not Al-Manar and other parties in the region."

Mattar says Al-Manar's reporting is objective, though she acknowledges she gets the "Israeli point of view" only by quoting other news agencies. Because it is an arm of Hezbollah, Al-Manar does not recognize the Jewish state, and refuses to interview Israeli officials or anyone who supports Israeli policies.

"There is no problem with Jews because they are Jews - we respect the Jewish religion and the Jewish people. Our problem is with Israeli policy in Palestine," Farhat says. He notes that a crew recently flew to Britain to interview a Jewish professor, albeit one critical of Israel.

French authorities, though, found enough anti-Semitism in Al-Manar's programming that in December they banned the network. Among other things, they noted that it had run a 30-part series during Ramadan 2003 called The Diaspora, which depicted the killing of a Christian child and the use of its blood to make matzoh, and that it had accused Jews of spreading AIDS around the world.

A few weeks later, the State Department put Al-Manar on its Terrorist Exclusion List, prompting satellite TV systems to yank it off the air in much of North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Al-Manar says the actions have cut into its audience, once estimated at 10-million to 15-million viewers. It also lost revenue when Pepsi, Western Union and other U.S. companies pulled their ads.

The terrorist designation has even affected the network's Internet site, manartv.com.

"Companies that do hosting for us are getting afraid of the consequences by the U.S.," says Webmaster Mohammed Obeid. When users in the United States tried to call up the site one recent day, they got a notice that the domain name was for sale. (The site was accessible later in the week.)

Despite the setbacks, Al-Manar retains a staff of more than 250, between 30 and 40 percent of them women. Two of the anchors are female; unlike their glamorous counterparts on Al-Jazeera, they wear head scarves that reflect Hezbollah's conservatism.

The network has crews in most Mideast countries including Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, Jorisch says, Al-Manar incited violence against U.S. troops by "inflammatory" programming. One example: images of death and destruction followed by a graphic that said "Freedom: the American Way."

The network, though, continued to operate uninterrupted, even as authorities banned Al-Jazeera and closed the newspaper of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, sparking a Shiite uprising that lasted for months.

Farhat, the public relations manager, finds it ironic that Western countries promoting democratic values would squelch dissent.

"Unfortunately, the West is not accepting the Arab point of view and they are trying to lessen the areas in which Arab media are working. If an Arab station is transmitting something that is not consistent with Western values, then we can say Western stations are not presenting values consistent with our Arab values."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

The station's Web site, www.manartv.com is sometimes unavailable.

[Last modified May 31, 2005, 00:45:11]