Subsidizing Terror Propaganda

Joel Mowbray takes a look at Al-Hurra, and it's not a pretty picture.

With an annual budget now over $70 million, Al-Hurra has for three years served as the centerpiece of America's aggressive post-9/11 courtship of the Arab world. Insiders maintain that the network was fulfilling its mission until it hired former CNN producer Larry Register last November. Mr. Register has not, to his credit, changed Al-Hurra's dedication to showcasing the full range of U.S. politics. The other side of the network, however, has been "gutted," in the words of one staffer. Even though Mr. Register has made some improvements since the March column, Al-Hurra still produces far fewer stories about Arab government corruption and human-rights abuses. (Mr. Register did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

It is precisely because of Arab society's persistent refusal to accept the existence of such a defining--and indisputable--event in modern history that Al-Hurra dared to do things Al-Jazeera would never fathom, such as interviewing Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and airing the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But that was under Mr. Register's predecessor, a Lebanese-born Muslim named Mouafac Harb.

Under Mr. Register, Al-Hurra covered the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last December. But in a stark break from Mr. Harb's era, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the attendees at his conference were treated with unmistakable deference.

Read it all.

Curious how this producer Register went from one pro-terror outlet like CNN to another like Al-Hurra.

Speaking of terror propaganda, get a load of this story from Weasel Zippers.

America’s alienation of its Muslim community has ominous parallels to the British experience, in which increasing numbers of disaffected and radicalized Islamic youth led to the London bombings of July 2005, said a member of the British House of Lords at Fordham Law School on March 6.

Baroness Kishwer Falkner, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords who is on sabbatical as a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, said that Muslims in England are near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Although the economic situation is different for Muslims in the United States, she said that there is a strident anti-Muslim sentiment evident in everything from talk radio to television programs.

This “Islamophobia” could serve to radicalize American Muslims, she said, in the same way it has in the United Kingdom.

Unbelievable.