BEN SHAPIRO: WHAT IF THE NAZIS HAD BOUGHT NBC…GORE’S “CURRENT” FOLLY
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/current-tv-bought-by-al-jazeera/print/
This week, former presidential candidate and global warming guru Al Gore sold his failing cable television network, Current TV, to an ideological ally: Al Jazeera. He’d had an offer from Glenn Beck to buy Current TV, but according to Beck, he turned it down out of hand on the grounds that the two were philosophically incompatible. He had no such qualms about pocketing $100 million from the Qatar-owned propaganda outlet for America’s terrorist enemies.
That’s no coincidence. The two most left-leaning networks in America are now owned by two of America’s greatest geopolitical foes. RT, which carries American hosts like Thom Hartmann, is Russia Today – it’s owned by the Kremlin. And now Current TV, which carried people like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm (both of whom have now quit), is owned by a foreign government that backs terrorism.
The media has attempted, lamely, to spin the Al Jazeera purchase as a legitimate news outlet buying a legitimate news outlet. Howard Kurtz writes at CNN that “Al Jazeera English … doesn’t have the same reputation” as Al Jazeera proper (no doubt because Al Jazeera English is almost indistinguishable from the Western self-hatred evident on most liberal news networks). “In fact,” writes Kurtz, “no less a figure than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has praised it as ‘real news,’ and the channel has won journalism awards for its reporting on the Arab Spring and other events.”
Kurtz does admit, however, that Al Jazeera does allow airtime for Egyptian Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who spends an inordinate amount of time raving about Jews and Americans, and who backs suicide terrorism. Qaradawi, Kurtz didn’t mention, actually appeared on air and said this: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them.” But, says Kurtz, the network also has on Shimon Peres! Which is somewhat like saying that if you have on Adolf Hitler, mid-Holocaust, and also Neville Chamberlain, you’re evenhanded.
Kurtz hilariously proclaims that the network might “have its own biases.”
And that “Al Jazeera English is sometimes determined to paint the US in a negative light.”
Sometimes?
According to Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal,
“In 2008, Al Jazeera threw an on-air party for Samir Kuntar when he was released from an Israeli prison. Kuntar led a Palestine Liberation Front terrorist team that kidnapped an Israeli family in 1979. He shot the father and killed the 4-year-old daughter by smashing her head against rocks along the beach. In footage available on YouTube, Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau chief hands Kuntar a scimitar to cut the celebratory cake and says: ‘This is the sword of the Arabs, Samir.’”
The newest chair of Al Jazeera is the cousin to the emir of Qatar. The emir recently signed a $400 million check to Hamas.
Well played, Mr. Vice President.
And the staff is angry. They’re not too upset about Al Jazeera’s hatred for Jews and Israel. And they’re not particularly perturbed about Al Jazeera’s history of supporting American enemies. No, they’re mad because Al Jazeera is owned by oil producers. “[Gore] has no credibility,” one Current TV staffer told Fox News. “He’s supposed to be the face of clean energy and just sold [the channel] to very big oil, the emir of Qatar! Current never even took big oil advertising – and Al Gore, that bulls—ter sells to the emir?” Another staffer was just as angry … about Gore making money. “Al was always lecturing us about green,” said the staffer. “He kept his word about green all right – as in cold, hard cash!”
The left’s reaction to the Al Jazeera sale – anger at the lack of environmentalism rather than the lack of moral compass – is astonishing, but revealing. They are ideologically aligned with Al Jazeera on foreign policy. They openly say so, when they reject even hearing an offer from Glenn Beck in order to sell to the producers of “Oh Allah, kill all the Jews” material.
What’s even scarier is that Gore’s sale represents not only the merger of American leftist media and the media of our enemies, but the merger of American leftism and the philosophy of our enemies. And that is truly frightening.
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