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Cashing Out: Al [Gore] Jazeera Buys Current TV

COMMENT: For years, we have not­ed the U.S. pol­i­cy shift toward embrac­ing the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, an Islam­ic fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion allied with the Axis dur­ing World War II. Begun dur­ing George W. Bush’s sec­ond term, that pol­i­cy shift con­tin­ues to gath­er momen­tum, with Democ­rats falling head­long into a trap laid by the Under­ground Reich’s satraps in the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

On the heels of the Broth­er­hood’s smash­ing vic­to­ry in the so-called “Arab Spring” (aid­ed and abet­ted by the GOP/Underground Reich fac­tion of the Amer­i­can nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment), Al Gore sold his Cur­rent TV cable and satel­lite chan­nel to the Al Jazeera net­work. Dom­i­nat­ed by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, Al Jazeera will now be able to spread its Nazi poi­son to a wider audi­ence. Ulti­mate­ly, this will  rebound on the Democ­rats, Jews/Israelis and, even­tu­al­ly, Rus­sia, Chi­na and India–large nations with siz­able Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions that are slat­ed for break up by the Under­ground Reich-dom­i­nat­ed transna­tion­als.

The Al Jazeera//Current TV deal might be envi­sioned as Serpten­t’s Walk meets the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, with that Islamist Under­ground ally serv­ing proxy war­riors and pr0pagandists.

“Gore Went to Bat for Al Jazeera, and Him­self” by Bri­an Stel­ter; New York Times; 1/3/2013. [1]

EXCERPT: Gore’s Cur­rent TV was nev­er pop­u­lar with view­ers, but it was a hit where it count­ed: with cable and satel­lite providers. When he co-found­ed the chan­nel in 2005, Mr. Gore man­aged to get the chan­nel piped into tens of mil­lions of house­holds — a huge num­ber for an untest­ed net­work — through a com­bi­na­tion of per­son­al lob­by­ing and arm-twist­ing of indus­try giants.

He called on those skills again after decid­ing in Decem­ber to sell Cur­rent TV to Al Jazeera for $500 mil­lion. To pre­serve the deal — and the esti­mat­ed $100 mil­lion he would per­son­al­ly receive — he went to some of those same dis­trib­u­tors, who were look­ing for an excuse to drop the low-rat­ed chan­nel, and remind­ed them that their con­tracts with Cur­rent TV called it a news chan­nel. Were the dis­trib­u­tors going to say that an Amer­i­can ver­sion of Al Jazeera didn’t qual­i­fy, pos­si­bly invok­ing ugly stereo­types of the Mid­dle East­ern news giant?

“The lawyers for the car­ri­ers couldn’t find their way around it,” said a per­son briefed on the nego­ti­a­tions who described them on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.
Mr. Gore, who lost his last big legal argu­ment — the one in 2000 — suc­ceed­ed. On Wednes­day night, a deal was announced that will bring the Al Jazeera brand into at least 40 mil­lion homes in the Unit­ed States. It will also make Mr. Gore, who is already esti­mat­ed to be worth more than $100 mil­lion, an even rich­er man.
The deal com­plet­ed an eight-year odyssey for Mr. Gore and for Cur­rent TV that con­firmed one of the real­i­ties of show busi­ness: it can be a lot eas­i­er to prof­it from a chan­nel than to come up with must-see TV for view­ers.

Tele­vi­sion exec­u­tives and observers were sur­prised by both the big price tag and the deci­sion by Mr. Gore, one of the best-known pro­po­nents for action to com­bat glob­al warm­ing, to sell to a Mid­dle East­ern monar­chy built with oil wealth. . . . .

COMMENT: Sad­ly, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood appears to be tak­ing over the Al Jazeera net­work. Al Jazeera already has a con­tract with the Paci­fi­ca Radio net­work, which reach­es a siz­able por­tion of the so-called “pro­gres­sive” sec­tor.

“The Islamist (MB) Takeover of Al Jazeera?” by Dou­glas Far­rah; douglasfarah.com; 1/16/2009. [2]

EXCERPT: The Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Dai­ly Report [which tracks along the bot­tom of the front page of the web site] has an inter­est­ing look at the grow­ing Islamist agen­da of the al Jazeera TV sta­tion, and the roots of the shift in the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.

It is an impor­tant obser­va­tion since so much of the Arab world-as well as the West­ern media-look to the sta­tion to por­tray and inter­pret events, par­tic­u­larly the Hamas-Israeli con­flict.

It is easy to for­get (and shock­ingly sel­dom report­ed) that Hamas is an organ­ic part of the glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, accord­ing to arti­cle 2 of its own char­ter. So that the Ikhwan would seek to con­trol the main medi­um for the out­side world to inter­pret the con­flict is not at all unusu­al.

The report looks at Wadah Khan­far (aka Wad­dah Khan­far), the station’s Gen­eral Man­ager, as the dri­ving force behind al Jazeera’s move toward embrac­ing the Islamist agent, while mar­gin­al­iz­ing oth­er voic­es in the sta­tion that once had a sig­nif­i­cant role.

In Octo­ber 2006, one of Al Jazeera’s own cor­re­spon­dents stat­ed that Mr. Khan­far had a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood back­ground and asked him about it direct­ly, receiv­ing a non-denial and eva­sive reply:

Mr. Wad­dah, you have and Islam­ic back­ground, specif­i­cally Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, don’t you think that this is con­flict­ing with your posi­tion as a head of the biggest Arab media orga­ni­za­tion now? In fact, I do not clas­sify myself as belong­ing to a cer­tain polit­i­cal ide­o­log­i­cal move­ment, this is first­ly an impor­tant issue which is very .. (inter­rupt­ing) ..Or you were belong­ing .. I think that first­ly I belong to this Nation includ­ing its col­lec­tive lega­cy and mind, and that this some­thing I val­ue and am keen on it, but I tell you clear­ly and frankly, Al jazeera taught us always that our affil­i­a­tion to Al jazeera– as an admin­is­tra­tion or press– is an affil­i­a­tion to an insti­tu­tion with deep-root­ed rules and with a clear iden­tity based pri­mar­ily on pro­fi­ciency and respect­ing the opin­ion and the oth­er opin­ion, and it isn’t absolute­ly based on dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between peo­ple on ide­o­log­i­cal, intel­lec­tual or par­ty bases.Inter­est­ingly, it was the Nation Mag­a­zine arti­cle from 2007 that first report­ed on the grow­ing Islamist agen­da of the TV sta­tion.

Whether it’s report­ing the Hamas per­spec­tive from the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries with­out men­tion of the Pales­tin­ian Authority’s ver­sion of events, or the fawn­ing depic­tion else­where of Islamist par­ties and mili­tias as the grass­roots reflec­tion of Arab sen­ti­ment, Al Jazeera has moved away from its ide­o­log­i­cally diverse ori­gins to a more populist/Islamist approach. After the March 2003 US inva­sion of Iraq, Al Jazeera replaced its long­time sec­u­lar bureau chief in Bagh­dad, Faisal Yasiri, with Wadah Khan­far, who had report­ed from Afghanistan after the Amer­i­can inva­sion in 2001 and then Kur­dish-con­trolled ter­ri­tory as the war with Iraq was launched in 2003.

Short­ly there­after, the sec­u­lar head of Al Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem Ali, was oust­ed and replaced by Khan­far, whom nine cur­rent and for­mer employ­ees of the sta­tion inter­viewed for this arti­cle char­ac­ter­ize as an Islamist. It was around this time that Jazeera’s Iraq bureau “became a plat­form for [Sun­ni] extrem­ists,” says Shak­er Hamid, a sec­u­lar Jazeera cor­re­spon­dent in Bagh­dad from 1997 to 2000, who left to work at anoth­er Arab satel­lite sta­tion after get­ting what he says was a bet­ter offer. “I can’t say that Jazeera’s rhetoric is com­pletely against Shi­ites,” Hamid says. “The Amer­i­cans intro­duced this, but the media should not make it worse, and Jazeera did.”

I am all for free­dom of expres­sion and the rights of oth­ers to get their mes­sage out. But I am also in favor of full dis­clo­sure of own­er­ship and inter­ests. Al-Jazeera is los­ing its right to claim to rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent voic­es, because the Islamist agen­da has made it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult for any oth­er voic­es to be heard. . . .