Say thanks to the good folks at THAICOM, a satellite company in Thailand, who have picked up the Hizbollah propaganda station, Al-Manar.
THAICOM, a private satellite company in Thailand, has begun airing the broadcasts of Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV. The satellite covers Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Europe.
The Thai satellite has significantly boosted the resonance of Al-Manar’s propaganda messages around the world, said the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) in Herzliya, Israel. “This is an outrage,” said ITIC head, Dr. Reuven Erlich. “Other satellites have stopped airing Al-Manar, so Hizbullah has found a way round it.”
Approached by The Media Line THAICOM said it is considering its response and will only offer a formal reaction over the weekend. However, company sources said the decision to transmit Al-Manar broadcasts was a “purely business decision, which had nothing to do with politics.”
THAICOM considers Al-Manar programming as “news and entertainment,” the sources said.
Sure. News and entertainment, with a terrorist, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, anti-American theme. And oh yeah, the Islamist point of view.
“It’s a war. Al-Manar is Hizbullah’s main communication tool, through which it spreads anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, and anti-American incitement. It spreads Hizbullah and Iranian values of radical Islam,” Erlich explained. He added that the fact that Al-Manar can now be seen in south-east Asia, means that Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries with a large Muslim population, are open to its messages of hatred.
In the past few years since the European satellites stopped airing Al-Manar, the station could only be seen via two Arab satellites: Nilesat and Arabsat. The former is an Egyptian-owned satellite, which broadcasts to the Middle East, North Africa, and a few countries in southern Europe. The latter is a pan-Arab satellite, with approximately the same reach.
It is a war. It’s a propaganda war. And we just lost a major battle to the Islamists.
Something comes to mind about selling them the rope they’ll hang you with.
If the terrorists take over Thailand (which they’d like to – they want to take over every country that has ever has a Muslim citizen), you can guarantee that its media (including THAICOM) will either be nationalized or destroyed, with its employees either exiled or imprisoned (or worse.)
It really makes me angry when corporate heads think world politics is merely something that happens to other people.