S.F. broadcaster forced to drop Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV

Jamal Dajani understands the importance of honest, direct communication between the United States and the Middle East better than most.

"People cannot afford to only learn about the Middle East from sound bites," Dajani, director of Middle Eastern programming at LinkTV, told the Bay Guardian. "We cannot just rely on what Washington tells us, or on getting our news from Fox."

It was with this in mind that Dajani launched Mosaic: World News from the Middle East out of LinkTV's studio on Battery Street in downtown San Francisco in the month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The program assembles news from a wide spectrum of Middle Eastern TV networks with the goal of showing how different sectors – official government channels, independents like Aljazeera, conservative Islamist stations, and Israeli outlets among them – cover the issues of the day. Its name attests to the vast diversity of viewpoints found in the Arab world and stands as a challenge to the more simplistic, monolithic portrait often presented in the mainstream U.S. media.

Mosaic airs three times a day on both Dish Network channel 9410 and DirecTV channel 375 and, as such, is available to 25 million households across the country. But Mosaic – the only national program of its kind – has been suffering from a conspicuous gap in its coverage these days because it was forced to drop the Al-Manar network, a well-known Lebanese satellite TV network financed by Hezbollah (a jihadist group that has also sponsored terrorist activities).

In December the U.S. State Department placed Al-Manar on its Terrorist Exclusion List (TEL), a roster authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act that carries looser designation criteria than the better-known Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

"We placed Al-Manar on the list based on its incitement of terrorist activities," State Department spokesperson Lou Finter told us.

When asked whether State had ever placed any other media outlets on one of its terrorist lists, Finter argued that many terrorist groups engage in media activities, but he admitted under further questioning that no TV network had been designated as a terrorist organization prior to Al-Manar.

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