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“Al-Aqsa TV is notorious for its incitement to antisemitism, demonstrated in a speech last week by senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Zahrar, who claimed that the Israeli operation in Gaza justifies Muslims murdering Jewish children worldwide,” the Simon Wiesenthal Centre complained in a letter to French regulators.
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PARIS (AFP-EJP)---Hamas's television channel was taken off the air in Europe less than 24 hours after it was added to a satellite network, industry officials said Friday.
Hamas announced on Monday that Europeans would be able to see its Al-Aqsa service -- best known in the Middle East for its virulent anti-Israeli content -- via the French firm Eutelsat's satellites.
Al-Aqsa is Hamas' official mouthpiece, and became notorious outside the Palestinian territories for a show in which a man-sized pink rabbit named Assud urged children to embrace martyrdom and threatened to eat Jews.
Alerted by industry sources, the ‘Higher Audiovisual Council’ (CSA), the French broadcasting regulator, this week wrote to Eutelsat and warned that much of Hamas' programming contravenes laws against inciting hatred and violence, the government body said.
A Eutelsat official said the company had never had a contract with Hamas but that it had rented space on one of its satellites to Noorsat, a Bahrein-based provider, which had in turn begun showing Al-Aqsa.
Noorsat was warned to respect French law, and the broadcast has halted.
“Al-Aqsa TV is notorious for its incitement to antisemitism, demonstrated in a speech last week by senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Zahrar, who claimed that the Israeli operation in Gaza justifies Muslims murdering Jewish children worldwide,” the Simon Wiesenthal Centre complained in a letter to French regulators.
The group worried that Arabic-speaking Europeans could "be exposed to Jihadist calls for attacks on their Jewish neighbours and to revulsion for European values of secularism, multiculturalism and tolerance."
In May 2005, France's highest judicial body the Council of State ordered Eutelsat to halt re-broadcasting of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia's Al-Manar station because of the anti-Semitic content of its programming.
The Wiesenthal Centre expressed the hope that Muslim leaders across Europe will join this appeal to protect their youth from the Hamas' Al-Aqsa channel of hate.