–Europe's Tolerance May Soon End

 
EU blocks Hezbollah TV broadcasts in Europe
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent and Reuters

BRUSSELS - Hezbollah's al-Manar television channel, branded a terrorist organization by the United States, will no longer be available on European satellites from Monday, media regulators said Thursday.

The announcement came at a meeting of European Union broadcasting regulators in Brussels, where national watchdogs from the 25-nation bloc agreed to step up action against TV broadcasts which incite hatred or promote racism and xenophobia.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom welcomed the European Union's decision Thursday. "This is an important step in the struggle against terror," he said.

Shalom has been lobbying European foreign ministers to block the militant Lebanese group's broadcasts. "The decision is another important step to closer Israeli-European ties," Shalom said, adding that Hezbollah was a group that sought to destabilize the region and harm the peace process.

Last year, a French court banned al-Manar from a satellite owned by France's Eutelsat because its broadcasts were deemed anti-Semitic and a potential threat to public order.

Dutch regulators discovered that a satellite owned by New Skies Satellites was carrying al-Manar and has ordered the company to stop doing so, because the channel did not have the required Dutch license.

"We saw that al-Manar was being transmitted by New Sky Satellite (NSS). We assessed that al-Manar does not have a Dutch license ... and NSS will now take al-Manar from its satellite," Jan van Cuilenburg, head of the Dutch Media Authority, told Reuters.

"As of Monday al-Manar will no longer be available on any European satellites."

It willm however, remain on Middle Eastern satellites outside the jurisdiction of European regulators, Van Cuilenburg said.

Al-Manar, which is run by Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, is one of several Arabic-language stations popular among Europe's millions of Muslims.

It was part of a package of different TV channel networks being offered to viewers by Globesat - a unit of France Telecom's Globecast - which leases space on an NSS satellite that transmits to Africa and the Middle East.

Last week, the Transatlantic Institute, a Brussels-based think-tank set up by the American Jewish Committee, said the French ban on al-Manar was a "wake-up call that the values of radical Islam" were being transmitted to Europe.
It said programs broadcast by Arab channels available in Europe via satellite projected views which were anti-Western, misogynist, threatening to Jews and which promoted violence.

But Lebanon's parliament has criticized the French ban on al-Manar, saying the ruling showed the reach of "Zionist pressure" on France.