Never could have seen this coming…
It’s pretty hard to miss the fact that Al Jazeera America is in roll-out mode for their new television news network. They are marketing nearly everywhere. Ads on the web (including this site, in fact), billboards, taxi cab signs, they’re even sponsoring National Public Radio. The network purchased Al Gore’s “Current TV” network and, from everything that I have seen, they promise to be a serious contender. I have already appeared on one of their programs and found the content and analysis to be above average.
Predictably, the American bigots have emerged from the mud under the stones they live beneath to call it “Jihad TV” and “Terror TV”. Pamela Geller, noted bigot and Islamophobe compares the billboards that Al Jazeera America has up to Nazi propaganda based on the fact that they use human faces on them. I’m not kidding.
The notorious group of bigots known as the Florida Family Association bragged in advance about hiring a plan to fly a banner over the Green Bay vs. Cincinnati game last Sunday that read “PROCTER & GAMBLE SPONSORS JIHAD TV”, attacking P&G for their sponsorship of the network. If you go to their homepage, they have a long list of sponsors. Note that this is the same group that got Home Depot and others to quit advertising on the All-American Muslim television show on The Learning Channel and eventually get the program dropped from the network completely.
The irony of Pamela Geller’s claims of Al Jazeera America using Nazi tactics (which are laughably and absurdly ridiculous) is that this sort of over-the-top bigotry is much closer to the mindset of German Nazis than anything Al Jazeera has ever done. The swastikas that Geller shows on her blog post represent a white domination ethic that is much closer to her home than Al Jazeera’s. And, while the Florida Family Association claims to be promoting “biblical views”, their behavior truly makes you question if they have ever actually read the words of Jesus Christ. From my perspective, they betray everything about his message of loving others and treating them with dignity and respect.
As Margaret Cho puts it: “I have just become so intolerant of intolerance.”
Word.
