France Takes Hamas TV Off The Air In Europe

Eutelsat halts broadcast of Noorsat to Europe less than 24 hours after it was added to satellite network.

 
PARIS - The Palestinian group 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 via the French firm Eutelsat's satellites.

Al-Aqsa is Hamas' official mouthpiece, and its critics say that it has a show in which a man-sized pink rabbit named Assud urged children to embrace martyrdom and threatened to eat Jews (‘Jews’ is the name Israeli soldiers had used to identify themselves when communicating with Palestinian refugees, many of whom still in Gaza).

Alerted by industry sources, the French broadcasting regulator CSA 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 anti-Semitism," the Simon Wiesenthal Centre claimed in a letter to French regulators.

The Jewish human rights organisation alleged Al-Aqsa had last week carried a speech by Hamas official Mahmud al-Zahrar "who claimed that the Israeli operation in Gaza justifies Muslims murdering Jewish children worldwide."

The group claimed 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."

Critics say pro-Israel groups, which are influential in Europe, often exaggerate or even outright lie about the nature of Hamas discourse.