Indonesia: Hezbollah-owned TV begins broadcasts

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/CultureAndMedia/?id=1.0.2054861661

Indonesia: Hezbollah-owned TV begins broadcasts

Jakarta, 9 April (AKI) - The Hezbollah-owned Lebanese television channel Al Manar has begun broadcasts in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Sunni Muslim population.

The transmissions are broadcast via the Palapa C2 satellite owned by the Indonesia Telkom company, in which the Indonesian government holds a majority shareholding, BBC Monitoring reported. It quoted information published by Lyngsat Satellite website.

Al Manar, Arabic for "The Beacon", has been broadcasting from Beirut since 1991. The self-proclaimed "Station of the Resistance" is a key player in what Hezbollah – a Shia Muslim militia organisation - calls its "psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy’.

It is also considered an integral part of Hezbollah's plan to spread its message to the entire Arab world.

According to Al Manar's news director, Hassan Fadlallah, Al Manar does not aim to be neutral in its broadcasting.

"Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us," Fadlallah said, quoted in a 2007 article in The New Yorker magazine.

Al Manar was designated a 'terrorist entity', and banned by the United States in December 2004.

It has also been banned by France and Spain, and according to several reports it has also runs into some service and licence problems abroad, making it unavailable in the Netherlands, South America, Canada and Australia.

In Southeast Asia, Al Manar TV launched on the Thai Shin Corporation's Thaicom satellite in January 2008, but transmissions were halted after a few days when the channel's links to Hezbollah were revealed.
_________________
"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't." -General George S. Patton

Psalm 82-8: Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You inherit all the nations.