Investors.com / IBD Editorials | September 15, 2011

Muslim Brotherhood Channel

Islamofacism: Quick: What would be the biggest casualty of a merger between the Saudis and two of the West's most influential media moguls? Answer: the truth.


Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal will launch a pro-Islamist 24-hour news
network even more radical than Al-Jazeera.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal announced this week he will launch a pro-Islamist 24-hour news network with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's privately held news service.

The deal has Bloomberg News providing five hours of financial and economic news programming throughout the day on the new "Alarab" channel, which the prince says will be "right of Al-Jazeera" -  that is, even more radical. It will no doubt promote Alwaleed's notoriously anti-Israel agenda.

After 9/11, he gave a $10 million gift to New Yorkers, but with a string attached: They had to acknowledge our Mideast policies brought on the attacks. Mayor Giuliani famously told the prince to go pound sand.

Gotham's current mayor, on the other hand, has no qualms about doing business with the creepy billionaire. They seem to see eye-to-eye on many issues.

Take the Ground Zero mosque. Bloomberg gave his blessing to the outrage. In fact, to the shock of many, the mayor actually promoted its construction. His support is said to have been colored by Alwaleed, who happens to be one of the project's biggest foreign boosters.

More troubling is Alwaleed's obsession with institutionalizing Shariah finance in the West - and Bloomberg's receptiveness to the idea. Islamic banking rejects the cornerstone of Western finance: credit and interest rates. It also requires a share of profits go to Islamic charities, which often funnel money to terrorism.

With a $20 million endowment, Alwaleed has set up a Shariah law and finance section at Harvard University. Will Bloomberg help promote Shariah finance? He already is. Bloomberg LP has opened a regional hub in Dubai with an "Islamic finance portal."

"Since the meltdown of the Western capitalist system, there has been an increasingly large focus on the virtues of Islamic finance," Bloomberg's Mideast chief Max Linnington told "The National" newspaper of Dubai. "So by Bloomberg being here, we are in the process of building out an Islamic finance product."

Heading Alwaleed's TV network is a Saudi flack named Jamal Khashoggi, cousin of the Saudi arms dealer of Iran-Contra fame. In an Arab interview, Khashoggi revealed he grew up with Osama bin Laden in the radical Muslim Brotherhood, whose credo is "Jihad is our way; death in the cause of Allah our highest ambition."

He says he spent time with bin Laden in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and later in Sudan. "I met Osama in Jeddah" in 1987, Khashoggi said. "And ever since, I developed a close relationship with him." Don't worry, he says he no longer believes in forcing a caliphate like bin Laden. "Now, I believe this is the work of God."

Khashoggi says he wants to model the 24-hour Arab channel on Fox News, which his boss has a stake in. Alwaleed has sunk more than $600 million in Fox parent News Corp. and is now the biggest shareholder outside the Rupert Murdoch family.

Murdoch and Alwaleed operate a media venture called Rotana. Zawya Dow Jones News Service, which covers Mideast markets, grew out of the deal. Khashoggi denies Murdoch is a partner in the new Alarab venture. But Zawya Dow Jones itself reported last year that Alwaleed would launch "the news channel in partnership with the Fox Network."

One thing is certain: Bloomberg and Murdoch are groveling for Arab petrodollars. And that kind of backing won't come without a price.

Original article here.