US Hypocrisy On Terrorist Media

It is rumored that Israel may soon ban Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned media company.

Qatar is Hamas’s principle backer (nearly $2 billion), and the oil rich kingdom has long used its state-owned Al Jazeera and AJ+ media platforms to broadcast the Palestinian political-terrorist group’s propaganda. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X/Twitter on April 1 that “the terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activities.”

At a press conference in Washington, D.C. later the same day, a journalist asked White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre about the potential Israeli ban. She said that it is “concerning,” and that “the United States supports the critically important work journalists around the world do.”

*White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre on April 1, 2024 discussing Israel’s possible ban of Al Jazeera*

Yet the United States itself bans terrorist-supporting media.

In December 2004, the United States banned Al Manar, the satellite station run by the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which is backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, much like Hamas. In June 2021, the U.S. blocked and/or seized the websites of several dozen Iranian sites for spreading “disinformation.”

More recently, the U.S. was influential in getting social media sites Facebook and Instagram to shut down Hamas’s postings. Right now, the U.S. government is trying to ban the entire social media platform of Tik Tok which is indirectly owned by the Chinese government due to security concerns, even though the country is not a designated terrorist entity.

Qatar is one of the richest countries in the world and uses its vast fossil fuel deposits to fund the murderous jihadists of Hamas, as well as radical jihadist professors and student groups at American universities. Despite knowing this, the Biden Administration offered a hypocritical defense of Al Jazeera.

The U.S. government should not only reverse the White House press secretary’s remarks about Israel’s potential actions against Al Jazeera, but should support the effort and consider doing the sames in the U.S. as well.