MIDDLE EAST: A virulently anti-Israeli Arab TV station is set to broadcast its message in Hebrew, Lynne O'Donnell reports from Beirut
As the Middle East dynamic changes, the battle is shifting from the streets to the airwaves. At least that's how it appears at the Beirut headquarters of Hizbullah television, Al-Manar TV, one of a growing number of Arab broadcasters with global reach where preparations are under way to launch a Hebrew-language service to beam into Israel, the sworn enemy of the station's overlords.
The men who will staff the new service learned Hebrew while serving time in Israeli prisons charged with supporting the resistance against Israel's occupation of Lebanon.
And the idea behind the channel, according to Al-Manar's news director, Hassan Fadallah, "is for an audience that doesn't speak Arabic to have access to another perspective, one they may not get from their home media."
The medium may be changing, but the message in Hebrew is likely to be as alternative as any the Israeli public has ever been subjected to, for Al-Manar is the broadcasting outlet for an organisation that has been branded a terrorist threat by Washington, maintains a substantial armed presence in Lebanon and is committed to the destruction of Israel.
In the not-so-distant past, for example, it has used Hebrew broadcasts to warn Israeli viewers "for your own safety . . . return to Europe and to the United States, from where you came." But it is also part of a burgeoning sector broadcasting throughout the Middle East and to immigrant communities worldwide.
As a result it and many of its counterparts stand accused of helping to contribute to a yawning comprehension gap between the Middle East and the West, by dressing up the language of hate as the hitherto unheeded voice of the man in the Arab street.
Avi Jorisch, a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, attributes much of the violence of the current Palestinian uprising to the impact of Arab-language television, particularly Al-Manar.
"Al-Manar intensified a concerted campaign of terrorist incitement against Israel, broadcasting impassioned pleas for 'martyrs' to massacre Jews," Mr Jorisch wrote in April.
"The scale and intensity of the intifada, which has claimed over 750 Israeli lives and 2,000 Palestinian lives, is partly an outgrowth of this incitement," he said.
Others, like Dr Patrick Sookhedo, the director of Britain's Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, worry that Arab-language media are contributing to the rise of Islamic radicalism among immigrants.
Writing recently in the Spectator, after two young British men travelled to Israel to become suicide bombers, he suggested the West could be losing "a crucial propaganda war" as the reach and emotive appeal of Arab satellite TV threatens to outstrip that of Western broadcasters.
For other commentators, however, the extremism of the new Middle Eastern broadcasters provides a welcome contrast to Western stations like CNN and the BBC that have dominated round-the-clock satellite news for decades.
"During the war in Iraq, the Arab who had English was the best-informed person in the world because of the range of perspectives available - as much as you can be informed by television, that is," said Samir Kassir, professor of political science at Beirut's St Joseph's University and a columnist with Al-Nahar newspaper.
"One positive effect of globalisation is that we have today Arab media that are active not only on Arab issues but on international issues," he said.
"It has a dichotomous impact - dictatorial governments don't like their people to have a point of view, but they are so much in control of their own societies that they can afford it. But this may be where, indirectly, radical Islam is gaining. A radical Islamist doesn't have to act within the confines of a political party, so he escapes government control in many instances," Dr Kassir said.
Prof Nabil Dajani, a social scientist and media specialist at the American University of Beirut, said the new broadcasters were redressing a Western bias in Middle Eastern media that until recently were controlled by governments that are generally pro-American.
"Before satellite, Arabs got their information through the Western media, or through local government media that spoke for the West," Prof Dajani said. "Arab governments don't speak for their people. It is ironic that Westerners talk about democracy, but if there are democratic governments in the Arab world, they will not be pro-American."
Arab-language broadcasting is most closely associated outside the Middle East with Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel which Prof Dajani said was "born in the womb of the BBC and grew up on the values of CNN."
Al-Jazeera made a name for itself after the September 11th, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon - which saw President Bush delineate the world as either enemies of terrorism or enemies of the United States - by showing Osama bin Laden exhorting Muslims to wage jihad, or holy war, against the West in general and the US in particular.
The network built on its reputation as a podium for anti-Americanism during the most recent war, when its broadcasts depicted scenes of Iraqi suffering caused by what it portrayed as unwelcome invaders and perpetrators of crimes against innocent Iraqi people.
The juxtaposition with the good-news approach of American broadcasters like CNN and Fox, which portrayed the US-led action against Saddam Hussein as a war of liberation, was stark, and the extent to which Western broadcasters often appeared as public relations arms of the British and American governments disturbing.
"Calling the Americans 'occupiers' was reflecting the Arab position, as well as the Western style of media operation," Prof Dajani said. "Most people who watch Al-Jazeera do not trust it, but they watch it because it covers the news and, like CNN, is attractive to watch."
Al-Jazeera appears to have set the pace for Arab satellite broadcasters, including Al-Manar, where Mr Fadallah also describes coverage as having coming from an "Arab perspective".
But given that the Middle East is divided into a large number of sovereign states ruled by governments, many of which are supported by the United States, that maintain tight control over domestic media, it is difficult to know what is meant by an "Arab perspective."
Al-Manar's executives readily admit that their true allegiance is not to objectivity or redressing any perceived imbalance, but to the ethos of Hizbullah, which means in-house censors checking all news bulletins, as well as advertisements and general programming, before broadcast.
While he was adamant that Al-Manar's rhetoric does not incite violence, the chief editor of the station's English and French-language news, Ibrahim Mousawi, proudly proclaimed of the American government: "They hate us."