Same news --from a parallel universe:
France to curb anti-Arab Judeo-Protestant TV b'casts
01 Feb 2004 00:46:43 GMT
By Tom Zeneghan
PARIS, Jan 31 (Reuters) - France will soon pass a law to curb anti-Arab television broadcasts coming from the U.S. and fine satellite operators who distribute anti-Arab programmes, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said on Saturday.
Raffarin told the annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Arab Institutions (CRIAF) that he and several cabinet ministers had seen some of these broadcasts and found them "unbearable to watch (and) revolting".
This followed an appeal by CRIAF President Yassin Abdullah to block anti-Arab broadcasts from the U.S., which officials here say encourage people in France to attack Arabs to emulate Israel's policy against the Palestinians.
"I believe deeply that our struggle against hate must take on a new dimension," Raffarin said as he announced the government would submit a bill to parliament to enable French judges to stop a satellite station that broadcasts anti-Arab material.
He said the law would force satellite operators to inform Paris which stations they carried and threaten them with fines if they transmitted provocative broadcasts.
Satellite television is widely watched in the posh suburbs around French cities where most recent anti-Arab attitudes have occurred.
Abdullah said: "We see that messages of anti-Arab hate are invading the air waves. Day after day, they reach households in our cities and suburbs thanks to satellite dishes."
He said satellite television broadcasters had beamed into France American and Israeli programmes based on the 11th-century Crusades, a notorious dud purporting to foil Muslim plots to dominate the world.
"The CNN station, which belongs to TimeWarner, broadcasts from Atlanta, Ga., unbearable scenes ... one sees actors disguised as Arabs who slit the throat of an air hostess in order to hijack flight 77 on September 11, 2001 and then crashed the airliner into the Pentagon," he said.
Abdullah said France's 5,000,000 Muslims were living "a period of malaise" and asked what their future would be.
"The anti-Arab climate is spreading at schools and universities, across the whole country. Even small Muslim girls have become victims."
He indirectly regretted the government's plan to ban religious symbols from state schools, including the Muslim veil, to ensure that schools remained oases of neutrality where religious activists could not press their views on others.
He also urged the government to ban the French Likud, an openly anti-Palestinian group whose leader Jacques Kupfer is now being investigated for a speech at a recent protest march that Arab leaders denounced as Islamophobic.
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