Al Jazeera hands Al Gore the second-chakra-releasing sum of $100 million.

Wow! Here's this failed, low-rated cable TV project of Al's. What is Al Jazeera buying? It's going to close down Current TV and only seems to want access to the American TVs that receive Current TV, if the people watching those TVs wanted to watch Current TV, which they obviously don't. There are many, many more spots on the cable TV dial, so why buy Gore's channel? Al Jazeera paid $500 million total (Gore's share is 20%). That seems like a crazy amount of money just to get onto cable TV. The idea is — as the NYT puts it — "to convince Americans that it is a legitimate news organization, not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more sinister."

How hard is it to take over an existing slot in cable TV?

News channels financed by Britain, China and Russia are especially hungry for American cable deals. To date, the BBC has had the most success; its BBC World News channel is now available in about 25 million homes thanks to a deal struck last month with Time Warner Cable.

But the takeover of Current brings Al Jazeera to the front of the line. 

But did BBC or those other channels ever try to purchase an existing channel's access? Would $500 million be the going rate? Did Al Jazeera negotiate only with Gore's channel or did they try to get a better deal from some other channel with pathetically low ratings?

In recent weeks, Mr. Gore personally lobbied the distributors that carry Current on the importance of Al Jazeera, according to people briefed on the talks who were not authorized to speak publicly.

So... Al Jazeera was buying the former Vice President's advocacy.

Distributors can sometimes wiggle out of their carriage deals when channels change hands. 

How long is that carriage deal? $500 million worth of long? And it's not even guaranteed? It could turn into nothing?!

Most [distributors] consented to the sale, but Time Warner Cable did not...

Time Warner Cable had previously warned that it might drop Current because of its low ratings. It took advantage of a change-in-ownership clause and said in a terse statement Wednesday night, “We are removing the service as quickly as possible.”

So Time Warner — which serves 12 million of those 40 million homes — is already out. Did Al Jazeera get hoodwinked by the Oscar-and-Nobel-Prize-winning former Veep? He did what he could for them, "personally lobb[ying] the distributors that carry Current on the importance of Al Jazeera." How much more can you buy in this world? You got Al!

Hey, I just thought up a slogan Al Jazeera can use as it promotes itself to the American people: You Can Call Us Al.

"They should allow us to demolish the American embassy because they have blasphemed against our holy Prophet."

"They" = the police in Islamabad, Pakistan. The line is spoken by a student protester, who also says:

"Our policemen are not any better than the Americans because they are trying to stop us. They are in the same league as them, they are heretics like them...

"The police are also becoming an accomplice of blasphemers.... "

According to an al Jazeera article linked by Drudge (who uses the headline "US Embassy in Pakistan Under Seige"). More from al Jazeera:

In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, over two hundred protesters set fire to an effigy of Barack Obama, the US president.

"We will make known it by burning the effigy of Obama and his allies that a blasphemer deserves to be burnt to death," said Maulana Mehmood ul Hassan Ashraf, secretary general of Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam.

"Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge..."

"... all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

Wrote Gore Vidal, who reached the end of his enough yesterday. He was 86.

Here's a late interview (with al Jazeera), where he makes himself cry — at 2:23 — saying, about Americans — "They're the greatest nation in the world in the world." And then "Everybody says that, that's why they keep shooting us.... That's jealousy." And then recovers and says "This is irony, you know."



ADDED: Here he is calling William F. Buckley a "crypto Nazi"... and also:

Consider his "incorrigible" mother, a sometime actress who "failed a Paramount screen test because of the prominence of her manly mustache." Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a mad Sapphic crush on Amelia Earhart and was "constantly proposing" that they fly around the country, "with Amelia at the controls"?....

Asked to define commercialism, Vidal remarks, "It's the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all." Bobby Kennedy had "aggressive non-charm." The '60s: "a decade stolen from those of us who were living in it." And he doesn't turn away from the wit of others. Like Tennessee Williams, who stares at Jack Kennedy and mutters, "That boy has a nice ass."

What's the story with Amelia Earhart? Vidal's Wikipedia page says: "according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life."

Al-Jazeera chooses not to air video of the Toulouse shootings.

BBC reports:

[Mohamed] Merah filmed himself killing seven people, including Jewish children and unarmed soldiers, before he was shot dead after a 32-hour siege last week....

Someone mailed al Jazeera a USB memory stick with edited footage and a note claiming the attacks were committed in the name of al Quaeda. Since the postmark shows it was sent after Merah was under siege and from outside of Toulouse, it indicates that Merah had at least one accomplice. Whoever prepared the video combined footage of all 7 shootings with music and Islamic verse.

Al-Jazeera explained its policy:

"Given its contents, we immediately passed the video on to the French police as we were duty-bound to do and they are conducting their investigation. In accordance with al-Jazeera's code of ethics, given the video does not add any information that is not already in the public domain, its news channels will not be broadcasting any of its contents."

..."You hear the voice of the person who carried out the killings," [al-Jazeera Paris bureau chief Zied] Tarrouche told French channel BFM TV. "You also hear the victims' cries. My feelings are those of any human being who sees horrible things."

Mr Tarrouche said he had to weigh up the "risks and the consequences" of airing the video, but he added: "We are not a sensational network."

I hope that is indeed their policy. I suspect that there are also fears of legal consequences. This is al-Jazeera in France, where presumably there is law enforcement against those who are in a conspiracy with murder and who serve as accomplices after the fact.

"Your day will come, vile one. As long as we live, you won't be safe, Jazeera."

Bin Laden fans suddenly annoyed by bad press.

"Reform is alive and well within Islam, but it will only happen by those from within Islam..."

Last week, we took interest in Wafa Sultan, the Syrian-born woman who has strong words for Muslims. Today, the LA Times has this:

[T]he flurry of interest among non-Muslims contrasts oddly with the near silence among Muslims themselves, many of whom say she is a largely unknown figure not causing any particular stir.

"I haven't come across any indication that people are discussing her," said Abdulaziz Sachedina, a University of Virginia Islamic studies professor who was blacklisted eight years ago by Iraqi Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his reformist ideas that women were equal to men and all Abrahamic faiths were equally respectable. "Cyberspace is almost silent."

He said he first heard of her a few weeks ago, when the American Jewish Congress sent him an e-mail with a link to her Al Jazeera interview, which was translated from Arabic into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute. Sachedina said he agreed with some of her remarks, including her criticism that too many Muslim rulers fail to protect human rights. But he objected to what he called her "vilification" of the entire tradition.

Other Muslims questioned why groups outside the faith were so avidly promoting a non-Muslim to criticize Islam, a practice that has occurred before and is a sore spot in the Islamic community, particularly since many respected Muslims also advocate change.

"Reform is alive and well within Islam, but it will only happen by those from within Islam and not those who hate Islam," said Hussam Ayloush, who heads the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Some Muslims, however, have embraced at least part of Sultan's message. Ani Zonneveld of the Progressive Muslim Union in Los Angeles, who has been fighting to gain wider acceptance of female musicians in Islam, said she put the link to Sultan's Al Jazeera interview on her personal website, under the title "Wafa Sultan Rocks!" But Zonneveld said Sultan's critiques were not new. Plenty of practicing Muslims, including Zonneveld, have been outspoken in criticizing the way some Muslims interpret their tradition's teachings on women, human rights and interfaith relations, she said.

The very act of non-Muslims taking interest in someone like Sultan seems to undermine the effectiveness of her critique. We are told "Reform is alive and well within Islam." Is it good that we haven't heard much about it, in that our exclusion from the debate makes it more effective?

UPDATE: Here's an article about Sultan in the Israeli National News, which puts special emphasis on her positive attitude toward Jews:

Dr. Sultan explained that during her upbringing in Syria she was raised to hate Jews:

“Up to the very first day that I immigrated to America, I used to believe that Jewish people were not human creatures, that they had different features, different voices than the human race. Unfortunately this is the way I was raised."

She said that it was only through meeting and interacting with Jews on a personal basis that her views began to shift: “I have discovered how wrong we were. The more I work with them the more I find out we are all human beings. The first experience I had in the medical field was with a Jewish doctor. We were four Muslim women in his program, and he treated us very well. My experience is great, so I have to break this taboo and tell my people the truth."

During her Al-Jazeera debate, Dr. Sultan praised the high moral standard of the Jewish people, demonstrated by their restrained and resilient response to suffering....

In contrast, Dr. Sultan points to the murderous tendencies of Islam....

Instead of perpetuating the cycle of hate and bloodshed, Dr. Sultan advocates creating connection and communication between Arabs and Jews to foster tolerance and compassion. “There is a saying ‘Get to know your enemy in order to know how to fight him.’ Far from this saying I would say, ‘Get to know your enemy in order to befriend him.’ Once you know how much suffering your enemy is going through, you will be more compassionate and eventually more tolerant. Get people on both sides to know each other, to communicate with each other,” Wafa implored.

Not necessarily not dead.

Al-Jazeera withdraws some reassurance about the continuing existence of Osama bin Laden.

"Voting, Not Violence, Is the Big Story on Arab TV."

That's the headline -- at least for now -- on this NYT report:

After close to two years of providing up-to-the-minute images of explosions and mayhem, and despite months of predictions of a bloodbath on election day, some news directors said they found the decision surprisingly easy to make. The violence simply was not the story this morning; the voting was.

Overwhelmingly, Arab channels and newspapers greeted the elections as a critical event with major implications for the region, and many put significant resources into reporting on the vote, providing blanket coverage throughout the country that started about a week ago. Newspapers kept wide swaths of their pages open, and the satellite channels dedicated most of the day to coverage of the polls.

Often criticized for glorifying Iraq's violence if not inciting it, Arab news channels appeared to take particular care in their election day reporting. For many channels, the elections were treated on a par with the invasion itself, on which the major channels helped build their names.

Far from the almost nightly barrage of blood and tears, Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, the kings of Arab news, barely showed the aftermath of the suicide bombings that occurred in the country.

Instead, the channels opted to report on the attacks in news tickers, and as part of the hourly news broadcasts, keeping their focus on coverage and analysis of the elections themselves. And the broadcasters spared no expense to provide an entire day of coverage from northern to southern Iraq.

Beautiful! Will this not greatly increase the effect of the successful election throughout the region? Hope has its own momentum, and these broadcasters, who don't want to be left behind, have become part of the force for democracy.

"The Opposite Direction."

Faisal al-Kasim talks about his Al Jazeera talk show, "The Opposite Direction," in the November issue of The Atlantic.

His goal? "To change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way."

Al-Kasim's first show, he says, "dissected" the Gulf Cooperation Council (the league of oil-rich monarchies and emirates that are responsible for some of the most closed regimes in the Middle East) "like a corpse," and since then The Opposite Direction has addressed an array of previously unmentionable questions in the Arab world, in terms ranging from the contrarian to the outlandish. Is Arab unity an unattainable myth? When was life better, under colonial or Arab rule? ("Eighty-six percent of our viewers who called in said they'd rather be re-colonized," al-Kasim told me. "The Algerians would welcome Chirac, if he decided to return.") Was King Hassan II of Morocco an agent of the Mossad? Should polygamy have a place in the modern Arab world?

On one show, viewers were asked "Are Arab regimes refraining from condemning the abuse in Abu Ghraib because they're committing far worse atrocities in their own prisons?" 84% of the viewers said yes. A guest on that show, Khaled Chouket, director of the Center for the Support of Democracy in the Arab World, spoke of:

"standard daily practices" in all Arab prisons, which he depicted as "man-made hells" where prisoners hang by their ankles and are skinned alive; where savage dogs "rip chunks of living flesh from inmates' bodies"; where torturers tear out their subjects' fingernails and hair, administer electric shocks, hack off body parts, deprive prisoners of food and sleep, and submerge them in dungeons filled with icy water.

Terrific article.