Text of report by French news agency AFP
Paris, 9 January 2009: The French regulatory authorities have ensured that the Hamas TV channel, Al-Aqsa TV, will not be broadcasting to Europe as was to be the case as of this week, AFP learnt on Friday [9 January] from corroborating sources.
Al-Aqsa said on Monday that it would start broadcasting programmes to Europe from Wednesday via a Eurobird European telecoms satellite operated by Eutelsat, a Paris-based company governed by French law.
Al-Aqsa had broadcast for less than 24 hours, a source close to the case said, when the signal was hastily interrupted after a warning from the Higher Audio-Visual Council (CSA).
Alerted by several European partners, the CSA told AFP it had sent a warning to Eutelsat in December in the belief that some Al-Aqsa TV programmes were likely to breach article 5 of the law prohibiting incitement to hatred or violence on the grounds of race, religion or nationality.
Once it received the CSA warning, Eutelsat told AFP, it sent a message to Noorsat, the company that distributes Al-Aqsa, asking it “to respect all international and national laws regarding channel content”.
Eutelsat stresses that there is no contract between Eutelsat and Al-Aqsa TV. “We have a contract with a distributing firm called Noorsat based in Bahrain. We learnt that Al-Aqsa TV was being carried on one of our satellites broadcasting to Europe on capacity that had been temporarily allocated to Noorsat for technical documentation at the start of the week,” Eutelsat explained.
In a statement published on Friday, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said for its part that it had sent a letter to CSA President Michel Boyan, voicing its concern about Al-Aqsa TV’s announcement that it was going to broadcast to Europe.
“The natural audience for Al-Aqsa TV programmes will be young Arab speakers in Europe and the West who will thereby be exposed to calls from jihadis to attack their Jewish neighbours and reject the European values of secularism, multiculturalism and tolerance,” the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said.
In May 2005, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, ordered an end to broadcasts of Al-Manar, the mouthpiece of Lebanon’s Shi’i Hezbollah, via Eutelsat’s Hotbird operator because of the “anti-Semitic connotations” of its programmes.
(Source: AFP news agency, Paris, in French 1505 gmt 9 Jan 09 via BBC Monitoring)
