As many of you know by now, the powerful pan-Arab media
broadcaster Al Jazeera has just bought a US cable TV channel,
Current TV. Based in and owned by the Arab monarchy of Qatar, Al
Jazeera paid half a billion dollars for a failed TV channel in
order to get the unfettered US base it has been seeking for
years, “a pathway into American living rooms,” as the New York
Times put it.  Qatar is supportive of Hamas and Hezbollah, but
maintains secretive contacts with Israel, which used to have a
trade office there. It straddles the fence, with regard to
relations with Israel and other Arab countries and tribes, from
a purely opportunistic basis. (I’ll leave it to the reader to
ponder the irony and meaning of Al Gore owning 20% of Current TV
when it was sold to Al Jazeera.)  The representatives of the two
parties to the deal have been flacking Al Jazeera as not the
terrorist TV outlet that people used to think of, but as a
legitimate worldwide news organization. This it may be ― as all
such organizations now are bia