FPM: Google's Terrorist News Source

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

On Tuesday, I posted about Google's decision to include al-Manar among its Google News sources. Today I have an article in FrontPage Magazine that explores the issue in more detail. An excerpt:

Consistent with its desire to see Israel destroyed, al-Manar openly supports acts of terror against Israelis. The programming frequently praises suicide bombers, and indeed, Jorisch writes that "station officials maintain that one of al-Manar�s aims is to promote suicide missions. The station also strives to ensure that the families of suicide bombers know that they will be compensated for their loss."

Nor is this advocacy of violence limited to Israelis: Many al-Manar guests portray all Jews as part of a sinister conspiracy to dominate the world. As Sheikh Taha al-Sabounji, the head mufti of northern Lebanon, said on al-Manar: "Judaism is a project against all humanity. It is about time the world understands this. Those who are fighting Israel are not just defending themselves; they are defending the whole world. They are protecting all the future generations of humanity. If they don't believe this, then they should read in the Jewish books what is written about Islam, Christianity, about Jesus and Muhammad. It's our job as Muslims to call upon the Christian world to rise up and become aware of what the Jews are doing. . . . There is no such thing as Zionism . . . . There is only Judaism." And [Hizballah secretary-general Hassan] Nasrallah stated on a different show, "If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."

It isn�t as though Google News lacks criteria for source selection. In fact, their exclusion of certain sources has been cause for controversy in the past. For example, Michelle Malkin noted in February 2005 that the exclusion of her blog and Little Green Footballs from Google News seemed hypocritical in light of Google News's inclusion of Democratic Underground and the truly malicious uruknet.info. (The Google team allegedly decided not to include Malkin's blog because it was "written and maintained by a single individual," while rejecting Little Green Footballs as purely a news aggregator.)

But most noteworthy among the sites turned down for inclusion in Google News is Alain's Newsletter, a rather obscure right-wing website. While the decision to exclude Alain's Newsletter from Google News is warranted for quality reasons alone, the explanation that the Google team provided is quite telling: "We've reviewed your site and cannot include it in Google News at this time. While we make an effort to provide a well-rounded perspective on controversial topics by including sites that represent contrasting points of view, we do not include sites that contain hate speech." But if Hizballah's al-Manar isn't hate speech, then surely nothing is.

Read the whole article here. If you agree with my take on this issue, I recommend that you send a polite but firm e-mail to source-suggestions@google.com suggesting that they remove al-Manar as a news source because it violates Google's own articulated policies for inclusion.

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