Tel-Chai Nation

Diana West's written about how, in contrast to several other American news networks that reported the case of Saudi blogger/tweeter Hamza Kashgari, who could face death in the House of Saud for insulting Muhammed, FOX kept completely quiet about it, possibly due to al-Waleed bin Talal's influence:

Have you heard about the 23-year-old Saudi journalist who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Muhammad? It went something like this: He loved Muhammad, he hated Muhammad, he couldn't understand Muhammad, he wasn't going to pray for Muhammad. If this isn't exactly a disquisition on faith and doubt a la "The Brothers Karamazov," remember, we're just talking Twitter.

If you haven't heard of this young man, whose name is Hamza Kashgari, it could be because you're watching too much Fox News. As of this writing, almost a week after the Kashgari story broke, I haven't found a single story about it at the Fox News website. (You try.) Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN have all reported the Kashgari story, clueing in their viewers on how far totalitarian Islam, Saudi style, will go to exert its control over the human spirit. But not Fox.

Say -- you don't suppose the fact that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns the second-largest block of stock (7 percent) in News Corp., Fox News' parent company, not to mention a new $300 million stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent), has anything to do with Fox's silence on this Saudi black eye of a story? After all, it was Saudi dictator King Abdullah -- Alwaleed's uncle -- whom press accounts credit with ordering the tweeting journalist's hot pursuit and imprisonment. And it is Saudi Arabia's adherence to Islamic limits on free speech that is driving Kashgari's ordeal.

Maybe it has become institutional Fox thinking to let such news slide for fear of offending the Saudi prince -- or for fear of risking the kind of exposure that might remind viewers of Fox's connections to Saudi regime interests via Alwaleed.

Like her, I too find FOX's willingness to let such an atrocious man have any kind of influence over their network offensive, to say nothing of any inability by other conservatives to decry their dhimmitude. Heck, the same goes for Twitter, even if I don't care much for their type of platform. She's quite right, this is a most atrocious form of silence on a grave issue, and conservatives who fail to protest FOX's associations with bin Talal are not helping one bit by not speaking out, presumably because the network is "all they've got". It's not, and if they don't speak out, eventually, it can end up with FOX turning 360 completely.

Labels: communications, dhimmitude, House of Saud, islam, msm foulness, United States