According to Wikipedia entry for Al-Manar
Al Manar (المنار; Arabic for Beacon) is the television station of the controversial Lebanese organization Hezbollah. Al-Manar was categorized as a terrorist organization by Executive Order 13224.
Dated March 23, 2006 we see this U.S. Treasury press release
The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated pursuant to Executive Order 13224 al Manar, a satellite television operation owned or controlled by the Iran-funded Hizballah terrorist network.
There is now agitation in some parts of the blogosphere to have Google news stop its indexing of the online news feeds of al Manar.
An item on the right wing blog Little Green Footballs points to a posting on another right wing blog called the counterterrorism blog that is leading the charge to demand that pursuant to Executive Order 13224 Google should stop "doing business" with this terrorist group by indexing its English language web news page.
The proof that this is still being done can be found by going to http://news.google.com/..., entering 'al Manar' in the box titled "Return only articles from the news source named" and then entering some middle eastern-related search term like Syria, Israel, or Iran. This will restrict that search to the English section of Arabic language al Manar web page.
Right now the top story in the English version of al Manar is a story about a plot in Lebanon to assassinate the General Secretary of Hezbollah which quotes a party figure as saying that the secretary is a target of those wanting to create discord in the Arab and Islamic world and reminds its readers that in 1992 Israel assassinated the prior General Secretary along with his wife and son.
If you go to the Arab language version of al Manar you don't need to be an Arabist to get the drift of the top story which features this remarkable image
and which obviously relates to the Iranian president's announcement of Iran's new breakthrough in the "peaceful" use of nuclear energy.
So the question is: in a post 9/11 world can we permit an American corporation to give us access to this sort of information? Freedom speech is wonderful, but is it taking it too far for us to have access to news that takes such contrarian views of the world?
Perhaps we in the English speaking world would all sleep more soundly tonight if we did not know that many people in Lebanon now believe Israel may be plotting to kill the leader of one of its major political parties. Perhaps we would find it easer think about Iran's announcement if we did not understand the sort of "peace" spin that its leaders are putting on it.
Is it time for blogosphere to rise up and denounce all those who "do business" with terrorists by reading and talking about the views that they put on the web? What position should the more progressive wing of the blogosphere take on this? Or is this just a mousetrap issue designed by the right to make it easy to paint the left as "soft on terror"?