Al-Manar

Development

Al-Manar was one of fifty unlicensed Lebanese television stations that went unregulated until Lebanon promulgated a broadcasting law in 1991 and enforced it five years later. Al-Manar later received a license for satellite transmission just in time to broadcast the Israeli withdrawal from most of the South on May 24, 2000, a withdrawal it [Page 75]attributed to its own resistance and to the support it received from the Lebanese people. The prolonged victory celebrations of a channel that calls itself the “channel of resistance” (qanat al-muqawama) allowed Arab viewers to compare the exploits of a nongovernment actor to the inactivity of Arab governments that were unable to liberate their territories from Israel through peaceful means.

Al-Manar, like other advocacy media, does not claim neutrality but bills itself as partisan to the cause of its constituents: initially, the disadvan-taged and poor Shi'ia of the South and the Beka'a valley in Lebanon; later expanded to include the larger Arab and Islamic worlds. The channel provided extensive coverage of the second Intifada (Uprising against Israel) of 2000 in the occupied Palestinian territories, and later, the war in Iraq. Hizbullah, through its media, took on the mantle of the protector of Palestinians, a cause Marc Lynch says tends “to produce an unchallenged consensus unifying different sectors of Arab opinion.” The channel “communicates the idea that Israel is hegemonic in the region, tightly connected to the United States, and that Israel and the United States want a weakened Lebanon and Syria, unable to resist Israel's actions. Iraq was targeted to fragment the country, not make it sovereign” (Baylouny 2006). Regarding U.S. positions on Lebanon, one Al-Manar spot compares how the United States deals with UN Resolution 1559 (calling for Syria to withdraw from Lebanon), by showing a menacing man ready to strike with a stick he is holding. “This is followed by another scene, with the words ‘and this is how the United States treats UN resolutions regarding Israel.' The screen shows a man picking the petals of a daisy” and stating: “it applies, it does not apply, it applies, and so on” (Baylouny 2006).

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