Gore, Al Jazeera, And American Liberalism

It’s hard to calculate the market value of one’s moral principles, the price so compelling one trades purposeful conviction for cold, hard cash. For Al Gore, however, clarity comes easy: that number is $100 million.

Gore sold his languishing network Current TV to Al Jazeera for that stupefying number. For those not familiar with the Qatar based news station, there are reasons to be squeamish at the thought of a former vice president of the United States profiting from, and introducing American viewers to, an enthusiastic advocate of tyranny and terrorism.

In a cheerful spirit of charity, let us aside, only for a moment, the nauseating hypocrisy of Gore’s transaction. Ou nation’s most visible environmentalist just brokered a financial deal with a nation whose entire economy is supported by the drilling and selling of oil. (How many carbon credits must Gore buy now to atone for his ecological sins?).

Let us also excuse the fact that one of our most stridently liberal class warfare troopers structured the deal to avoid the impact of Obama’s new tax hikes. Apparently, pretending to invent the internet indemnifies Gore for life from paying his “fair share”.

But even more disturbingly, Al Jazeera has earned a reputation for its reprobative illiberalism. First, the network is state run and so premised on a dismissive rejection of free speech and an independent press. It has frankly intimidated dissent and manipulates the news to serve despotic state ends.

It has also provided a hospitable platform to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and, predictably, is an inexhaustible fount of anti-Israeli and anti-American ire. It’s not clear that there are enough self-loathing Americans living in the United States to make it’s entry into the market worthwhile but Gore is willing to test the waters.

Moreover, it is difficult to imagine a news network more intestinally hostile to the purported premises of contemporary liberalism. Al Jazeera is a reliable mouthpiece for Qatar’s condescending misogyny, its antiquated racial prejudice, its violent hatred of homosexuals, and all around contempt for human rights. Its perspective is typified by a pervasive disgust for modernity itself, ironically dispensed by satellite.

Gore allegedly waved off overtures from Glen Beck to purchase Current Tv on the grounds that he was too politically radical. It is, at the very least, discomfiting that Gore thinks mainstream American conservatism, however heavy handedly presented, is more radical than Al Jazeera’s frothing brew of theological fundamentalism and political fascism.

Of course, in a free country the people themselves are the final arbiters of what speech is and isn’t acceptable. Al Jazeera’s success or failure will be determined in the open market place of ideas, ironic since they reject as a matter of principle such unregulated expression. The real issue here is what this says about the disfigured state of American liberalism, that it finds more common ground between supporters of terrorism than their own counterparts across the political aisle.

One way to look at this is in terms of the Left’s greater comfort with propaganda, given their own advocacy of the state’s intrusive superintendence of political speech. There is a theoretical continuum that runs from campaign finance laws that essentially ration free speech, various iterations of the “fairness doctrine”, etc and the notion that free speech is a special privilege rather than an infrangible right.

Also, liberals in America have a tendency to interpret every facet of human life as irreducibly political and so legitimately subject to government regulation. This adversarial deportment inclines them to make friends with the enemies of their enemies, and excuse their failings however grotesque. Al Jazeera hates American conservatives and Israel. I’ll let the reader conclude the syllogism on their own.

There has been much ado about our currently broken system of government and the legislative inertia that ensues from this dysfunction. Our problem of polarization, though, might have something to do with the left’s tendency to transform their political opponents into mortal enemies, to interpret dissent as sedition. This divisiveness, a kind of moral myopia, can produce the strangest bedfellows. Tune in to Al Jazeera US to see what I mean.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Times.

Tags: al jazeera, american liberalism, current tv, daily witness, gore

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