A press release from the Philadelphia chapter of Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI):
CONTACT: Moshe Phillips, Director of Public Relations, info@phillyafsi.com
IN WAKE OF BEHEADING GROUP CALLS ON VERIZON TO DROP ISLAMIC TV NETWORK
(PHILADELPHIA, PA) The Philadelphia chapter Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) has called on Verizon to discontinue broadcasting a radical Islamic TV network in the U.S. immediately.
“Last week’s tragic beheading of Aasiya Zubair Hassan by her estranged husband Muzzammil Hassan calls into question Verizon’s vetting of Bridges TV. Muzzammil Hassan founded the pro-Islamic Bridges TV propaganda network in 2004 and Verizon carries it on their Fiber-Optic Television nationwide,” explains Hillel Bluestein, chairman of the Philadelphia chapter of AFSI.
“AFSI has been monitoring Bridges TV since 2007 and it is nothing more than a sanitized, American adjusted, Islamists’ broadcast created as a propaganda effort to portray American Muslims as peace-loving citizens while depicting U.S. policy in the Middle East as dangerous and terroristic,” states Bluestein. “Verizon and the FCC must completely re-evaluate Bridges TV and take appropriate and immediate measures to remove it from the airwaves.”
AFSI also calls on the FCC to look into the financing of Bridges TV and investigate what laws may have been broken in the foreign financing behind this extremist propaganda effort. AFSI requests clarification as to whether U.S. taxpayers unknowingly financed Bridges TV through the NPR/PBS linked Democracy Now! program that has long aired on Bridges TV. Bluestein insists that the “knee-jerk” reaction that must have been involved in airing this Islamic propaganda may have overlooked the way Bridges TV was financed. “It is time we end the defensive posture most broadcasters have assumed in regard to information on Islam and Muslims,” states Bluestein. “We cannot bend over backward in fear of offending Islamic groups in America especially when the material they offer is truly dangerous to our nation’s interests.”…