Robert Satloff's Arabic Comedy Hour on Hurra TV

Talal Chatila, a brilliant medical doctor/chief of division at a major medical center in the US sent me this (I cite with his permission): "Saltof does not need to know Arabic: his audience is internal in the US, not external in the Arab world. He peddles his schtick in DC to those who want to legitimate a predator, plundering state at home and abroad. The Arabic show is an empty form that serves the latter purpose. By working in Al Hurra, he can buttress his claim at home in the US that he is an expert on the natives. The same logic applies to Al Hurra itself. It satisfies an American domestic need, not an international one. It is not meant to subjugate the colonials, but to legitimate the act of aggression back at home (the military intervention is to reform the natives of the Arab and Islamic world, as was said about the Iraq war by many American pundits including Thomas Friedman. Al Hurra would then be a tangible cultural result of that intervention that vindicates the original claim. How well it does carry out its "reforming" act is otherwise irrelevant. PS: remember Bernie Kerik, the NYPD police commissioner and Gulianni corny who went to Iraq for few months to train the Iraqi police (he became interim minister of the interior in Iraq!), then came back, was nominated as secretary of homeland security before he was exposed as a fraud? This shallow opportunist who only cared to promote himself and his career is the model for the 21st century American colonial administrator (as compared say to the erudition and scholarship of colonial agents like the Burton of the British empire). Saltof and his associates are at heart the Bernie Keriks of the American Middle Eastern specialist cast."