Al Gore is No Run of the Mill Hypocrite

Now that we’re done chuckling over Al Gore’s breathtaking hypocrisy regarding the sale of his Current TV to Al Jazeera -- a news outfit owned by Qatar, a country that gets its money from the same oil that Al Gore tells us will destroy the planet – and now that we’ve stopped rolling our eyes over the fact that Gore publicly says the rich need to pay higher taxes then tries to avoid paying higher capital gains taxes by closing the deal by midnight December 31, let’s move on to the really ugly stuff.

You may recall that Gore wouldn’t even sit down with Glenn Beck who wanted to buy Current TV because Gore’s values were way out of whack with Beck’s.  Gore and his business partner Joel Hyatt, a Democratic fundraiser, wanted to sell to an organization that shared their journalistic values.

So they sold to Al Jazeera.  Okay, so what should we make of these inconvenient truths that we learned about in a Wall Street Journal column by Gordon Crovitz:

In 2008, Al Jazeera threw an on-air party for a Palestinian terrorist who had just been released from an Israeli prison.  In 1979 he kidnapped an Israeli family and killed their 4-year old daughter by smashing her head on some rocks.  They even gave him a cake.

In 2009, the host of Al Jazeera’s most popular Arabic language show says, on the air, that he wants Allah to count the numbers of every Jew … and kill them “down to the very last one.”

Are these the journalistic values that Al Gore holds so sacred?

Of course, Gore and Hyatt – and their supporters – will say there’s a difference between Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English.  And they’re right.  But what is the difference?  Does Al Jazeera save the vile bigotry for its Arab audiences because it knows that kind of venom will be received well in the Arab world?  Do they tone it down when they report in English because they know that cake parties for people who kill little girls and praise for people who want to kill every last Jew on the planet wouldn’t play so well in the more civilized world?

Can you imagine if George W. Bush, in retirement, sold some business to people who said they wanted to kill every last Muslim.  Or if Mitt Romney sold a business to someone who threw a party for the man who killed a 4-year old girl by smashing her head on a rock – because he hates Jews.

The so-called mainstream media that hyperventilated when Romney said he had “binders full of women” would rightly be outraged if Romney or Bush did anything even remotely as reprehensible as what Gore did.  They  wouldn’t let the story go away.

But with Al Gore they couldn't muster even a little outrage. By and large all they did was cover the business story -- Al Gore sells to Al Jazeera.  The Wall Street Journal did more and so did CNN and Fox.  But that’s about it.

The so-called mainstream media’s sin used to involve bias.  These days it involves out and out corruption.