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  • Libyan Government

    If we win the war for the rebels I'm sure the video of her being stoned will turn up on you-tube.

    Fiercely pro-Gadhafi, Libya TV host leaps to fame

    Fiercely pro-Gadhafi, Libya TV host leaps to fame - Business - U.S. business - Media biz - msnbc.com
    In this frame grab used with permission from Al Arabiya Television released on Wednesday, April 6, 2011, Libyan State T.V. presenter Hala Misrati is seen during an undated broadcast. Hala Misrati once wrote romance tales about lost love. Now she's the ferocious face of Libya's regime, a star talk-show host on state TV lashing out daily against Moammar Gadhafi's enemies. (AP Photo/Al Arabiya Television)
    By DIAA HADID, HADEEL AL-SHALCHI
    The Associated Press
    updated 4/7/2011 7:42:44 AM ET 2011-04-07T11:42:44

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    TRIPOLI, Libya — Hala Misrati once wrote romance tales about lost love. Now she's the ferocious face of Libya's regime, a star talk-show host on state TV lashing out daily against Moammar Gadhafi's enemies.

    She railed against a Libyan woman who claimed to Western journalists she had been raped by Gadhafi militiamen, calling her a "liar" and suggesting she was a "whore." On live TV, Misrati grilled an arrested journalist for an hour with all the doggedness of a secret police interrogator.

    "Say the things that you said in your recordings!" she barked at the journalist, Rana al-Aqbani, apparently referring to taped recordings of al-Aqbani's phone calls, as she tried to make her acknowledge that she sought Gadhafi's ouster. Al-Aqbani, a Tripoli-based journalist, has since disappeared.

    With her attack-dog demeanor, Misrati stands out even in the field of presenters of state-run news channels throughout Arab countries, whose autopilot response has been to denounce protesters in the anti-government uprisings around the Middle East.

    "She's clearly a very strong mouthpiece for the pro-Gadhafi forces," said Dina Eltahawy, a researcher for Amnesty International, which has issued an urgent alert to try find al-Aqbani.

    Misrati appears daily on her hour-long call-in show, "Libya on This Day" on the state-run satellite channel, Al-Jamahiriya 2.

    In her 30s, with long dark hair, heavy makeup and often decked out in gaudy outfits, she often gives long monologues crusading against Libya's rebels, the NATO-led alliance bombing Gadhafi troops from the air and anyone perceived of sympathizing with them or fueling the campaign against Gadhafi. That includes Western media and, particularly, the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, which she refers to as "the pig channel" in a rhyming play on words — the Arabic word for pig is "khanzeera."
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    Libya's crisis has made her a star — beloved by Gadhafi supporters and viewed with a mix of loathing and bemused fascination by the opposition.

    Miriam al-Amani, a 23-year-old student in Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital in eastern Libya, called Misrati "a clown."

    She said Misrati was not well known before, but her new incarnation since the uprising made her famous. "Now she's well known. Everyone in Libya knows who she is," al-Amani said with a laugh. "She lies so badly that nobody believes what she says," added al-Amani, who studies medicine at Benghazi's Garyounis University.

    In contrast, an upper-class woman having tea with friends at a five-star hotel in the capital Tripoli was full of praise for Misrati.

    "Libya runs through her veins," said the woman, a Gadhafi supporter. "She is bold. She has been able to show the truth in Benghazi and tell us what it's really like over there, no one else was brave enough to tell it how it is." The woman spoke on condition of anonymity because her husband holds a job in the state.

    In one show, Misrati blasted Libya's U.N. ambassador, Mohamed Shalgham, who turned against Gadhafi, calling him "ignorant" and "an idiot" and saying "he is good for nothing but barking like a dog."

    In another, she said the prominent Qatar-based Muslim cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi was "the devil" after he criticized Misrati. "Al-Qaradawi is too stupid to judge me or (Libya's) press," she coolly said.

    Her fiercest diatribe came against Iman al-Obeidi, a Libyan woman who last month burst into a Tripoli hotel where Western journalists are staying and told them she had been gang-raped by troops before security officials dragged her out.

    "Iman, in the end, is a liar," Misrati said in a 10-minute rant, accusing al-Obeidi of pulling a media stunt. She dismissed her claims, saying no Arab woman would bring shame on her family by publicly admitting to rape. She told viewers that it was rebels who were raping women in the eastern territories they control. Misrati urged al-Obeidi to come clean with the truth because her claims were fueling the "bombardment" of Libya.

    "Even sometimes a whore has nationalism toward her homeland, when she knows her homeland is in danger!" Misrati sneered. "Even a whore!"

    Misrati has since vowed to "uncover" al-Obeidi's real life.

    She aired footage of a later attempt to interview al-Obeidi. Misrati's film crew taunts the woman, who is seen curled up on the ground and refuses to be interviewed. It ends suddenly with Misrati screaming at al-Obeidi, "You and your kind have frittered away this country!"
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    Days later, Misrati conducted an interrogation on live television of al-Aqbani, a Syrian-Libyan journalist who the rights group Amnesty International said was snatched from her Tripoli home along with her brother by plainclothes gunmen on March 28.

    Misrati accused her of helping prompt the international air campaign with her reports. As the defiant al-Aqbani tried to explain herself, Misrati interjected, "Sometimes a person lives in a fantasy ... But when you take fantasy outside (your head), without realizing, you pass on rumors and mistakes, and we pay the price of those mistakes under shelling."

    Misrati later reassured her viewers that al-Aqbani wont be put to death. "She and her friends are not the head of the snake. Maybe the tail."

    Eltahawy of Amnesty International said the whereabouts of al-Aqbani and her brother remains unknown.

    Opponents relish in posting YouTube videos of her bloopers. In one famous misstep, she insisted that Muslims could not accept the U.N.'s move to "adopt" the resolution authorizing airstrikes over Libya, because Islam bans adoption — of children.

    Misrati's launch as a fierce defender of Gadhafi's regime is all the more striking considering her past. In 2009, she was pulled off air during a live interview and interrogated by security officers, according to a report on the incident by the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli released on the WikiLeaks site.

    Misrati was interviewing Mustafa Zaidi, a senior member of the Revolutionary committees, a quasi-pro-Gadhafi paramilitary group. Although Misrati "downplayed" the incident, she "criticized the strictures placed on journalists in Libya by reactionary regime figures," according to the embassy report.

    She began on TV only three years ago, according to her Internet resume.

    Before that, she was an aspiring writer. She published a collection of short stories in 2007, "The Moon Has Another Face." A review by an Internet magazine Middle-East-Online praises the collection for Misrati's "humane honesty" and describes the woman who "is angry like a child about the lies of others."

    Her lengthy blog — untouched since December — is a mix of personal reflections, essays about the Internet (with a law degree, she is a self-professed expert on cyber law) and short stories on lost love.

    "I watched the movement of the clouds, with the sun hiding ominously behind them, annihilating the heavy rain," one of her stories begins, before tumbling into a tale of a woman disappointed in marriage.

    The title of a series of entries on her blog even holds a bit of philosophy about how changeable life can be — like her surprising leap from writer to regime celebrity.

    "Between today and tomorrow is chaos," it reads.

    ________

    Hadid reported from Cairo. AP correspondent Ben Hubbard in Benghazi contributed to this report.
    Attached Files
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    Originally posted by troung View Post
    If we win the war for the rebels I'm sure the video of her being stoned will turn up on you-tube.
    Why ?

    Take the example of a famous prime time egyptian news presenter (can't remember her name) who apologised to the nation after Mubarak fell, saying she was tired of broadcasting the lies they fed her for several years and came out in support of the people.

    This Hala Misrati in comparison appears to be no more than an opportunist. She'll be forgotten.

    Originally posted by troung
    In her 30s, with long dark hair, heavy makeup and often decked out in gaudy outfits, she often gives long monologues crusading against Libya's rebels, the NATO-led alliance bombing Gadhafi troops from the air and anyone perceived of sympathizing with them or fueling the campaign against Gadhafi. That includes Western media and, particularly, the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, which she refers to as "the pig channel" in a rhyming play on words — the Arabic word for pig is "khanzeera."
    Isn't that strange. An independent arab channel that rails against other arabs
    Last edited by Double Edge; 08 Apr 11,, 10:38.

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    • #3
      Chad denies officers fighting Gaddafi troops
      Sat Apr 16, 2011 2:48pm GMT
      Chad denies officers fighting Gaddafi troops | World | Reuters
      N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Chad's foreign minister on Saturday rejected allegations by Libyan rebels fighting the government of leader Muammar Gaddafi that Chadian officers were fighting alongside Gaddafi's soldiers.

      Moussa Faki Mahmat, addressing diplomatic envoys to the Central African state's capital, said a report by the Libyan transitional national council and submitted to the U.N. Security Council that alleged Chadian army officers were in Libya was untrue.

      "We want to formally deny those accusations and, as proof, the officers mentioned in the report are here present," Mahmat said, pointing to nine soldiers seated in the room.

      Rebels say Gaddafi has brought in African mercenaries from countries such as Chad and Zimbabwe to help Libyan troops trying to put down the uprising against Gaddafi's rule.

      The minister said Chad had asked France to help monitor its border with Libya and allegations that thousands of Chadian fighters had crossed into Libya and that Gaddafi had moved a large consignment of gold into Chad were also not true.

      "How could tonnes of gold belonging to Gaddafi be sent to Chad without anyone seeing them?" he asked.

      (Reporting by Madjiasra Nako; Writing by Bate Felix)

      © Thomson Reuters 2011 All rights reserved
      To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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