I Met Al Jazeera

On August 18, 2012 Al Jazeera (United Kingdom) came to our corner on Federal Highway where the Ft. Lauderdale Tea Party has been every weekend consecutively since Obama became President. It is the longest running Tea Party in the world.

I was surprised when the reporter had a British accent because I assumed Al Jazeera was Arabic. I suspiciously asked the reporter what Al Jazeera means.
He innocently clipped in his British accent, “peninsula.” Then, he chuckled to his cameraman, “that word isn’t used very often!”

I looked him in the eye and said, “Florida is a peninsula.”

Wikipedia says, “In Arabic, al-ǧazīrah literally means “the island”. However, it refers here to the Arabian Peninsula, which is شبه الجزيرة العربية šibh al-ğazīrah al-ʿarabiyyah, abbreviated to الجزيرة العربية al-ğazīrah al-ʿarabiyyah.”

…(was) owned by Saudi King Fahd’s cousin, Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud. It had fallen apart after a year and a half when the Saudi government attempted to kill a documentary on executions under sharia law.

… Al Jazeera was also becoming a favorite sounding board for militant groups such as Hamas and Chechen separatists…The station aired videos it received from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban… Some criticized the network, however, for giving a voice to terrorists…
…The Al Jazeera logo is a decorative representation of the network’s name written using Arabic calligraphy. It was selected by the station’s founder, Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, as the winning entry in a design competition.

The Chairman of Al Jazeera is Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, a distant cousin of Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani…Sheikh Hamad has three wives and twenty-four children, eleven sons and thirteen daughters…

The reporter and cameraman recognized me from Saturday Night Live and we had a friendly chat. They seemed surprised that I live here. They said they live on South Beach.
They asked me, on camera, if the Tea Party was going to disappear if Romney won. I said, “Absolutely not! We are here to stay. This is the 2nd American Revolution. We have to hold Romney’s feet to the fire, and make sure he doesn’t slip into socialism like he did in Massachusetts, I love Paul Ryan.”

They seemed pleased with the footage they’d gotten of me.
As they went about interviewing the various Tea Party members standing on the corner with signs and flags, I noticed that they were not showing our black patriots. They would angle the camera away so as not to include them. Danita (co-founder of Ft. Laud. Tea Party) noticed this also, so we confronted them.

What you don’t see in this video is what happened after my cameraman Boris turned his camera off. So I will tell you. (If I was Breitbart, I would have had a back up camera rolling.)

The Al Jazeera crew denied their exclusion of the blacks, of course, and were very uncomfortable when I turned the cameras on them. You can see the cameraman ducking away. I calmly said to them, “You are not filming the black tea partiers, but even if you were, you would edit them out in ‘post (production)’ to show we are racist. I can’t trust you. You’re the liberal media.”

The British reporter balked loudly, “We’re not liberal!”
“No? Well, I saw a story on Al Jazeera, when it came into my home once, I was flicking channels, I didn’t even order it…

“You don’t even know what socialism is!” he shouted over me.

…I don’t know how it got on my TV, but the story I saw was an outright lie. And then, I saw Hilary Clinton say…

One of them said, “Hilary’s an idiot.”

“…that Al Jazeera was the best news resource there is, so I know it’s bad.”

The cameraman repeated with a raised, angry voice, “You don’t even know what socialism is!” “What is it?!”

The other one shouted, “What’s socialism?”

I was so nervous from being yelled at I couldn’t think, I mumbled, “…every one the same..”

The cameraman laughed cryptically, “That’s communism!” “Look at my leg!” He had a tattoo of England’s flag I think. He was walking across the street with his suited reporter to get long shots of our group.

I had to shout back since they were crossing the street, “Socialism doesn’t work! England’s a failure, Europe is falling apart! Socialism never works!”

Then, an old man in our group approached me and yelled at me, “Stop arguing with them! That’s what they want you to do! You’re making us look bad!”

I said, “Who’s side are you on?!”

He scoffed, “Who’s side am I on! I’m with channel one…” He mumbled something very mean and arrogant.

I said, “Look, I’m a beginner political activist and if you, a conservative, scream at me, I’m gonna quit doing this!”

I wouldn’t have been shouting if the reporters hadn’t asked me questions and then walked across the street, not listening to my answer.

I resumed my post next to my big sign, lent to me by my friend Edward, the great sign maker. I told Ami, the brown skinned man next to me, “Everyone’s yelling at me.” He smiled sweetly and as peaceful as an angel said, “Don’t worry about it, none of this matters, Jesus is coming back any day now. Praise the Lord.” I realized that Ami always wears that peaceful grin. (Maybe he is an angel. I kept glancing back at him to see if he floated away.)

When the Al Jazeera crew came back to their cars to leave, I calmly said, “I know the definitions of capitalism, socialism, and communism. I memorized them from Webster’s Dictionary for my first Tea Party. Capitalism: the people control business, socialism: the government controls some of the business, and communism: the government controls all of the business. Socialism is phase one of communism.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Webster is wrong?!”

He said, “You misinterpreted it. Socialism’s about giving!”

“Ha! Giving?! The government giving…but where does it get the stuff to give?…me!”

It was incredulous that this guy is so naive, like many socialists, to think that the government can just give stuff away and not tax the workers more and more and more to pay for it.

I said, “54% of Americans pay NO tax!”

Then he sneered as he walked away, “Gay people have more rights in Canada!”

“Gay? Wha…gay people have… rights here..” What?! That’s a weird seque.

Then he said, “I loved you on TV!”

I said, “I love you!”

When I got home in the evening Geraldo Rivera was on Fox News doing an in-depth story on White Supremacist Hate Groups and I thought “Hey, a memo must have gone out to all the propaganda main stream media channels including Fox and Al Jazeera, telling them to get a story on white hate groups.” I’ll bet ya a million bucks the film footage that will be shown of the Ft. LauderdaleTea Party yesterday will have no blacks, and a voice-over of my shrill voice shouting. The spin will suggest that conservatives, the tea party and hate groups are linked.

I know what’s going on, but many millions are still being duped by these media tricks.