Al-Manar, Arabic for "the beacon," is the official television station of Hezbollah. The terrorist organisation uses al-Manar—which it calls the "station of resistance"—as an integral part of its overall operations. With a stated purpose of waging "psychological warfare," al-Manar is a potent instrument that incites violence to viewers in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.

While there are many mass communication media outlets owned by terrorist organisations, particularly on the Internet, al-Manar is by far the most prominent, approximately reaching between 10-15 million viewers daily around the globe.

Al-Manar was founded in 1992 and with a terrestrial signal limited to Lebanon and Northern Israel. In 2000, in coincidence with the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, al-Manar started broadcasting via satellite, worldwide, seven days a week. In 2005, European satellite providers took al-Manar off the air. However, al-Manar is available in Europe through Arabsat, a Saudi Arabia-based company owned by the Arab League, and Nilesat, owned by the Egyptian government.

You can watch clips of al-Manar broadcasts here.

Hezbollah was the first terrorist organisation to establish its own television station. It uses it, in the words of one official, as "an operational weapon" to incite hatred and violence, recruit suicide bombers, and communicate with its soldiers in the field.

According to an al-Manar official, its programming is meant to "help people on the way to committing what you call in the West a suicide mission." Many of al-Manar’s videos aim to recruit terrorists. Viewers are told: "the path to becoming a priest in Islam is through Jihad."

Hezbollah uses al-Manar to inculcate hate and incite violence. Al-Manar’s programming skilfully combines news, talk shows, propaganda music videos, and other elements in order to spread an ideology of hate, terrorism and militant Islam.

Al-Manar has an estimated annual budget of $15 million which comes partly from Hezbollah and partly from advertising revenues. Until recently several Western companies were advertising on al-Manar, however they stopped after the content of al-Manar programming was brought to their attention.