Wikileaks founder Julian Assange premiered "The World Tomorrow," his talk show on RT, Tuesday with an interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah.
ASSANGE: What is your vision for the future of Israel and Palestine? What would Hezbollah consider victory? If you had that victory would you disarm?
NASRALLAH: The state of Israel is an illegal state. It is a state that was established on the basis of occupying the lands of others, of usurping the lands of others, of controlling by force the lands of others, of committing massacres against the Palestinians who were expelled, and basically Muslims and Christians too. Justice—justice remains [unclear], where even if 10 years passes, the progress of time does not send justice—does not negate justice. If your house, and I go and occupy it by force, it doesn’t become mine in 50 or 100 years, just because I’m stronger than you and I’ve been able to occupy your lands. That doesn’t give me—that doesn’t legalize my ownership of your house. At least this is our logical view and our legal view. We believe that Palestine belongs to the Palestinian people. But if we wanted to combine ideology and law, political realities and realities on the ground, we should say the only solution is we don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to treat anyone unjustly, we want justice to be restored. The only solution is the establishment on the land of Palestine—one state, in which the Muslims and the Jews and the Christians live in peace in a democratic state. Any other solution will simply not be viable.
The New Republic reported last month on the Kremlin-funded channel's slanted coverage of the Syrian conflict, and the network's success in "cultivating American liberals and libertarians eager to criticize the United States for its adventurism abroad and sermonizing posture toward other nations":
Between the outrage following allegations of fraud in Russia’s parliamentary elections last December and the country’s more recent veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Syria, it’s clear why RT would want Americans to supply a counter-narrative that makes the United States look out of line for lecturing Russia. The bigger mystery is why American journalists and academics continue to go along for the ride.
Russia Today was founded in 2005 on the heels of Vladimir Putin’s famous declaration that the collapse of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." From then on, as Julia Ioffe noted in Columbia Journalism Review, both the network and the regime came to embrace an ideology of "sovereign democracy," a concept meant to promote Russian "independence of an externally imposed Western morality." The network’s insistence that the United States is a bad-faith arbiter of global affairs can be seen as a direct extension of this philosophy.