Hamas' YouTube-inspired site hits the Web

They could have just as easily uploaded those videos on to YouTube and have a much larger audience. Maybe they started to feel the heat from YouTube Smackdown and launch their own video site. Haaretz

Featuring content ranging from relatively conservative Syrian social drama to videos glorifying al-Qaeda, the Islamic Hamas movement has launched its answer to the popular YouTube Web site.

The Hamas version, AqsaTube, shows real-time videos about the Islamist movement and is, the Web site wrote in its introduction about itself, "the first Palestinian Web site specializing in Islamic and jihad audio-visual productions."
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"This site shows the latest Palestinian and Arab audios and videos about the politics, sport, jihad and many things that it would take so long to list here," the "About Us" section of the site says.

n addition, the site features the popular Syrian television drama, "Bab al-Hara," or The Neighborhood Gate, relating to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, and videos of former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, whose Fatah movement is locked in a bitter, and sometimes violent, struggle with Hamas.