A Staten Island satellite TV salesman was busted by the feds for beaming the terrorist network Hezbollah's hate-filled al Manar channel—which is banned in the U.S.—into New York City living rooms. "Why don't you watch al Manar?" Javed Iqbal asked a customer who turned out to be an FBI informant secretly recording the conversation, officials said yesterday.

The unique case, prosecuted under the federal Patriot Act, raised First Amendment concerns among civil liberties groups—and follows battling between Israel and the Lebanon-based terror group.

The feds were tipped this year by a media watchdog group that Iqbal, a Pakistani national who sells satellite dishes out of his storefront business in Brooklyn called HDTV Ltd., was offering al Manar broadcasts as part of the package, according to court papers unsealed yesterday, the New York Daily News reports.

The Treasury Department designated al Manar, a Lebanon-based satellite TV station controlled by Hezbollah, as a global terrorist entity in March, making it a federal crime to buy the satellite service—even though the channel can be seen for free on the Internet.

The FBI informant contacted Iqbal about installing a satellite system at his Manhattan apartment. When Iqbal learned the customer was Lebanese, he encouraged him to sign on for al Manar, officials said.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the arrest troubling. "In a free society, all speech is protected regardless of the viewpoint," she said, according to the Daily News piece by Thomas Zambito and John Marzulli.

But Mark Dubowitz, who heads the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said al Manar is not banned for its content, as ugly as calling on Muslims to carry out suicide attacks against U.S. troops and its allies may be.

"Al Manar is a terrorist organization masquerading as a TV channel," said Dubowitz, who alerted authorities to Iqbal's alleged al Manar sales. "It is being used to raise money ... by broadcasting bank account numbers where viewers can donate money to Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations."