MTV Networks has announced it is starting MTV Arabiya in conjunction with Al-Arabiya to air “music and entertainment” throughout the Middle East.

That sounds like a great idea, if you like that sort of thing. I’m guessing the network will start out showing music videos 24 hours a day and gradually phase all music out but leave viewers with hit shows like ‘Real World: Dubai,’ ‘I Want to be an Oil Tycoon’ and if viewers are lucky, ‘Who Wants to be a VJ.’ There’s a rumor floating around viewers of MTV Arabiya will select a drugged-out freak over more reasonable choices in the latter show.* Due to a lack of videos on MTV, MTV Arabiya 2 will start up with videos all the time, until they too are phased out to bring even more hit programming such as ‘Basra Beach’ and ‘Sweet Sixteen.’

If Viacom, the owners of MTV, thought the American evangelicals flipped out over a Super Bowl half-time show, wait till they get a load of how Islamists will react.

* During my sophomore year in college, my roomate at the time decided to watch the marathon-esque ‘Who Wants to be a VJ’ on the only television in the apartment.  Being the day after one of the bigger parties of the year, I was hardly in the mood to get up and do anything else. So there in the living room I stayed, and watched, and lived my own personal type of hell between watching such a stupid show to announce the winner of a contest that won’t do anything since there were no videos on MTV at the time and listening to my roomate dissect the different contestants on how they would do introducing the Beastie Boys, a band whose videos would never be shown on the station anyways.