Al Jazeera Media Network 1 November 1996 following the closure of the first BBC Arabic language television station, then a joint venture with Orbit Communications Company, owned by Saudi King Fahd's cousin, Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud. The BBC channel had closed after a year and a half when the Saudi government attempted to thwart a documentary pertaining to executions under sharia law. The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, provided a loan of QAR 500 million ($137 million) to sustain Al Jazeera through its first five years, as Hugh Miles detailed in his book "Al Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab
Al Jazeera controversies and criticism motives", as the report was just one of "hundreds of hours of diverse coverage". Some critics have alleged that Al Jazeera has censored criticism of the United States under U.S. pressure. Al Jazeera English's former director, Wadah Khanfar resigned in September 2011 following Wikileaks documents that asserted that he had close ties to the U.S. and agreed to remove content if the United States objected. Some of Al Jazeera's competitors have claimed that Al Jazeera is pro-American. RT, a Russian network sometimes criticized for an alleged Anti-Western bias, asserted that the Wikileaks documents concerning Wadah Khanfar (see above) prove that