Thanks to the wildly popular iPod, Apple is now the world’s most influential brand.

And according to the poll of “branding professionals” (who are these people?) the world’s fifth most popular brand is …

JihadTV.

LONDON (Reuters) - Arabic media channel Al Jazeera has been voted the world’s fifth most influential brand in a poll of branding professionals that gave the top slot to U.S. iPod and computer icon Apple.

In the survey of almost 2,000 ad executives, brand managers and academics by online magazine Brandchannel, Apple ousted search engine Google from last year’s top spot, but the surprise to many will be Al Jazeera’s entry into the top five.

“With all the news from Iraq and Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’, a lot of people are really tuned into the news, and the major news sources have a western bias,” Brandchannel Editor Robin Rusch said.

“I think people are tuning in to Al Jazeera and looking at its Web Site because it does offer another viewpoint. For the global community, it’s one of the few points of access we have to news from the region with a different perspective.”

Kudos to Al Jazeera for doing such an excellent job of promoting jihad to the Arab world, and a sanitized “alternate viewpoint” to the West’s gullible fools. It’s the Yasser Arafat approach (say one thing to the infidels and an entirely different thing to the ummah), with a glossy media patina, and it’s obviously succeeding.

But in this small corner of the internet, we’re on to you.