The Qatari state-controlled broadcaster Al Jazeera has come under fire after its Arabic channel posted a video that called into question the “truth of the Holocaust.”
In the seven-minute long video shared on Facebook and Twitter on Friday, narrator Muna Hawwa charged that the number of Jews perished during the Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Israel is the “biggest winner” from the genocide.
The Holocaust was “different from how the Jews tell it,” the narrator asserted, before adding that the Jewish community uses “financial resources [and] media institutions” to “put a special spotlight” on their suffering.
The video claimed that Jews “exploited the Holocaust for their agenda and made the whole world focus on their murders and forget the other victims” to receive reparations from Germany.
It went on to suggest that Israel uses the “same pretexts as the Nazis to commit ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and eliminate them.”
Images of Jews mass murdered by the Nazi regime were overlayed with narration asking, “Gas ovens killed millions of Jews, or that’s how the story goes (…) how did the Zionist movement benefit?”
The video attracted 1.1. million views before it was taken down by Al Jazeera.
In a statement posted to social media, the Qatari-controlled broadcaster failed to apologize to the Jewish community but said, “Al Jazeera Media Network deleted a video produced by AJ+ Arabic because it violated the editorial standards of the Network.”
Al Jazeera also announced that it had taken disciplinary action and suspended two of its journalists over the content.
Emmanuel Nahshon, spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the video was “the worst kind of pernicious evil.”
“That’s how Al Jazeera brainwashes young people in the Arab world and perpetuates hatred of Israel and the Jews,” he said. “Lies and evil propagated by the ideological descendants of ‘Der Stürmer.’”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Arabic media spokesperson, Ofir Gendelman, vowed: “We’ll keep fighting antisemitism on Arab media, including on [Al Jazeera Arabic] – an inciting propaganda machine.”
[Photo: Zmotion / Wikimedia Commons]