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According to the BBC, Al Jazeera, a Qatari-based news organization, suspended two journalists who denied the full reality of the Holocaust and its impacts on Jewish communities.
The two journalists produced a video in which they denied the reality of the Holocaust, which went online at the AJ+ video library in Arabic. As most or all readers here know, 6 million Jewish peoples were murdered by the National Socialists or Nazis during World War II.
The video published by the journalists on AJ+ in Arabic or through the online channels of audiovisual media of Al Jazeera stated that the numbers of the murdered were both exaggerated and then “adopted by the Zionist movement,” where the state of Israel became the “biggest winner” from the genocide of the Jewish peoples during WWII.
“Its narrator also asked, ‘why is there a focus only on them?’ – referring to the Jewish victims – before claiming that the community uses ‘financial resources [and] media institutions’ to ‘put a special spotlight’ on Jewish suffering,” the reportage stated.
The caption for the video was the following: “What is the truth of the Holocaust and how did the Zionist movement benefit from it?”
The Middle East Media Research Institute or Memri tweeted an English translation of the Arabic text or the caption of the video. Memri is a non-profit based in the United States.
The BBC stated, “Questioning the number of Jewish victims killed, suggesting that Jewish people manipulate the media, and claiming that Jewish people or the State of Israel benefit from the Holocaust have been condemned as forms of anti-Semitism.”
After the tweet in English from Memri following the Arabic tweet from Al Jazeera, the content was widely condemned. A spokesperson, Emmanuel Nahshon, for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the content the worst evil, and pernicious at that.
He sees lies and evil propagated through Al Jazeera akin to Der Stürmer, according to Nahshon, which was an anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda publication. Al Jazeera broadcast journalist, Mehdi Hasan, was happy for the disciplinary action against Al Jazeera journalists, as he considered the AJ+ video “ridiculously offensive and dumb.”
In recent statement by Al Jazeera, the video was quickly deleted and “violated the editorial standards of the network.” Both journalists were suspended over the production of the video.
The Executive Director of the digital division of Al Jazeera, Dr. Yaser Bishr, stated that there was an immediate call for “mandatory bias training and awareness progamme” by him, where the AJ+ Managing Director, Dima Khatib, spoke to how the video was “produced without the due oversight” necessary to prevent falsehoods and offensive content produced about historical events.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-books, free or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com.
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