Al Jazeera suspends two journalists following backlash over anti-Semitic Holocaust video

The Qatar state broadcaster suspended two journalists over a video presenting a distorted view of the Holocaust. 

By David Isaac, World Israel News

Al Jazeera suspended two journalists on Sunday after a storm of protest following the posting on its social media channels of a video accusing Jews of exploiting the Holocaust, with Israel being the “greatest beneficiary.”

Executive director of Al Jazeera’s digital division Yaser Bishr said the network “completely disowns the offensive content in question.” He announced a mandatory bias and sensitivity program in an email to staff.

The video had been posted on the social media accounts of Al Jazeera’s youth channel, AJ+, with the caption, “The gas chambers killed millions of Jews… So the story says. How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?”

The video, approximately 7 minutes long, said that while Jews indeed suffered in the Holocaust, they exploited that suffering for their own interests, exaggerating it to the detriment of other victims.

It also accused the Zionist movement of the “purposeful inflation of the numbers of victims and the totals of dead in the Holocaust” to  benefit the State of Israel.

Borrowing heavily from anti-Semitic tropes, the video explains that the reasons Jews were so “successful” at exploiting their suffering is that “the Jews of Europe in the ’30s were wealthy and controlled centers of research and media companies – which gave them the possibility after the war to exaggerate their suffering.”

Following protests from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Jewish organizations, Al Jazeera’s AJ+ pulled the video on Friday night, but not before it garnered 1.1 million likes on Facebook and Twitter.

The Arabic broadcaster tweeted on Saturday, “Al Jazeera Media Network deleted a video produced by AJ+ Arabic because it violated the editorial standards of the Network.”

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