After pressure, AJ+, an Al Jazeera channel geared to youth, pulled a video that presented a distorted view of the Holocaust.
By David Isaac, World Israel News
Following protests from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Jewish organizations, Al Jazeera’s AJ+ pulled a video it posted on its social media channels that presented a distorted view of the Holocaust and claimed Israel was its “greatest beneficiary.”
Al Jazeera finally pulled the 7-minute video on Friday night, but only after it had gained more than 1.1 million likes on Facebook and Twitter.
The video had been posted on its social media 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 main message of the video is that while the Jews indeed suffered in the Holocaust, they exploited that suffering for their own interests, exaggerating it to the detriment of other victims. The video says that compared to other countries affected by the Holocaust “the reparations that Israel received were disproportionate.”
“The Jews weren’t the only targets of the Nazis, but also Gypsies, the disabled, homosexuals, and Arabs and Christians, too,” the narrator in the video says. “In all, the Nazis killed 20 million people during the Holocaust and the Final Solution, and the Jews were just a part of that. Then why does the world focus so much on Jews?”
The video accuses the Zionist movement of the “purposeful inflation of the numbers of victims and the totals of dead in the Holocaust in order to exploit the victims of war to benefit the State of Israel, completely ignoring other groups that suffered from the Nazis.”
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.”
The video goes still further, claiming that “the establishment of the State of Israel itself is derived from the national ideology of the Nazis.” It also says that “Israel – which benefited the most from the Holocaust – uses the same pretexts as the Nazis to commit ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and eliminate them.”
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, in a tweet on Saturday, said the AJ+ video is “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. Lies and evil propagated by the ideological descendants of ‘Der Sturmer.'”
Al Jazeera is the state broadcaster of Qatar. The country is the top funder of Hamas, having given $1.1 billion to the terror group between 2012-2018.
After the video led to condemnation, 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.”