Twitter agreed to a request by Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language network to censor English translations of a video that questioned the reality of the Holocaust and charged Jews exploited it “for their agenda.”
In a post to social media, AJ+ Arabic captioned the seven-minute video: “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 presenter, Muna Hawwa, says the Jews “exploited the Holocaust for their agenda and made the whole world focus on their murders and forget the other victims,” the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
When the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, posted the video with subtitles, Twitter blocked its users from sharing it “in response to a report by the copyright owner.”
The presenter states, “People are divided between those who deny the annihilation, others who think that the outcome was exaggerated, and others yet who accuse the Zionist movement of blowing it out of proportion.”
Al Jazeera is owned by the royal family of Qatar, the Gulf state bordered by Saudi Arabia with a reputation for harboring terror financiers.
In a statement, Al Jazeera said: “Dr. Yaser Bishr, Executive Director of Digital Division, stated that Al Jazeera completely disowns the offensive content in question and reiterated that Al Jazeera would not tolerate such material on any of the Network’s platforms.”
Bishr, according to the statement, sent an email to his staff calling for “the mandatory bias training and awareness program.”
Two journalists will be disciplined, Al Jazeera said.
Facebook and Twitter allowed the original video, without the translation, to circulate, receiving 1.1 million views.
The Daily Caller noted Twitter regularly blocks content from its platform that it deems “Islamophobic.”
Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough told the Daily Caller Tuesday afternoon she was looking into why the translated videos were blocked while the original ones in Arabic were allowed.
Only because it was caught
Nervana Mahmoud, an independent Middle East commentator, tweeted that Al Jazeera “took down @ajplus ugly Arabic video. But that is NOT because the channel suddenly becomes less #antisemitic, but because it was caught.”
“The Qatari channel is run by a group of cowards who cannot even stand by its employees when exposed,” she wrote. “Denying or downplaying the #Holocaust is not new. It has been a recurring theme by AJ arabic since its establishment.”
Earlier this month, MEMRI translated from Arabic to English a video posted on Facebook showing Muslim children at a Philadelphia Islamic school lip-syncing a song and reading poems that called for beheading and torturing Israelis
Similarly, the video, posted by the parent Muslim American Society’s Philadelphia chapter, stirred controversy only after it was translated.
