After Broadcasting Holocaust Denial, AJ+ Feigns Innocence

After Al Jazeera created and posted a video questioning “the truth of the Holocaust,” officials at the Qatari media giant took a page from the New York Times‘ book, blaming employees who were working “without due oversight.” (The Times had blamed its recent anti-Semitic cartoon on “a single editor acting without adequate oversight.”)

The video, by Al Jazeera’s pseudo-progressive AJ+, dismissed the Nazi murder of six million Jews as dubious “Zionist claims.” According to a translation by MEMRI, the video claimed that

the number of victims of the Holocaust remains one of the most prominent historical debates to this day. 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 in the service of the plan to establish what would later be known as the ‘State of Israel.’

According to an article on Al Jazeera’s website, “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.”

But that’s not true. It has long tolerated Holocaust denial, and has played an important role in spreading it. In 2009, for example, Al Jazeera broadcast Yousef Al-Qaradawi’s speech about Hilter’s “punishment” of the Jews: “By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them.”

“Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” Qaradawi continued.

Al Jazeera viewers were also treated to Qaradawi calling for a new genocide: “Oh Allah, Take This Oppressive, Jewish, Zionist Band Of People; Oh Allah, Do Not Spare A Single One Of Them; Oh Allah, Count Their Numbers, And Kill Them, Down To The Very Last One.”

In 2007, Al Jazeera aired broadcast a speech by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in which he delivered a similar message to the AJ+ Holocaust-revisionism video: “I want to make it clear to the West and to the German people, which is still being blackmailed because of what Nazism did to the Zionists, or to the Jews. I say that what Israel did to the Palestinian people is many times worse than what Nazism did to the Jews, and there is exaggeration, which has become obsolete, regarding the issue of the Holocaust. We do not deny the facts, but we will not give in to extortion by exaggeration.”

So much for Yaser Bishr’s claim that Al Jazeera “would not tolerate” Holocaust denial. See more at MEMRI.