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Fatah posted offensive Holocaust video after Al-Jazeera removed and condemned it

Note: PMW's excerpt from this video has been blocked by Al-Jazeera due to claims of copyright infringement.

Al-Jazeera condemned its own journalists' report: "Al Jazeera stated today, that it has taken disciplinary action and suspended two of its journalists over video content produced on the Holocaust." 

Fatah republished the video on Facebook: “Al-Jazeera TV did a favor to the occupation (i.e., Israel) and erased the video. Let’s publish it again.”

Al-Jazeera narrator: “Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis -this is the narrative that the Zionist movement adopted and emphasizes every year in marking what is known as Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let us tell you the story of the Holocaust...

After the Holocaust, the Zionist movement claimed that two out of every three Jews were murdered. How and why did it happen? ...

The Nazis targeted everyone who they viewed as ‘human surplus,’ whether due to ‘their racial inferiority’ or due to their political unacceptability. This means that the Jews are not the only victims of the period...

The number of victims of the Nazis under the command of [Adolf] Hitler was over 20 million people, and among them the Jews. So why is the focus only on them [the Jews]? The Jewish organizations had financial resources, media frameworks, research institutes, and voices in academia that succeeded in focusing the attention on the Jewish victims of the Nazis and highlighting them to a much greater extent. However, one of the most prominent historical debates is taking place to this very day concerning the number of victims of the Holocaust. People are divided into a number of groups - those who deny the annihilation, those who think that its results are exaggerated, and even those who accuse the Zionist movement of inflating it to benefit the project to establish what later came to be known as the State of Israel. Let us spend some time on the question of how Israel benefited from the Holocaust. In the first months of the Nazis’ rule [1933], an agreement (i.e., Ha’avara Agreement) was signed between the Zionist Agency (sic., the Jewish Agency) and Nazi Germany, whose goal was to ease the migration of the Jews to Palestine...

There are those for whom this agreement, along with other documents, made them to adopt the idea that Hitler supported Zionism. This caused former London Mayor Ken Livingstone to explicitly declare this belief, which ended with his suspension from the Labour party. The persecution and the suffering, the narrative of the sad cases in the Holocaust that were repeated again and again, paved the way for the migration of the Jews to Palestine. Is this how the story ended? Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, the Axis states - and prime among them Germany - were forced to pay massive compensation to the states that were harmed by the war...

Greece, Serbia, Yugoslavia, and the Gypsies - all of them were harmed, but the German compensation to these victims as a whole was not at all similar to the scope of the payments to Israel, which in turn swallowed up the compensation of most of the Jewish victims of Nazism.

The Holocaust was not just a passing tragic event. A great number of states consider the denial of it to be a crime. Dozens of institutions sponsor large museums in various world capitals, which commemorate the tragic disaster of the Jews - which created global interest in the incident, even though similar and no less ugly crimes are still being committed against other peoples.

The annihilation of any people on the basis of its race or religion is unacceptable and requires strong condemnation. The condemnation of the Holocaust is a moral requirement - but Israel, which benefitted the most from the Holocaust, is using the same Nazi justifications as a basis for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and for their annihilation. The ideology of the State of Israel’s establishment is based on religious, national, and geographic premises, which were fed by the spirit of Nazism and its initial founding principles. So how can the Palestinians condemn a crime (i.e., the Holocaust) that became the other side of their tragedy?”

The following is the statement by Al Jazeera condemning the video:

Headline: "Al Jazeera takes disciplinary action and suspends two of its journalists over violation of its editorial guidelines"

"Al Jazeera stated today, that it has taken disciplinary action and suspended two of its journalists over video content produced on the Holocaust. The video content and accompanying posts were swiftly deleted by AJ+ senior management from all AJ+ pages and accounts on social media, as it contravened the Network’s editorial standards.

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. In an email to staff he also called for the mandatory bias training and awareness program.

Dima Khatib, Managing Director of AJ+ Channels, said that the video was produced without the due oversight. She added that workflows are being reviewed to make sure all production goes through the proper editorial channels at all times, and called on all AJ+ editors and journalists to comply with the Network’s editorial values and Code of Ethics

Al Jazeera continues to adhere to the journalistic values of honesty, courage, fairness, balance, independence, credibility and diversity, giving no priority to commercial or political over professional consideration. In addition, the Network recognizes the diversity in societies with all races, cultures, beliefs and their values and intrinsic individualities. 

Since its inception, Al Jazeera Media Network never shied away from acknowledging any mistakes on its editorial content and to rectify them to avoid recurrence of such errors.”


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