Major news organizations covering the extraordinary Flydubai incident have omitted a striking piece of context: five days earlier, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader warned that if Iranian aircraft could not use regional airports, nobody else should expect to fly either.
On September 25, Mohammad Mokhber, Iran’s former acting president and current adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared:
“Flight in the region is either free for all, or for no one.”
He added: “If Iran is denied the possibility of flight and access to airport services, no country in the region will have this possibility either.”
Days earlier, another senior Iranian official, Mohsen Rezaei, had issued a similar warning concerning neighboring airports.
Five days after Mokhber’s statement, a Flydubai aircraft carrying mostly Israelis from Dubai to Tel Aviv suffered an attempted hijacking. The captain was attacked, the aircraft rapidly lost altitude and the flight made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. The motive remains under investigation. There is no immediate evidence connecting Iran to the incident.
But Iran’s warning is missing from major coverage reviewed from Reuters, the Associated Press, the Guardian, Al Jazeera and The National. Reuters had itself reported Mokhber’s statement when he made it.
That omission is difficult to understand. A senior Iranian official had publicly warned that regional aviation could be disrupted. Five days later, an Emirati aircraft carrying over one hundred Israelis is put at risk by an Omani pilot.
Consider that Al Jazeera and the Guardian continue to say that Israel is at war with Iran even though that hasn’t been true for many months. They insert Israel into the war against Iran while they leave Iran out of the discussion about a potential killing of nearly two hundred Israelis.
Readers are being lied to by acts of insertion and omission, especially about Israel and Iran. It is critical to understand those basic facts and begin to ask why.
Al Jazeera is the global media company funded by Qatar, governed through a board appointed by the Qatari state and used to project Qatari influence around the world. Its digital arm, AJ+, was built in 2013 specifically for younger Americans who consume news through social media rather than television. By the late 2010s, it had become one of Facebook’s largest news-video publishers, generating billions of views and millions of followers while focusing heavily on race, social justice and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peculiar cocktail of a socialist-jihadi alliance at that time, which is now mainstreamed.
AJ+ has a long history of peddling Hamas propaganda
In September 2020, the Trump Justice Department concluded that AJ+ was acting on behalf of a foreign principal and ordered it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Registration would not have restricted its journalism, but simply would have required public disclosure of its relationship with Qatar and periodic reporting similar to that required of other foreign state-backed media organizations like those from Turkey (TRT), China (CGTN) and Russia (RT).
AJ+ refused to register. Republican lawmakers including Chuck Grassley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Todd Young pressed DOJ to enforce its own determination.
Then, in May 2022, the Biden Justice Department withdrew the order after reviewing additional information submitted by AJ+. What changed has never been publicly explained. DOJ has not identified the decisive new facts, released its legal analysis or explained why AJ+ was treated differently from other foreign state-funded broadcasters.
“AJ+’s reporting ‘supports an inference’ that its broadcasts are ‘designed to influence the opinions and perspectives of its U.S. audience as directed by the foreign principals and for their principal benefit.’…
Given Al Jazeera’s and TikTok’s public prominence in the U.S., mounting evidence of their use to advance foreign agendas, and the Biden Administration’s own national security concerns with the two companies, the Committee is puzzled that the Department appears to have either ceased or paused enforcement of FARA registration requirements for the companies without explanation.” – February 8, 2024 letter from the Committee on Oversight and Accountability
The timing naturally raises questions.
Only months earlier, the United States had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Qatar had become indispensable to Washington—hosting negotiations with the Taliban, assisting the evacuation from Kabul and serving as one of America’s principal diplomatic intermediaries in the region.
There is no public evidence that the FARA reversal was connected to Qatar’s diplomatic role but it is reasonable to ask whether a government relying heavily on Doha’s cooperation became less interested in forcing Qatar’s flagship media network to register as a foreign agent.
The same question now confronts the second Trump administration. Although Trump’s first Justice Department initiated the FARA action, his current administration has not publicly reopened the case. That may simply reflect DOJ’s legal judgment or competing priorities. It may also reflect Qatar’s continuing importance as a partner in addressing Iran, Gaza and other regional crises.
A final question – closer to home – may be the most consequential. During this same period, antisemitism reached levels not seen in decades while anti-Israel activism surged across American campuses and social media, principally from young people. And AJ+ was one of the most influential foreign state-funded digital news brands reaching young Americans, peddling such hatred over this time.
The unanswered question is whether Washington accepted greater Qatari influence inside the United States – including directly and indirectly promoting antisemitism – in exchange for Qatar’s assistance abroad.
Whether making Al Jazeera and AJ+ register under FARA would suddenly change these trends is unknown. But it is also unknown and curious why the government stopped asking the Qatari media powerhouse to do so.
Nothing so captures the European mindset like soccer. It’s a global sport with scant appreciation in North America, but Europeans are glued to it. Consequently, soccer (“football”) matches become backdrops for activists to shout their causes, knowing that it will attract millions – or perhaps billions – of eyeballs.
It was a moment anti-Israel advocates would not pass up.
UEFA had been criticized by pro-Gazan agitators for not coming out against Israel during this war. On August 12, the day before the match, UEFA announced an expansion of its existing “support for the humanitarian efforts for children in conflict zones,” to include Gaza. The wording was careful to not criticize either Israel or Hamas, and just focused on children.
Whatever the adults waging wars think they are doing, the children are innocent.
Aleksander Čeferin, UEFA President
UEFA took an added step during the match and had nine children from conflict zones where it supports humanitarian efforts – Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and now Gaza – unfurl a banner on the field that read “stop killing children. stop killing civilians.”
Qatar-owned Al Jazeera would use the UEFA actions to generate its own anti-Israel story.
In an article titled “UEFA unfurls Gaza-related plea banner after Palestinian tribute fallout,” the pro-Hamas media site said that the banner was all about Gaza, even when children from multiple countries participated. The article pushed a Gaza narrative with “in the wake of heavy fallout over its meek tribute to a Palestinian player killed by Israel,” it mentioned Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah who condemned UEFA on August 10 for not calling out Israel in its statement.
Al Jazeera would then manufacture history, writing “Nine children refugees from Palestine, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq carried the banner onto the field of play before the game began.” But Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq are actual countries, Palestine is not. The two children from Gaza who took part in the ceremony were in Milan receiving medical treatment, not fleeing persecution “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” which is the definition of a refugee according to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. Unless Al Jazeera believes these children are being targeted by Hamas.
Just days before this incident, on August 10, Al Jazeera had some of its journalists in Gaza killed by an Israeli strike. Israel said they were legitimate targets, as they were terrorists paid by Hamas. It was shocking to all that the media company which is owned by the wealthiest regime in the world needed its journalists to make some extra coin from an antisemitic genocidal organization that is supposedly “starving,” not that the journalists were terrorists, which was common knowledge.
The Qatari propaganda company has long accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. It claims that “Israel kills an average 28 Palestinian children daily in Gaza,” attempting to make the Arab youth the primary victims and focus of the war, and portray Israel as a bloodthirsty monstrosity. It did not inform its readers that children under 18 account for 47% of the population of Gaza, but a much lower 31% of the fatalities according to OCHA, which gets its information from the Hamas run Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza.
When further considering that many of the children between 15 and 18 years old are part of the Hamas war machine, the much lower percentage of child fatalities points to Israel’s efforts to target Gazan fighters, not children. Even Hamas admits that nearly half of all fatalities in Gaza have been fighting-aged males (49%), even though they account for just one-quarter of the population (26%).
As for the 6,000 Gazans who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, Al Jazeera had no concern for how they treated Jewish children. The Gazans killed 38 Israeli children in front of their parents. They took the same number as hostages to Gaza. What kind of people take babies as hostages as a matter of policy?
Bibas children Kfir and Ariel, with mother, Shiri, all taken as hostages by Gazans, later returned dead in an exchange for Gazan terrorists
“Don’t kill children. Don’t kill civilians,” should be the understood motto of all civilized people and organizations. That Qatar and Al Jazeera continue to stand by Hamas after all they have done – and then attempt to misdirect the world towards Israel – makes them deeply complicit in the deaths of thousands.
Desire Doué and Ousmane Dembélé of France St. Germain lift the UEFA Super Cup Trophy, sporting jerseys embossed by their sponsor, Qatar Airways
Over twenty years ago, Jewish Russian-Israeli Natan Sharansky coined the “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization.” Each one comes for Jews in their own unique way: demonization actively incites hatred; delegitimization undermines support structures over time; and double standards drips slowly into society, barely noticed and acknowledged.
Consider the assassination of noted terrorist Osama Bin Laden by the United States. World leaders applauded the American attack, thousands of miles from its shores, as justice served. Yet when Israel eliminated the terrorist Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, the world lined up to condemn Israel.Hypocrisy masked by time, place and protagonists concealed the rank Jew-hatred.
It happens to Israel frequently.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in France which attempts to get information out to the world regardless of frontiers, and to protect journalists. Its tagline does not clarify that it does this selectively, such as toeing the line with the French government, and persistently coming for Israel.
For years, RSF pushed to get Russia Today (RT) off the air and internet in France. RSF claimed RT was “Russia’s war propaganda machine,” and successfully got Channel One Russia off the air which it labeled “an important part of the state’s disinformation arsenal in Russia, where TV continues to be a very influential medium.”
RSF worked to ban media outlet RT because it claimed it is a disinformation outlet
Yet when Israel banned Qatar-owned Al Jazeera from Israel in May 2024, which had long served as an open propaganda outlet for the political-terrorist group Hamas, RSF went nuts. The group’s Middle East leader said “The Israeli parliament’s vote to censor Al Jazeera, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s defamatory remarks about its journalists are unacceptable. RSF demands that the Israeli authorities end their aggressive harassment of Al Jazeera. Such censorship legislation, under the guise of democratic regulation, implicitly targeting a specific media outlet, creates a precedent fraught with dangers for journalism in Israel.”
RSF didn’t only object to Israel’s ban of Hamas’s propaganda arm of Al Jazeera but accused Israel of “persecution”
RSF did not only defend the Hamas mouthpiece headquartered in Qatar, its entire framework of the Gaza war completely sides with Hamas. Examples of Hamas simply being annoying while Israel is the source of violence include: “Journalists suspected of collaborating with Israel are hampered in their work by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, while also enduring the violence of the Israeli blockade on the territory,” and blaming Israel for starting the latest war with “Press freedom, media plurality and editorial independence have been increasingly restricted in Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, launched by Israel on 7 October 2023 following the deadly Hamas attack,” which would be like blaming the U.S.A. for starting a war with Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack.
In January 2025, the Palestinian Authority also shut down Al Jazeera in the parts of the West Bank it controls, stating the company’s websites have “inciting material and reports that were deceiving and stirring strife.” Israel went further and accused several Al Jazeera journalists of participating in the October 7 massacre. Whether causing “strife” or participating in lynchings, the media outlet has been blamed by both sides in fueling the war.
The double standards of Reporters Without Borders attempting to protect the Hamas propaganda outlet of Al Jazeera during the terrorist group’s horrific war but pushing to ban Russian media in Europe is appalling. It also raises questions about the NGO’s biases.
This isn’t a defense of censorship but a demand for consistency. If Al Jazeera’s ability to operate is sacred, then so is Russia Today’s. If RT can be banned for spreading propaganda and fueling war, then so can Al Jazeera. RSF’s double standard is damning.
The reality of today is there is no neutral and completely fact-based press. Government-owned media like Russia Today and Al Jazeera should fall under a single bucket of treatment. Ban them or air them with wrappers that identify them as foreign propaganda outlets so viewers understand the nature of the content.
Freedom of the press is not a weapon to be wielded selectively. But for groups like Reporters Without Borders, it increasingly is. And that should concern everyone who actually believes in a free and honest media.
Qatar has been buying its way into the heart of American power. Not metaphorically—literally. The small Gulf state has dumped billions of dollars into American universities, co-opted think tanks, and inserted itself into political circles on both sides of the aisle. It’s not just about soft power anymore. This is strategic infiltration.
According to Middle East Forum, Qatar pumped “$33.4 billion into businesses and real estate; $6.25 billion to universities; $72 million to lobbyists. Qatar purchases access to our corridors of power while simultaneously funding Hamas terrorists who seek our destruction. The pattern is clear: Qatar targets critical infrastructure, including our energy grid. It bankrolls academic departments that foment campus unrest, buys Manhattan skyscrapers, and infiltrates Silicon Valley. Its capital flows to Washington insiders who shape Middle East policy.”
And now, in the latest display of quiet power, Qatar gifted the President of the United States a brand-new plane.
This isn’t a gift. It’s a transaction. And we don’t know what was sold.
Experts Sound The Alarm
Jonathan Conricus, a former Israel Defense Forces spokesperson and now senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), has made it clear that Qatar is not neutral. He describes the Gulf emirate as an “active nefarious actor,” using its wealth to export ideological influence and to shield organizations like Hamas. He’s seen what this money funds—from underground terror tunnels in Gaza to misinformation and antisemitic narratives in the West.
Others, like Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute, argue Qatar is just playing defense—just a tiny monarchy with a population of 300,000 surrounded by giants like Saudi Arabia and Iran. But here’s the flaw: Qatar already hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, the Al Udeid Air Base, just outside Doha. With thousands of American troops stationed there, Qatar doesn’t need more protection. What it IS doing is leveraging that partnership as cover for its far-reaching agenda.
Buying The American Narrative And Minds Of The Youth
Qatar’s influence isn’t just in think tanks and campuses—it’s also in your living room.
In 2013, Qatar’s state media arm Al Jazeera bought Al Gore’s cable network, Current TV, for a staggering $500 million. The rebranded Al Jazeera America failed commercially, but its goal wasn’t ratings. It was presence in 40 million American households.
The acquisition gave Qatar the ability to market propaganda under the guise of serious journalism. It continues to do so under the AJ+ brand on social media, pushing anti-Israel, anti-Western, and often antisemitic narratives to audiences across the globe. It doesn’t aim to inform—it aims to manipulate.
The monarchy’s influence extends into elementary public schools.The Qatar Foundation provides materials for New York City’s “Arab Culture Arts” program which has a map of the Middle East with Israel removed. Tova Plaut, a New York City public school instructional coordinator for pre-K through fifth grade classrooms, said “It’s not just that we’re experiencing Jewish hate in NYC public schools, we’re actually experiencing Jewish erasure.”
A report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) uncovered extensive foreign influence and anti-Israel bias infiltrating as many as 8,000 K-12 classrooms, reaching one million students. Qatar is mentioned 48 times in the report.
Congressional Sleepwalking
Disgracefully, few members of Congress have called out Qatar for their support of Hamas and fueling antisemitism in American schools.
Rep. Carol Miller (R-WV) did so in November 2023 noting “the influence of foreign governments on tax-exempt college campuses, [specifically] Qatari funding for Northwestern University. It is no coincidence that it now has a campus in the Gulf country and has become a pipeline for reporters for the Qatari state-owned media Al Jazeera and their youth-focused subsidiary, AJ+.”
Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), Vice Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said in May 2024, “It’s simple: if Qatar can’t pressure Hamas to make a deal with Israel, they must expel these terrorists so they can be brought to justice and punished for their horrific crimes against humanity. If they won’t do either, then the United States should seriously examine whether Qatar still deserves the privileges of its status as a major non-NATO ally.”
Yet it’s taken the public gift of an airplane to President Trump to finally make everyone in Congress wake up to the evils of Qatari influence.
Conclusion: Start The Audit And Pressure Campaign
President Trump has no qualms bankrupting Iran’s oil business if it continues to pursue a nuclear weapons program. It is time to threaten the Qatari regime to reverse its nefarious connections to state sponsors of terrorism and vicious antisemitism, or face actions similar to those inflicted on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Congress should use the airplane gift as an opportunity to open a wide ranging probe into Qatari influence everywhere in the USA.
The New York Times, Al Jazeera and other anti-Israel media often quote the number of people killed by Hamas on October 7 and then the number of Gazans killed in an effort to show a disproportionate figure in casualties. As described on IsraelAnalysis.com “The Quantitative Shield for A Qualitative Problem,” the intentions of each side is erased, with the Palestinian Arabs seeking a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews, while Israel attempts to keep the jihadists from being able to commit such atrocities again.
The issue of the quantitative telling is also grossly misleading.
The New York Times deceptively frames the conflict of Israelis killed and Gazans killed
The anti-Israel propaganda uses a number of deliberately misleading tactics and phrases to inflame anger against Israel in its defensive war. The tactics include:
Israel’s dead are only from a single day, while Gazan dead are totaled over 15 months
Gazans are separated from their popular leadership of Hamas in describing the attackers as from “Hamas,” while the Gazan dead are “Palestinians”
Israel is described as launching the war in response to the Hamas attack, rather than Gazans launching the war
Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and several Palestinian Arab terrorist groups east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) are part of the Iranian proxies war against Israel; this is not a war of one local militant group against Israel
Hamas is never highlighted as a declared terrorist group by the United States and several western countries
Qatar-owned Hamas propaganda outlet Al Jazeera describes the war as being launched by Israel
Many Israelis have been killed since October 7, 2023, but those hundreds of dead soldiers are excluded in the anti-Israel account. The multifront war with 10,000+ projectiles fired at Israel is completely ignored in trying to make Gaza look like the single, small party in a fight against Israel.
Hamas is not just a “group” or “militants.” They are the ruling the government of Gaza. They were popularly elected to 58% of the Palestinian parliament in 2006 and continue to hold such representation. They continue to be the most popular Palestinian political party in every poll, and a majority of Gazans supported the October 7 massacre of Israelis. The war wasn’t just led by Hamas militants but a genocidal war supported by Gazans.
And the war was also supported by jihadists around the Middle East including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the government of Iran and the Houthis in Yemen. Each launched numerous missiles against Israel in support of the Gazan genocidal war.
A proper accounting of the history of this war will show several jihadi armies attacking Israel and killing well over the 1,200 people murdered on the first day of the war, with each army routed by the Israeli Defense Forces. It will show that the initial perpetrators of the war hid like cowards underneath their families for fifteen months, and Israel managed to keep the civilian death toll much lower than the 74% of Gaza which are women and children under 18 years old.
History will also judge the socialist-jihadi alliance which waged a propaganda war against Israel, and the gross misstatements made repeatedly to fan the flames of antisemitism from Australia to Canada.
When President-elect Donald Trump announced that “hell will break out” if Hamas doesn’t return the hostages that it brutally seized from Israel, this site pondered whether the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas-affiliated-UNRWA will be targets of the United States. It stands to reason that the media companies and sites of Qatar-owned Al Jazeera and Palestinian run-Wafa should be shut down in the United States under the same principle.
Al Jazeera has long been a mouthpiece of Hamas. Saudi Arabia shut down the media operations in 2017 stating that “the move comes after Al Jazeera promoted the plots of terrorist groups, supported the Houthi militias in Yemen, and tried to break internal ranks with Saudi Arabia by and harming its sovereignty.” Israel decided to shutter AJ’s operations in May 2024, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying “the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel.” Even the Palestinian Authority, perhaps looking to curry favor from the incoming Trump administration, decided last week to shut down Al Jazeera in the West Bank.
Al Jazeera has been fanning the flames of antisemitism in the Muslim world for years, claiming that Jews are “storming” the Al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. This is an echo of the Palestinian news site Wafa which continues to attempt to enlist the Muslim world to demand a Jew-free Temple Mount. The New York Times picks up on the propaganda and spreads it to its global liberal readers, cementing the socialist-jihadi alliance.
Even today, Wafa calls all Jews who are in Israel “colonists” who “storm the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque”, just by visiting Judaism’s holiest site, insisting that the only worshipers be Muslim.
It is highly probable that Trump will reverse course of the Biden administration, and ban Al Jazeera from the White House briefings. It will be interesting to see if the ban will cover all U.S. operations, and extend to Palestinian media as well.
In the middle of a multi-front war that Israel was fighting against Iranian proxies, the Jewish State decided to ban Qatar’s Al Jazeera media because of its positive depictions of Hamas and Palestinian terrorists groups, and negative stories about Israel. The New York Times ran many stories about Israel’s ban.
Last week, the Palestinian Authority also acted to ban the Hamas-supporting news company, as the PA began to arrest various terrorist groups in the West Bank in an attempt to show that it can be a trusted party to rule in Gaza. The story was picked up in a few publications, including Reuters, Variety, The Jerusalem Post, JNS and many other organizations such as i24News, Haaretz and the New Arab.
Yet The New York Times has still not covered the story, despite heavily covering Israel’s ban.
Al Jazeera has long tried to inflame a global jihad against Israel and instigate a Shiite-Sunni war in the Middle East, under the veneer of a legitimate news agency. Perhaps the New York Times is trying to both support the anti-Israel propaganda – which the grey lady echoes – by not covering the PA’s ban of Al Jazeera which would further delegitimatize AJ, and to paint Israel as anti-freedom of the press, which no one bothers to consider for the PA.
On September 15, 2023, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned 29 individuals and companies in Iran. In taking the action, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian Nelson said “As we approach one year since Mahsa Amini’s tragic and senseless death in the custody of Iran’s so-called ‘Morality Police,’ we recall that the movement of men and women across Iran, inclusive of different faiths and ethnic groups, was met with horrific violence, mass incarceration, and systemic internet disruption by the Iranian regime. The United States, alongside the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and our other international allies and partners, will continue to take collective action against those who suppress Iranians’ exercise of their human rights.”
On June 21, 2021, the United States seized 33 websites used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three websites operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (KH). The Department of State designated KH a Foreign Terrorist Organization. According to Reuters, “the sites seized included Press TV, the Iranian government’s main English-language satellite television channel, and Al Alam, its Arabic-language equivalent. Both came back online using Iranian domain addresses Alalam.ir and Presstv.ir.”
There was no brouhaha about the US actions against the lead state sponsor of terror. American media accepted the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)’s position that “that components of the government of Iran, to include IRTVU and others like it, disguised as news organizations or media outlets, targeted the United States with disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.”
But the US government and media reveal blatant hypocrisy when it comes to Israel’s actions against Qatar’s Al Jazeera, which Israel is closing after the Qatari-backed terrorist group Hamas savagely massacred 1,200 people in their homes.
The New York Times’ Serge Schmemann wrote an opinion piece on May 7, 2024 that started with “the Israeli government’s decision to kick Al Jazeera out of Israel says more about the government than the TV network.” This is the mantra of the Times: vilify the Israeli government as right-wing fanatics and don’t write about the antisemitic terrorism of Arab Muslims in the region, and their backers.
The piece would go on to belittle Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s worries about the security threat of Hamas by stating “the network was hostile to the messaging of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.” This is an insane inversion, turning the mouthpiece of a terrorist group which is waging a genocidal war against Israel, into a condemnation of Israel’s “right-wing government.”
New York Times opinion piece on May 7, 2024
Israel is engaged in an active war against a number of terrorist groups supported by Iran, Qatar and Turkey. In addition, roughly 25% of Israel’s population is Arab. It is fully understandable that the country would try to stop the “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations” of terrorist groups to avoid a multifront war, including from supporters inside of Israel.
When people hold Israel to a wildly different double standard it is the mark of antisemitism. When they do it about a terrorist group in the midst of fighting a genocidal war against the Jewish State, it’s the sign of dangerous antisemite.
It is rumored that Israel may soon ban Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned media company.
Qatar is Hamas’s principle backer (nearly $2 billion), and the oil rich kingdom has long used its state-owned Al Jazeera and AJ+ media platforms to broadcast the Palestinian political-terrorist group’s propaganda. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X/Twitter on April 1 that “the terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activities.”
At a press conference in Washington, D.C. later the same day, a journalist asked White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre about the potential Israeli ban. She said that it is “concerning,” and that “the United States supports the critically important work journalists around the world do.”
White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre on April 1, 2024 discussing Israel’s possible ban of Al Jazeera
Yet the United States itself bans terrorist-supporting media.
In December 2004, the United States banned Al Manar, the satellite station run by the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which is backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, much like Hamas. In June 2021, the U.S. blocked and/or seized the websites of several dozen Iranian sites for spreading “disinformation.”
More recently, the U.S. was influential in getting social media sites Facebook and Instagram to shut down Hamas’s postings. Right now, the U.S. government is trying to ban the entire social media platform of Tik Tok which is indirectly owned by the Chinese government due to security concerns, even though the country is not a designated terrorist entity.
Qatar is one of the richest countries in the world and uses its vast fossil fuel deposits to fund the murderous jihadists of Hamas, as well as radical jihadist professors and student groups at American universities. Despite knowing this, the Biden Administration offered a hypocritical defense of Al Jazeera.
The U.S. government should not only reverse the White House press secretary’s remarks about Israel’s potential actions against Al Jazeera, but should support the effort and consider doing the sames in the U.S. as well.
