Blue skies, warm air and a cup of coffee. Another day begins somewhere in New York.
First-year students at Columbia University open the feeds on their phones and scroll to pass the time. They are already accustomed to seeing content creators showcase cholesterol-laden recipes or obscenely expensive restaurants serving food at a kindergarten level. Boring.
But other videos also appear in their feeds. They do more than entertain. They relentlessly promote messages that would have been considered radical only a few years ago but are now reaching the heart of the mainstream. "Criticizing the State of Israel is not antisemitism," a bright-eyed presenter insists with feigned authority. "Are Americans breaking up with Israel?" she wonders in another reel.
"They're fucking stupid," a supporter of Iran's national soccer team says of Iranians demonstrating with the Lion and Sun flag, a symbol associated with supporters of the shah's son. "Just because I don't agree with the regime doesn't mean I don't support the national team," the fan says innocently. "The team is different. These are people representing Iran. I don't care about politics."
In another video, the American students are introduced to Amy Goodman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, speaking out against Israel. "I was born into a family where some survived and some did not survive the Holocaust. That statement, 'Never again,' which I grew up with, is applicable to all times and all places," Goodman says without blinking before denouncing the "genocide in Gaza."
The content creator enthusiastically reinforces her message: "She is a prominent Jewish American journalist who has spent decades amplifying voices excluded from the US mainstream media, especially Palestinian voices."
Behind this poison machine is AJ+, one of the platforms operated by Qatar's Al Jazeera network. It has millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X, and publishes content in English, Spanish, French and Arabic.
When AJ+ was launched in 2014, Doha News reported that it had an initial budget of several million dollars. Its various accounts drip-feed hostile messages about Israel around the clock. In 2019, its parent network, Al Jazeera, suspended two AJ+ employees after they published a video suggesting that Jews had used their status to "exaggerate the scale of the Holocaust," triggering widespread outrage.
"When we talk about AJ+, its origins lie in Al Jazeera America, which was launched around 2010," Dr. Ariel Admoni, a researcher at Ariel University and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told Israel Hayom. Al Jazeera America was the Qatari network's US branch.
"They established a media team in San Francisco, and the goal at the time was to make the content accessible to young Western audiences and move toward more subversive and provocative material," he said.
"In recent years, it has connected extremely well with a young progressive generation and with the anti-colonial discourse we see on university campuses. AJ+, for example, frequently plays on the narrative of the oppressed speaking out against oppressive authorities."
99% propaganda
Seven years have passed since the controversy over the Holocaust video, and Holocaust denial now slips fairly smoothly into AJ+ content.
The platform has learned how to operate more effectively, enlisting Jews from the progressive Left. These enlightened figures casually and self-righteously diminish the scale of the Holocaust, as Goodman does, and compare the murder of millions of people with a war against a murderous terrorist organization.
Like thieves protesting their innocence before anyone has accused them, AJ+ devoted another video entirely to rejecting allegations of antisemitism.
Here, too, Jewish interviewees are used as useful idiots.
Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, volunteered to defend Israel's detractors.
"If you can't win the argument on Israeli policy, then you're going to have to shut down criticism of the State of Israel," she said. "There is something so perverse about where we are today."
How does AJ+ answer the straightforward argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, given that the movement specifically denies the Jewish people the right to a nation-state?
"To this day, the Zionist project is based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy that grants exclusive rights to Jews. Anti-Zionism rejects that ideology of Jewish supremacy," another Jewish interviewee says, disregarding Israel's Declaration of Independence and anti-Zionist calls for a single Palestinian state "from the river to the sea."
Much of the platform's content is led by Dena Takruri, a Palestinian American and University of California, Berkeley graduate who joined Al Jazeera in 2008 and became one of AJ+'s leading figures.
In polished English, she presents the next blood libel: An American university is "selling the bodies of Americans donated to science to the US Navy, with some of them eventually ending up in the hands of Israeli military surgeons, all without the donors' consent."
The video is based on information from the US Navy indicating that a small number of Israel Defense Forces medical personnel received surgical training on cadavers at a Los Angeles university during the year. Absurd as it may sound, the video received thousands of shares and countless views.
It is a sophisticated tactic that invokes classic antisemitic motifs, in this case associating Jews with the desecration of corpses, without stating the accusation explicitly. At AJ+, we see them identify news stories that contain 1% truth and 99% propaganda, and frame them so that most of the blame falls on the US, the West and Israel," Admoni said.
"A few months ago, they posed the question, 'Why isn't the US Constitution democratic?' Last week, they portrayed the Trump administration as a regime that steals oil and murders people. They take a fragment of a sensational story and analyze and frame it however they like. You can also see cooperation with activists on university campuses."
Sinwar rebranded
The absurdity does not end in the US. It extends as far as Kenya. Several months ago, Takruri reported on Erez Rivkin, an Israeli entrepreneur who dared to purchase 520 dunams, about 128 acres, for a real estate project. In the theater of AJ+, this quickly became nothing less than the "recolonization of Kenya."
Takruri enlisted a local lawyer who explained that "many people in the country feel" the deal evokes memories of the period when Kenya was a British colony. "Seeing new people come in and buy vast tracts of land reawakens feelings of dispossession," lawyer Ng'ahira Githahi said. "Then there is the added drama of this being an Israeli arriving in the middle of a genocide."
Githahi also noted that the Zionist movement once considered establishing a Jewish state under the British Uganda Scheme in an area that is now part of Kenya. In general, the "genocide" in Gaza is mentioned in nearly every video as though it were an objective fact, like the existence of the sun, rather than a propaganda message promoted by terrorist organizations.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have indeed been killed in the Gaza war, but according to estimates, at least one-third were terrorists belonging to Hamas and other organizations. That would mean the proportion of civilian casualties was significantly lower than in other conflicts, particularly given the campaign's duration and the realities of warfare in a densely populated urban environment.
Nevertheless, even a report about soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and attending a yoga workshop becomes a "scandalous video" in the hands of AJ+. "While Israeli soldiers are given the opportunity to heal through yoga, the Israeli military continues its attacks across Gaza and southern Lebanon, despite ceasefire agreements," the Qatari channel declares in horror.
Hamas? Hezbollah? Terrorist organizations? The Oct. 7 massacre? All are almost entirely absent from the videos, presumably because they provide vital context that would undermine the propaganda's effectiveness.
One of the platform's lowest points came about a year ago, when it published a video defending slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 massacre and the man who personally led his people into war.
Human rights lawyer Noura Erakat remained undeterred. "Yahya Sinwar was killed in the southern Gaza Strip in an open building that was surrounded by infantry soldiers, not even special forces," she says in the AJ+ video.
"He was accidentally discovered by a unit of soldiers in training. That should tell us at least three things. "First, he was not beneath Palestinian civilian infrastructure in tunnels, as we had been told, and he was not using Palestinians as human shields."
Footage from the beginning of the war documented Sinwar inside an underground tunnel. He had also hidden in a tunnel near Israeli hostages. "Second, he was not in the tunnels surrounding himself with hostages, and therefore was not using Israelis as human shields," Erakat continues.
Sinwar had fled such a tunnel as IDF troops approached. "And third, it was not Israeli intelligence that led the unit to him, indicating that Israel has been attacking Gaza indiscriminately."
Israel did, in fact, have intelligence indicating that Sinwar was moving through the area. "The hostages are not their objective. Destroying Hamas is not their objective," Erakat says. "They want Palestinians to surrender and never fight back or fight for their freedom." In this way, without apology, a qualified lawyer stands before millions of viewers and justifies terrorism.
Creating problems, then solving them
Another low point came on Oct. 12, 2023, just days after Hamas' mass assault, in which terrorists murdered 1,163 Israelis and foreign nationals, including Jews and Muslims. It was also only days after 251 people, including children, women and elderly civilians, were abducted. AJ+ chose that moment to publish a video complaining about "why only Palestinians have to condemn violence."
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Authority's ambassador to the UK, had appeared in the Western media on Oct. 8 and was asked, as expected, to condemn Hamas' atrocities.
Zomlot instead became defensive. "This obsession with condemning the victim and blaming the victim, those who have been under occupation, colonization and siege for so many years ... this morally repugnant approach of always talking about Israel's right to self-defense ... the dehumanization of Palestinians must end," he responded during the BBC interview.
On the Qatari platform, Muslim American presenter Sana Saeed rushed to his defense. "Palestinian interviewees are asked to qualify their humanity through these condemnations," she said. "They are being asked to say, 'Yes, I don't want to kill you.' It is a rhetorical tool that has been weaponized against specific populations, Arabs and Muslims, for decades."
In other words, according to Saeed, the people murdered in the terrorist attack were not the victims. The real victims were the Palestinians' political representatives, who were forced to utter a word of criticism, without stammering, about a massacre involving murder, rape and kidnapping.
"There are several objectives being achieved simultaneously," Admoni said when asked about the motives behind Qatar's platform. "First, it seeks to create a destabilizing force. Qatar operates in many countries, particularly in the West, and has benefited from funding subversive narratives intended to undermine the discourse from within, so that in certain cases it can position itself as the 'problem solver.'
"We saw, for example, how Qatar offered in Germany to serve as a liaison between Afghan migrants and the German authorities. In principle, the long-term dream is to destabilize the discourse and then establish itself as the 'problem solver' for the difficulties that emerge from it.
"In the more immediate term, when Qatar is portrayed in pro-American and pro-Western colors, the Qatari media serves as a kind of certificate of ideological legitimacy in the Islamist world. They are conveying the message that they are, in fact, working to undermine the West.
"The third element is that this is part of a very powerful effort to position Qatar among the next generation. We saw how Northwestern University's US campus in Qatar collaborated with Al Jazeera from its earliest stages. In Qatar, this develops exponentially.
"You begin with cooperation between Al Jazeera and the campus in Doha. Then cooperation develops between the parent university and Qatar, eventually leading to honors being presented to Sheikha Moza," he said, referring to the mother of Qatar's emir and one of the country's most powerful figures. Then the Qatari media becomes a legitimate source from which news reports can be purchased.
"It reached the point where, during the 2024 election, AJ+ created an actual US election bot. Any American citizen could enter information and receive details about the politicians and their positions, with the bias built directly into the bot."
Against this background, Admoni stressed that Qatar's interests are not always so blatant or visible. "There have been cases in the past involving ostensibly social or educational initiatives, but it later emerged that they were attempting to organize people around the message that Israel is the devil and Qatar is a legitimate actor that simply contributes to various projects," he said. "In other words, anti-Israel sentiment was used to launder Qatar's legitimacy."
