A video recently posted by Al Jazeera’s US-based social media arm AJ+ on Twitter posed what it presumably thought was a challenging and provocative question: “If Palestinians protested for democracy and human rights in Tel Aviv, what would happen?”
Aside from the sheer inanity of the question (why would Palestinians be protesting for their rights in Tel Aviv and not, say, Palestinian cities such as Ramallah or Gaza City?), AJ+ ludicrously attempts to equate the recent judicial reform protests in Israel to the infamous Palestinian “Great March of Return” demonstrations in 2018.
Palestinians are calling out the double standards of the Israeli anti-government protests. Here’s why: pic.twitter.com/3mv3ZSxI43
— AJ+ (@ajplus) April 14, 2023
AJ+ interviews “human rights campaigner” Fadi Qurun, who claims that if Palestinians did protest, then “thousands, if not hundreds of Palestinians, would’ve been murdered by now.”
“We’ve already seen that when Palestinians protested in Gaza with the March of Return,” he continues. “We’ve seen that as well when Palestinians protested in the First Intifada seeking self-determination.”
First, the reimagining of the Great March of Return as a nonviolent protest in support of human rights takes considerable mental gymnastics. After all, this was a Hamas-orchestrated riot on the Gaza border in which armed terrorist combatants embedded themselves within civilian demonstrators to incite violence.
Second, it is interesting that Qurun, who has worked for the terror-linked Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, only references the First Intifada, which despite seeing countless Palestinian attacks on innocent Israeli civilians, was still a far cry from the Second Intifada and the campaign of gruesome suicide bombings and shootings for which it is associated, as well as more recent waves of terror perpetrated by Palestinians.
Compare this to the scenes of tens of thousands of Israelis — brandishing homemade signs rather than rocks — marching peacefully through the streets in opposition to the proposed judicial overhaul.
Qurun goes on to accuse demonstrating Israelis of “double standards,” arguing they are merely protesting for an illusion of democracy because most of them will have served in the IDF, which “controls the lives of over 5 million Palestinians,” before bizarrely stating that, in fact, “Israeli military generals try over 5 million Palestinians almost on a daily basis, and Palestinians have no say in it.”
Unsurprisingly, AJ+ fails to tell its viewers that it is actually the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip that governs 5.4 million Palestinians, in addition to the relevant detail that the last Palestinian elections were nearly 20 years ago.
In fact, if AJ+ had really wanted to answer its initial question of what would happen if Palestinians took to the streets in protest like Israelis, it could have shown viewers what actually has happened in the past.
For example, AJ+ could have mentioned how assembly without a permit is a criminal offense under Palestinian law and the Palestinian Authority arrested dozens of activists planning a pro-democracy rally in Ramallah in 2021, or how Hamas detained and tortured hundreds of civilians who protested against deteriorating economic conditions in the Gaza Strip in 2019.
To bolster its superficial observation that Palestinians lacking human rights is all Israel’s fault and has nothing to do with the actual Palestinian leadership itself, AJ+ references the thoroughly-debunked apartheid libel from chronically anti-Israel organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The narrator closes the video with scenes of what it suggests are heavy-handed and oppressive policing tactics used against Palestinians during several demonstrations in Israel and Gaza, which it claims Israelis were spared from during the judicial reform protests.
It appears, though, the outlet neglected to include footage of rioters hurling the rocks and Molotov cocktails that are invariably seen at Palestinian protests.
Al Jazeera by Stealth
Despite having more than 3 million subscribers across its social media channels, it is fair to say that AJ+ is not yet a household name in the United States.
Launched in 2014 and based in San Francisco, the internet channel was presumably given the rather nondescript moniker “AJ+” to appeal to American audiences by distancing itself from its parent company.
And the effort appears to have paid off considering that just this week Qatari-owned Al Jazeera’s official Twitter account was slapped with a new “government-funded media” label — a user warning that Twitter places on any media where the “government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content” — while AJ+ managed to slip under Twitter’s radar.
Unfortunately, avoiding the designation means Twitter users are not alerted to the reality of AJ+’s heavily-biased, anti-Israel propaganda that is plastered across its social media channels on an almost daily basis.
We encourage our readers to email or otherwise contact Twitter Support to demand that AJ+ is also given a “government-funded media” label so users are alerted to its potential bias.
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Phot0 credit: SAID KHATIB/AFP via Getty Images
