Amid the fallout over a video that denied the Holocaust, the anti-Semitism watchdog group Canary Mission has revealed that several members of Al Jazeera’s staff have held longstanding “disdain for Jews and Israel” that predate the video release.

The seven-minute video, which was published last week on the network’s online channel, AJ+, stated that Israel was the “greatest beneficiary,” and that the Holocaust happened, but “it’s different from how the Jews tell it.”

After international outrage, Al Jazeera retracted the video and announced that the makers of the video were to be suspended, and that staff were to undergo sensitivity and bias training.

However, before being pulled, the video reportedly gained 1.1 million Facebook and Twitter views.

Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate

by email and never miss

our top stories

“Al Jazeera and Qatar have proven once again that their hate for Israel and the Jewish people supersedes logic, and the network took action only after the video gained many views and received public condemnation,” Avi Benlolo, president and CEO of Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told JNS.

“The damage done to the Jewish people and Israel here through incitement of anti-Semitism is incalculable. All nations should evaluate Al Jazeera’s presence online and television.”

According to the Canary Mission, several staff members of Al Jazeera and its online channel AJ+ who appeared in the video have found to have had “repeated disdain for Jews and Israel” on their social-media profiles.

Among those profiled by the Canary Mission include:

Alex Safian, associate director for CAMERA, said that the Al Jazeera situation shows their longstanding anti-Semitism and bias against Israel to Western audiences.

“To a Western audience, Al Jazeera tries to appear more moderate, while in Arabic they show their true face and their actual motivations. In this case, they got caught and embarrassed, so they put on a show of being apologetic,” CAMERA associate director Alex Safian told JNS.

“Does this mark a change in the tenor of their journalism, including in Arabic? Will they end or even restrain their anti-Israel propaganda and incitement to violence? Not likely on all counts because doing so would betray their reason for being.”

The Al Jazeera situation follows on the heels of the scandal at The New York Times, which published two cartoons that were deemed anti-Semitic and the paper later apologized for.