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Lawmakers Call On Trump Admin to Investigate Al Jazeera for Spying On Jews

[additional-authors]
February 22, 2018
Photo from Flickr/Joi Ito.

A couple of congressional lawmakers are calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch an investigation into Al Jazeera for their spy operation against American Jews.

In a letter to Sessions, Reps. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) argued that Al Jazeera should register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) given that the news outlet spreads propaganda from the Qatari government throughout the United States.

“We find it troubling that the content produced by this network often directly undermines American interests with favorable coverage of U.S. State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Jabhat alNusra, al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria,” Zeldin and Gottheimer wrote. “Furthermore, Al Jazeera’s record of radical anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel broadcasts warrants scrutiny from regulators to determine whether this network is in violation of U.S. law.”

The lawmakers added, “Such an investigation should cover the full range of activities undertaken by Al Jazeera in the United States, including reports that it infiltrated American 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) nonprofit organizations.”

Al Jazeera’s spy operation reportedly involved the news organization sending a mole to various Jewish and pro-Israel organizations to cover their efforts in combatting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on behalf the Israeli government. Al Jazeera conducted the operation as part of a documentary that purportedly exposes Jewish control of the U.S. government, a longtime anti-Semitic slur.

If Al Jazeera is required to register under FARA, they would have to “periodically disclose the nature of its financial arrangements with the foreign principal and provide detailed, regular reports about the distribution of “informational materials” on its behalf,” according to the Brookings Institute.

“American citizens deserve to know whether the information and news media they consume is impartial, or if it is deceptive propaganda pushed by foreign nations,” Zeldin and Gottheimer wrote.

According to Discover the Networks, Al Jazeera was first established in 1996 from a $150 million grant by the emir of Qatar, whose government funnels money to Islamists worldwide. Members of Al Jazeera’s staff have ties to Islamic terror groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda; they were also the platform Osama bin Laden used to disseminate his various propaganda videos.

Unsurprisingly, Al Jazeera’s coverage is slanted against the United States and Israel, even going as espousing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Israel warned Jews about the 9/11 terror attacks before the attacks occurred. One of their sources for this was David Duke, and they failed to disclose Duke’s prior connections to the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party.

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