The Truth Al Jazeera Can’t Hide

The Zionist
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Electronic Intifada (EI) leaked a clip from a buried undercover documentary focusing on the Israel lobby in the USA.

The Emir of Qatar shelved the documentary rather than allow Al Jazeera to broadcast it.

In the above clip a staffer claims that Israeli/American philanthropist Adam Milstein funds the website Canary Mission.

Milstein has denied funding the website.

They also have Milstein in conversation saying some negative things about BDS activists.

Below is a second leaked clip. It shows staff members in a minibus claiming that they are “astroturffing” a demonstration.

Anti-Zionist commentator Max Blumenthal is in the documentary explaining that this means the demonstration is fake or created “using corporate money”. It’s interesting to note that despite being in it, Blumenthal claims not to have seen the documentary.

Background

Last year Al Jazeera released a four part documentary called “The Lobby”. They covertly recorded Shai Masot, an Israeli diplomat based in London, saying:

“She knows which MPs I would like to take down…the Deputy Foreign Minister”

This resulted in a public apology by the Israeli ambassador Mark Regev and Masot being recalled to Israel. Jeremy Corbyn called for an inquiry into Israeli influence on the UK (in stark contrast to his handling of the Skripal affair).

There is a second documentary made by Al Jazeera concentrating on the Israel Lobby in the USA. Al Jazeera used a British Jew called James Kleinfeld to infiltrate various organisations in the US. This is the documentary buried by the Emir.

The Accusations

Writing in LeMonde the journalist Alain Gresh, who claims to have seen the full documentary stated that:

Since the failure of the 1993 Oslo accords, Israel has been led by far-right parties that reject any diplomatic solution. There is no question of any discussion of the fate of the Palestinians, the future of the settlements or the tragedy in Gaza. And the lobby’s support for Netanyahu and Trump is unlikely to generate much enthusiasm among US students. Journalist Max Blumenthal points out that the lobby took a similar approach to the documentary, refusing discussion and likening investigative journalism to espionage; discrediting Al Jazeera by dismissing it as a puppet of Qatar;

The above is factually untrue vis-a-vis Israel. Since Oslo collapsed into the bloodbath that was the Second Intifada Israel has entered into several periods of protracted negotiations with Palestinians. Under Netanyahu Israeli halted all settlement building at one point as a result.

More importantly, in this context, the documentary not being aired on the orders of the Emir of Qatar validates the criticisms made of Al Jazeera. Imagine Netanyahu ordering Ha’aretz not to publish a scoop and you start realising just how much control the Emir exerts over Qatari media.

EI Claims:

The leading neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is functioning as an agent of the Israeli government, Al Jazeera’s forthcoming investigation on the US Israel lobby will reveal.

And

Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, is said to state that the foundation is “working on” projects for Israel including “data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best.”

Gresh put it very differently in Le Monde:

“Vaknin-Gil admitted that to gather information, ‘we have FDD. We have others working on this.’”

The EI article’s author, Asa Winstanley, has a well earned reputation for hyperbole and promoting conspiracies.

Gresh adds:

As Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the website The Electronic Intifada, says, ‘if you had on tape a statement of a senior Russian or Iranian or even Canadian official saying that they were running covert operations, to spy on Americans, and using an organisation like the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies as a front … it would be a bombshell.’

Except there isn’t a tape of a senior Israeli official saying they’re running covert ops to spy on Americans and using an organisation as a front. They allegedly have an Israeli official saying the innocuous “We have FDD. We have others working on this.” But we’ll never know for sure, unless EI leak more of the documentary.

And this is where EI appears to be employing smoke and mirrors. The British documentary with four episodes, each 50 minutes long had a total of fifteen seconds of footage offering interesting information.

Looking at what’s been written by Winstanley and Gresh as well as what’s in the clips EI leaked, one can’t help but reach the conclusion that for all their efforts the Al Jazeera crew really didn’t find much of substance.

Milstein being behind Canary Mission seems incontrovertible…but so what?

Perhaps the biggest shock came not to the Israel Lobby in the USA but to the Al Jazeera crew. It turns out that they really were working for an arm of the Qatari state all along. A word from the Emir and their work was buried.

Lead journalist Clayton Swisher is still on sabbatical as a result while the Israel Lobby carries on as before.

All there is to conclude from this is that there isn’t anything going on other than lobbying for Israel and a philanthropist funding organisations countering antisemitism and hatred of Israel.

Which was the truth that we knew already.

Still willing the dream into a continued reality

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