LONDON: “I don’t know what they’re doing, I just know that what they did to us is wrong. And if they do it to us then I’m very sure they do it to millions of others at the same time,” Nuseir Yassin, the founder and CEO of content-creation platform Nas Daily, told Arab News in an exclusive interview about Al Jazeera’s campaign against him and his company, which he describes as “fake news.”
Yassin, a Palestinian-Israeli, was featured in a video report published by AJ+ Arabic on Sept. 16, in which the news channel accused him and his social-media platform of being part of Israel’s propaganda machine.
Since then, Yassin has been subjected to a barrage of harassment online by Al Jazeera and its Turkish and Qatari affiliates, as well as reporters — all accusing him of being an Israeli spy.
“There is not a single ounce of truth to that because I know the truth. I’m the only person in the world that knows the truth and I know that, finally, I have real evidence that these guys are fake news and I didn't want to be quiet anymore,” Yassin said.
“Thank God there is social media, because I don’t need to go on broadcast TV to speak up, I can just make a video from my bedroom and tell millions of people how this institution has been on the side of fake news for far too long and it cannot continue to exist,” he added.
Nas Daily, which has over two million followers on Instagram, responded to AJ+ Arabic in a video titled “Be Careful of AlJazeera,” which it published across its social-media accounts.
The caption read: “I am a victim of Fake News...and I can't be quiet anymore. I really really hate drama. I just want to travel the world and show you the positive side of it. But some people don't like that. In the past month, there was a coordinated Fake News campaign against Nas Daily accusing us of things that are factually incorrect. They have unlimited money. They have unlimited reach. They have unlimited power.”
In the video, Yassin explained what had happened to him and his company, highlighted several controversies Al Jazeera has been involved, and pointed out the stark differences between the content published on its English and Arabic platforms.
AJ+ Arabic drew widespread condemnation in 2019 over a video that was branded “Holocaust denial,” which claimed the Jews exaggerated the scale of the genocide to help establish Israel.
More recently, Al Jazeera’s Arabic news channel aired an interview with terrorist-designated group Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh, as well as a podcast glorifying the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, both of which have stirred the ongoing debate surrounding the network’s alleged promotion of terrorism.
“One day they’re praising the Jewish community on their English-language channel directed at Western viewers, and the next they’re promoting hate speech against the Jews on their Arabic channels, and allowing preachers like Qatar-based Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to endorse the killing of innocent women and children on Al Jazeera Arabic just because they’re Jews,” Al Jazeera English’s former international bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, told Arab News in a previous interview.
Through his Al Jazeera program “Sharia and Life,” Egyptian cleric Al-Qaradawi issued religious edicts calling for the killing of Jews.
“Take the treacherous Jewish aggressors … They’ve spread too much tyranny and corruption on Earth. Oh God, take this Jewish Zionist band of aggressors and don’t spare a single one of them. Oh God, count their numbers, slay them one by one and spare none,” Al-Qaradawi said in a Jan. 9, 2009 sermon aired on Al Jazeera Arabic.
