Houthi propaganda via German servers | tagesschau.de

A Houthi propaganda station spreads anti-Semitic propaganda – a company in Bavaria hosted the banned content and made it accessible worldwide. Green politician von Notz calls for better controls.

Glossy videos show Houthi fighters in the Red Sea. They board freighters, bomb the ships, chant: “Death to the Jews. Victory for Islam.” The propaganda films are published by the Houthi’s house channel on ansarollah.com. They go around the world.

The American-Israeli research agency Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI for short, evaluates the videos from the Houthi broadcaster. Vice President Alberto Fernandez is convinced that the violent videos are intended to radicalize young people; it is a kind of “Houthi James Bond” or “Houthi Mission Impossible.”

It’s their way of “appealing to a certain youth culture, a globalized youth that maybe hates the West,” says Fernandez. “In this way, they are trying to address this target audience, which is very important to them.” Just like their actions, Fernandez also considers the Houthis’ media strategy to be very dangerous.

War propaganda the Houthis

We had that for weeks ARD-Politics magazine Report Munich and MEMRI tracked the data traces of the website and discovered that the Munich company Contabo GmbH was providing servers to the broadcaster from Yemen.

When asked, managing director Christian Böing explains that he didn’t know anything about it and just went through it Report Munich found out about the warlike and anti-Semitic content: “This means that our compliance department can take immediate action. And if we see that there is material there that does not belong on the Internet or should not be distributed, we take immediate action and block the channel.”

After the reporters tipped off, the Munich company took the propaganda station off its servers. The website initially went offline and is now apparently distributed via servers in Yemen. After the shutdown, Yemeni media published a Houthi press statement saying the shutdown was an “illegal measure that violated freedom of the press and freedom of expression.”

“Maximally bizarre”

German soldiers will soon be protecting merchant ships from Houthi attacks as part of an EU mission; the Bundestag still has to approve the mandate. Until recently, propaganda films with such attacks were shown on a German server.

The chairman of the parliamentary control committee, Konstantin von Notz, considers it to be “extremely bizarre” since “we are currently discussing sending German soldiers there to protect against exactly the kind of attacks that are being advertised here.”

Such films, according to von Notz, are classic propaganda produced with a lot of money that encourage people to commit violence and crimes. It should not run on German infrastructure.

Houthi videos show Training raid on kibbutz

A video on ansarollah.com shows a military exercise by the Islamists. In it they train an attack on Jews. In the video, they bomb a tent with Stars of David in the middle of Yemen. It was distributed via the Munich company’s servers.

Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the European Rabbinical Conference, is concerned: “We know that since October 7th, anti-Semitism has increased significantly in Europe and in the USA, with hundreds of percent of anti-Semitic events against Jews and against Israelis. This is not happening in a vacuum. We’re talking about channels like those from Yemen.”

Green politician von Notz expects the federal government, the police and the services to take decisive action in this area. It cannot be the case that anti-Semitism and war propaganda are spread via German servers, said von Notz.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior has received the request from Report Munich to ansarollah.com not answered by the editorial deadline.