context
Hardly any other media is as present in the Gaza Strip as the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera. Its content reaches millions of people on social networks – and is often very one-sided.
At the end of January, a page-long document from the militant Islamist Hamas appeared on the Internet in which the terrorist organization justified the October 7 attack on Israel. The atrocities committed are kept quiet and instead there are numerous accusations against Israel. The document was published by the broadcaster Al Jazeera – without context or other comments.
As early as October 7, Al Jazeera offered Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, who lives in the Qatari capital Doha, a platform for his propaganda. He called for “resistance” against “Zionist aggression” on the station, as the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” reported. He described the terrorists as “heroes” and spoke of a “great success”.
High presence in the Gaza Strip
The Qatari television station Al Jazeera is currently shaping its reporting on the war in the Middle East from the Gaza Strip. Many of the images and videos that can currently be seen from the Gaza Strip come from Al Jazeera, as this is almost the only media that has had employees stationed there for years and is therefore currently reporting from the Gaza Strip without the accompaniment of the Israeli military.
However, the line between news reporting and propaganda is fluid – the proximity to the terrorist organization Hamas is an important factor that needs to be taken into account, especially in Middle East reporting.
Propaganda accusations from various sides
Because of this, there is a lot of criticism of Al Jazeera: “This channel incites against the citizens of Israel, it films our troops in assembly areas outside Gaza. It is a propaganda mouthpiece,” said Israeli Information Minister Shlomo Karhi.
There are also voices in Germany that question the station’s credibility – including that of Michael Blume, anti-Semitism commissioner for the Baden-Württemberg state government.
What is Al Jazeera?
Al Jazeera was founded in 1996 by the then Qatari head of state Emir Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani. Within a short time, the station reached a large audience in the Arab world. Unlike most major media outlets of the time, Al Jazeera also reported critically on the heads of state and governments in this region. The station became particularly popular among opposition figures and became an important foreign policy instrument for Qatar.
The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in particular used Al Jazeera to spread their own views – sometimes with their own broadcasts. Al Jazeera has been repeatedly criticized for this closeness in the past, especially during the so-called Arab Spring in the early 2010s. At that time, the Muslim Brotherhood had come to power in Egypt, among other places.
development towards propaganda station
“It was already a revolution back then that free television was available in the Middle East for the first time,” says Andreas Jacobs, who headed the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s foreign office in Cairo from 2007 to 2012 and is now head of the foundation’s social cohesion department is.
However, Jacobs would no longer classify Al Jazeera as a reputable channel or as an independent channel for a long time. He sees Al Jazeera as part of a broad Islamist family of arguments to which Jacobs includes the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organization Hamas.
The terrorist organization Hamas benefits from Qatar’s proximity to Islamist groups. The head of the Hamas politburo resides in one Report by Guido Steinberg from the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP) According to an office in the capital Doha, financial support also flowed from Qatar to Hamas.
Steinberg also suspects Qatar’s populist motives behind the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas: “In the Arab world, the Islamists are still the strongest opposition forces,” he writes. “They could continue to be the actors of the future in the Arab world, and their supporter Qatar would benefit from this in the event of new upheavals. This explains why Al Jazeera continues to operate like a propaganda station for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.”
English program for western audiences
Al Jazeera is considered the broadcaster with the widest reach in the Arabic-speaking region. But Al Jazeera is not only successful in the Middle East – according to its own information, the Qatari news channel reaches more than 430 million people worldwide. The station’s programming is no longer just aimed at Arab viewers: the English-language offering AJ+ on social networks is also explicitly aimed at a European and US audience.
AJ+ presents itself as strategically modern and progressive in the West, which is also referred to as “woken Islamism”. For example, there is also content that advocates for the rights of LGBTIQ* people – although homosexuality in Qatar can be punished with up to seven years in prison, and under certain conditions there is even a death penalty.
“Al Jazeera increasingly uses progressive discourse elements from the Western world and addresses the experiences and realities of Muslim young people in a very targeted manner,” says Jacobs. Much of AJ+’s content relates to specific experiences of discrimination and exclusion that Muslim young people experience in Germany or other Western countries.
“These experiences of injustice are placed in context with the Islamist narrative of the victimhood of Muslims and an international Islamophobia that we must stand together and defend ourselves against,” said Jacobs.
Massive increase after Hamas attack
The program for an English-speaking audience appears to have been particularly successful since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th. Since then, the Instagram account “Al Jazeera English” has been subject to an evaluation by the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS). tagesschau.de According to this, more than 1.3 million followers have been added, bringing the number of subscribers to more than 4.3 million – an increase of almost 44 percent.
The situation is similar with AJ+. The station’s youth offering has increased its subscriber numbers by 38 percent since October 7th and now has 1.3 million followers.
“One worrisome Development”
Overall, Al Jazeera has been providing very one-sided reporting on the Middle East conflict for years, says Jacobs. The station shows emotional eyewitness reports and images of injured Palestinian children or grieving women, but leaves out the Israeli perspective. “This creates a shift in the perception of reality. And Al Jazeera is given a completely different level of credibility because they are closer to the realities of life of Muslim young people,” says Jacobs.
According to Jacobs, terms such as resistance, genocide or apartheid are used as a matter of course, are actively used and are not questioned. Rather, the narrative has prevailed that Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7th was a legitimate response to decades of apartheid.
“The narrative is that the Israelis are essentially to blame for the Hamas massacre. And I consider that not only a grotesquely wrong development, but also a worrying one for Germany, because it reinforces discourses of demarcation and increasingly endangers social cohesion,” says Jacobs.
Misinformation about explosion at the hospital in Gaza
This became particularly clear in mid-October: After an explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera, citing the Hamas-controlled health authority, also reported that Israel had attacked the clinic with a rocket and that several hundred people had died – a version that which later gave rise to strong doubts.
The news sparked spontaneous gatherings around the world at which anti-Semitic content was also spread. After Information from the Federal Association of Anti-Semitism Research and Information Centers (RIAS) There was also a sharp increase in anti-Semitic rallies in Germany. It happened at many pro-Palestinian rallies Non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) According to him, “threats, insults and attacks on reporters have increased.”
According to RSF, the attacks are “an expression of intense mistrust of journalists.” Jacobs confirms this. “Al Jazeera deliberately fuels distrust in the western media by claiming, for example, that the western media is hiding the truth, whereas they are the only ones depicting the truth.”
Turkish channel on Erdogan’s line
Stories like this go far beyond Al Jazeera’s reporting. Along with newsfluencers, Islam bloggers and other state-controlled media, the Qatari news channel is just one part of the media landscape that provides distorted reports on the war in the Middle East.
The public broadcaster Türkiye Radyo ve Televizyon Kurumu (TRT) in Turkey also repeatedly adopts pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel narratives – and sometimes spreads false reports. The broadcaster shared images on social networks of an alleged action in which a Palestinian flag and the phrase “Stop genocide in Gaza immediately” were said to have been projected on the facade of the Bundestag building. In reality, however, this action never took place.
TRT Deutsch has also been able to increase subscriber numbers by 33 percent since October 7th with its style of reporting and now has a following of just over 216,000.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party also play a role in the channel’s content. Because Erdogan has brought almost all of the country’s high-reach media to his line: According to the human rights organizations Article 19 and Human Rights Watch (HRW), 90 percent of the country’s traditional Turkish media are closely linked to the government and report “disproportionately on President Erdogan and the campaign of the ruling party”.
Türkiye part of the problem
When reporting on the war in the Middle East, TRT adopts narratives similar to those of Erdogan himself. Among other things, he described Israel as a “terrorist state” and the terrorist organization Hamas as a “liberation organization.” In articles by TRT Deutsch, Hamas is called a “resistance organization” and there is also talk of an “Israeli war of annihilation.”
“The Turkish government and state-affiliated Turkish media have aligned themselves with the Islamist language of the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Jacobs. “In 2013, a significant number of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood moved to Istanbul. Together with Qatar, Turkey is the state that most strongly supports these narratives and also spreads them in their media representation. In this respect, they are part of the problem.”