Did YouTube hate videos inspire Texas synagogue siege?

Cleric Tariq Jamil’s remarks are less inflammatory, but he claimed in a video to his nearly six million subscribers that Jews had “distorted” the holy books.

Akram helped organise a “rock star” welcome for Jamil, leader of the conservative Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat, when he visited Blackburn in 2017.

In chaotic scenes, the local Tablighi mosque, Makki Masjid, was mobbed and loudspeakers were installed on the roof so the crowds outside could hear his sermon.

Last June, the JC revealed how hundreds of hours of antisemitic YouTube videos in Urdu were “stoking hatred among British Pakistanis”. YouTube failed to remove the channels highlighted by the investigation, and did not even provide an on-the-record reply.

Some of the worst examples flagged last year — including a video showcasing the threat, “Jews… we are coming after you now” — were allowed to remain on the platform.

Nadine Dorries, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, told the JC: “It is awful that YouTube has allowed its site to be used to incite racial violence and terrorism and to profit from it. 

“We will hold social media companies to account for their role in the spread of extremist ideologies online.

“I will shortly be introducing a strengthened and re-written Online Safety Bill in Parliament which will force them to remove this hateful content.

“If they don’t, they will face huge fines and have their services blocked, with their bosses held criminally liable for failing to cooperate.”

YouTube, which has been criticised for failing to moderate non-English content, has made undisclosed sums of money through advertisements attached to the antisemitic content, which continue to attract millions of views.

The Texas terrorist was particularly enthralled by the video sermons of Dr Israr Ahmed, sources told the JC.

Speaking in Urdu in one clip, Ahmed said that Jews were “the ultimate source of evil [and] the biggest agents of Satan”. They “control the banking system of the world”, he added. 

In a separate video entitled “History of the Jews”, Ahmed claimed Jews had been acting against humanity for over 2,000 years.

“The name of Jews became an expletive,” he said. “They became akin to pigs.”

Underneath the video, one YouTube user asked why there were no English subtitles provided.

Revealingly, another replied: “I’m happy that there are no subtitles. If these are available with subtitles, this’ll be removed from here.”

In one of the Urdu hate videos flagged to YouTube by the JC last June, Zaid Hamid, who is known for sporting a red beret, declared in a rant: “Hitler was an angel, the way he took action against Jews, the way he killed Jews.”

That video, which went viral on WhatsApp, is estimated to have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

In another clip, Imran Riaz Khan, a Pakistani television personality with 2.2 million followers, said: “[The Jews] lobby a lot in America and have strangled America, have it totally controlled. They do it in Europe and America and elsewhere.”

It is not known whether Akram watched the videos flagged by the JC investigation last year.

But YouTube failed to remove those channels, and continues to make money from them.

Imran Ahmed, Chief Executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said: “Profiting from material which endangers the wellbeing and security of others is a fundamentally unethical business decision.  

“As Big Tech whistleblowers have revealed, moderation of non-English language social media content is even poorer than it is in the English language.

“Social media platforms are therefore vulnerable to abuse by terrorists, people traffickers, hate preachers and myriad other bad actors.”

Akram’s family have said that he was influenced by hardliners. They said he joined the conservative Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat – or “missionary group” – and was known to be a dedicated follower of is leader, YouTube preacher Jamil, in 2003.

Within a year, Akram was adopting its harsh Islamic strictures. He grew a long beard and began forcing his wife to wear a veil, against her wishes.

According to friends and family, he started disappearing for months in Pakistan and the UK.

A Tablighi Jamaat devotee told the JC Investigations Team: “Faisal Akram was tasked to raise large donations for Tariq Jamil, who travelled from Pakistan especially for the [2017] event to speak about piety.

“Faisal Akram also hosted a reception for Tariq Jamil in Blackburn and went out of his way to accommodate him.

“He went door to door to raise cash in the name of event and kept some funds for himself.”

Akram was later banned from the Tablighi mosque in Blackburn after he went too far, calling for jihad against Israel and US inside the mosque.

He also verbally attacked the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia for being on good terms with the Israel.

It is not believed that Akram had further dealings with Tablighi Jamaat’s operation after the ban.

Another YouTube video featuring Tablighi leader Tariq Jamil shows him saying on May 18 2021, at the height of Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza: “The whole world’s occupier is targeting us, the world oppressors joke about us, they dance on our dead bodies, they put our houses on fire, it’s our houses which are bulldozed… Oh Allah, the oppressor is challenging us.”

On a separate video-sharing site, Dailymotion.com, Jamil says in another sermon: “A Jew’s funeral was taking place and the Prophet expressed sorrow, he sighed. They said, ‘he’s a Jew, a Jew’. The Prophet replied, I am sighing because I couldn’t make him understand the Kalimas [the six pillars of the Islamic faith] and he has gone to hell.”

Fiyaz Mughal, OBE, founder and trustee of Muslims Against Antisemitism, said that Muslims needed to “reclaim their faith” from the fanatics.

He said: “The antisemitism in these YouTube videos show a deep strain of personal hatred against Jews that has been intertwined with the faith of Islam. 

“This is what we find, time and time again, with Islamist preachers.

“That they insert their manifest hatred of Jews into religious texts and edicts which are then circulated on You Tube.”

A spokesman for the Community Security Trust said: “Time and again we see social media platforms irresponsibly providing a global platform for hateful content that they are in no position to monitor, assess and control.

“There seems to be a particular problem with non-English content and it is no surprise, sadly, to see that online videos may have contributed towards the extremist mindset that led Malik Faisal Akram to take hostages in a Texas synagogue.”

Counter-terrorism expert Lord Carlile added: “It is extremely revealing but not unexpected to show that the perpetrator was radicalised through online sermons.  

“It demonstrates that the term ‘lone actor’ is often misleading.  Almost all terrorists like him are part of connections often facilitated by internet service providers.

“I hope that we are now going to hear from YouTube that they will set up a systematic control system to remove dangerous material from their online product.

Six people people have been arrested in Manchester in connection with the terrorist attack in Texas on January 15.

Anthony Glees, security and intelligence expert at the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, called on the video sharing giant to “remove these videos immediately”.

“It is outrageous they are being broadcast to millions of subscribers,” he said. “They are highly dangerous and undermine our national security here and in the UK.”

He added that it was obvious Akram had been radicalised, though pointed out that it was not certain whether that had happened in person or online.

He said: “Naturally, I understand the ‘free speech’ argument used by US companies, but with global reach comes global responsibility.

“YouTube, like other social media providers, should stop promoting terrorist and extremist materials, whether against Jews, or women or anyone else.”

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Perhaps now, this evidence that the sermons may have incited Malik Faisal Akram to take Jews hostage in a synagogue will move the company to act. 

“Or does it take actual dead Jews to persuade social media networks not to take the blood money that comes from broadcasting videos such as these?”

A spokeswoman for Google, which owns the YouTube platform, said it was reviewing the videos and subscription channels highlighted by the JC.

In 2019, YouTube updated its hate speech policy which led to a fivefold increase in offending videos being removed from the site. Its guidelines sate that antisemitism and hate speech are not allowed and videos in breach of the policy will be removed.