YouTube ignored damning reports flagging the Jew-hatred and incitement of two notorious hate preachers with a combined total of more than 3.5 million subscribers, the JC can reveal.
Whistleblower Khaled Hassan submitted his report on Wagdy Ghoneim, an Egyptian jihadist and Muslim Brotherhood leader, on 26 August, shortly after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
The report said that Ghoneim “celebrated” the event in four separate videos, describing supporters of the previous, democratic Afghan government as “infidels” who should be “punished”.
Ghoneim, Mr Hassan pointed out, “has been on the list of extremists banned from entering the UK for inciting terrorism since 2009”. He was wanted on terrorism charges in America since 2004, and an Egyptian court had convicted him for leading a terrorist cell in 2014.
Mr Hassan’s report said that Ghoneim had falsely claimed that Egypt’s President Sisi “is secretly a Jewish person working on advancing the interests of Israel while causing harm to Egypt’s economy and national security”. Moreover, in 2017, YouTube had been forced to apologise to advertisers including mobile phone firm Verizon when it emerged that Ghoneim was “monetising” his channel and running its adverts.
Failing to remove Ghoneim’s videos amounted to “promoting radical ideologies and enabling radical / terrorist groups to recruit members into their ranks”, the report warned.
The second report, on hate preacher Israr Ahmed, by another Crisp employee, was sent to YouTube on 28 October. It flagged that in his videos, Ahmed “used the phrase ‘Jew World Order’.” The preacher argued that Jews – described as “cursed people” and a “cursed race” – had conspired against Muslims for centuries, and that they were followers of Satan, intent on destroying Islam.
The videos “pose a serious risk of inciting hatred against Jews [and] a realistic possibility of leading to real-world violence”, the report warned.
This appeared to come true when Blackburn-born terrorist Malik Faisal Akram, who had watched the videos, took four people hostage at gunpoint in a Texas synagogue in January.
