Mr McCarthy still works at an employment law firm, but was struck off the register of barristers by an independent tribunal in 2017. Sara Jagger, the Bar Standards Board’s director of professional conduct, said then he had “provided false client letters” and that “such actions are clearly incompatible with membership of the bar”.
The JC contacted Mr McCarthy for a response but he did not comment.
His involvement in the Al Jazeera series is just one of several concerns among Jewish organisations, which accuse The Labour Files of being biased and misleading.
A Truth and Justice tweet
In March, Labour Files producer James Kleinfeld tweeted in support of Lowkey, a highly controversial musician who has rapped about the “Zionist lobby”. Mr Kleinfeld expressed “all my solidarity” with Lowkey, claiming he was “the latest victim of attempted — and failed — character assassination by the Israel lobby”.
Phil Rees, the head of the Al Jazeera investigations department, has a long record of expressing militant anti-Israel views.
In an Al Jazeera series shown in 2009, he said that in its conflict with Hamas, Israel’s conduct amounted to “terrorism”, and that when Hamas launched rocket and suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, they were “the only means they have to challenge Israel’s military superiority”.
He repeated this claim in 2012, arguing in another Al Jazeera programme that “every rocket fired by Hamas” was “supported by most Palestinians”, and that by doing so they were merely “trying to survive”.
The Labour Files was shown on Al Jazeera’s English channel, which was launched in 2006. However, there is also concern about its older, highly-influential Arabic service.
Both the channel and its website have published flagrantly antisemitic content.
Another Truth and Justice tweet referring to the late Chief Rabbi
Like Al Jazeera English, they are owned and run by Qatar’s ruling al-Thani dynasty, which has supported the Hamas regime in Gaza with donations running to hundreds of millions of pounds.
Research by the Community Security Trust (CST) has identified numerous examples. One of the most extraordinary dates from 2007, when Al Jazeera Arabic claimed that former French president Nicolas Sarkozy owed his success to the “fact” his mother was Jewish (in reality, one of his grandfathers was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism before Mr Sarkozy was born).
It went on to make the astonishing claim that Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer falsely accused of spying, was cleared because of the “uproar raised by the Jews”.
Phil Rees, head of Al Jazeera investigations
In 2017, Al Jazeera Arabic examined the “officials of Jewish origin” who “surround Donald Trump” and occupy “many lofty positions in the White House”. It went on to name “the 11 most prominent Jewish personalities on Trump’s team”.
The same year, the website published an article about “the origins of terrorism in Jewish thought”, claiming that “in their religious books you will find many texts that incite hatred of others”.
Last year, Al Jazeera published a guide to “the prominent plans of the Jewish lobby in America to defend Israeli aggression”, claiming they sought to influence members of Congress.
It also broadcast a documentary claiming that “hating Jews comes from Zionism… The equation is if Jews have their religious human and political rights in their country they will stay where they are and if they get hated and gross injustice they will move to the occupied land and become Zionist.”
Al Jazeera Arabic journalists have also posted antisemitic tweets.
The CST dossier includes a post shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine by leading anchorman Ahmed Mansour: “Ukraine has a population of 43 million and the number of Jews is no more than 120,000. Yet they rule Ukraine. President Zelensky, the Jew, pleads with Jews: ‘I am now addressing all the Jews of the world, don’t you see what is happening?’”
Earlier, he had suggested the Abraham Accords were “a real-estate acquisition by Trump, the real-estate dealer, and his son-in-law, the Jewish real-estate dealer Jared Kushner”.
Senior correspondent Jamal Elshayyal has repeatedly attacked the “Zionist lobby” in Britain, claiming “Aljazeera Arabic tops viewing figures because it does not succumb” to it. In 2011, he claimed the Norwegian mass-murderer Ander Breivik’s “Zionism” was “in line with pro-Israel European right”.
In April 2022, Al Jazeera presenter Tamer al-Mishal celebrated the fatal shootings of three civilians in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff St, calling perpetrator Raed Hazem “the martyr of the homeland”.
Ahmed Mansour also pitched in, posting: “A single resistance fighter has struck terror into an occupying country… May Allah have mercy on him.”
Perhaps the worst of many examples was unearthed by monitoring group Camera. In 2019, an Al Jazeera Arabic documentary referred to the murder of Jews in the Holocaust as “a narrative endorsed by the Zionist movement”.
It said that Jews are the focus of Holocaust remembrance because there were so many “Jewish groups possessing financial resources, media institutions, research centres and academic institutions that were able to highlight the Jewish victims more so (than others)”.
On this occasion, Al Jazeera suspended two of the production team and pulled the video from its website, admitting it had breached the channel’s guidelines.
However, according to their LinkedIn profiles, both suspended employees have continued to work for Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera English and its Arabic station were contacted for comment.
