The antisemitic videos that YouTube was warned about

YouTube whistleblower Khaled Hassan, a moderator who formerly worked for the social media giant, repeatedly flagged content that attacked Jews and glorified attacks on Israelis. Some of the worst offenders were channels such as Israr Ahmed's. Ahmed, a radical Islamist preacher from Pakistan who died in 2010, has an active presence on YouTube where his followers uploads videos that have Screenshot 2022-03-31 at 16.37.43 Israr Ahmed’s YouTube channel, with 2.9 million subscribers, is a repository of extreme antisemitism. In film after film, the late Urdu preacher likens Jews to pigs, recycles conspiracy theories about the power of the Rothschilds and Jews in general, and says they are trying to destroy Islam. Ofcom fined a TV channel £65,000 for broadcasting what it called his ‘hate speech’ in 2016 – but the same material has stayed on YouTube. Screenshot 2022-03-31 at 16.37.47 Egyptian jihadist Wagdy Ghoneim’s YouTube channel, which had 549,000 subscribers, included not one but four videos celebrating the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, in which he described the deposed government and its Western supporters as ‘infidels’ who deserved punishment. He has falsely claimed that Egypt’s President Sisi was a Jew working for Israel. In 2017, YouTube apologised for letting Ghoneim make $25,000 (£19,000) by monetising his channel with adverts – but left his videos online. YouTube took down Ghoneim’s channel on Wednesday but he appears elsewhere on the site. Screenshot 2022-03-31 at 16.38.20 Whistleblower Khaled Hassan also identified numerous videos on YouTube that glorified last November’s murder of tour guide Eli Kay by a Hamas terrorist disguised as a Charedi Jew. In this example, which remains on YouTube, the voiceover describes the attack as a ‘heroic operation in Jerusalem, carried out by the martyr’, and applauds the fact he ‘opened fire from zero distance’.

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