Popular Israeli Arab video blogger Nas Daily slammed the Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera on Tuesday for reporting “fake news” and falsely claiming that he was a propagandist for Israel.
The famed YouTuber, whose real name is Nuseir Yassin, posts video clips on social media that address a wide range of topics, including travel, food and the environment. His videos generally garner millions of views.
In an almost 6-minute video uploaded on Tuesday onto Facebook, he slammed efforts to smear him by Al Jazeera, which is owned and funded by the Qatari government.
“Oh my god… I can’t believe this is happening to us! This is fake news targeted at us by a government,” he began the video by saying.
Nas showed a clip from AJ+, an Al Jazeera spin-off that produces content for social media platforms, that accused him of “using words such as… openness, coexistence, peace” to “make Israel look good.”
Another AJ+ clip suggested that the blogger and his new company, the Nas Academy, were “using all the tools that the Israeli government provides him, and he is part of their official propaganda program.”
“That is comical!” Nas said. “In reality, Nas Academy is a great new startup that we started to create more creators. To teach people how to make videos. To teach people how to tell stories, so they go and create their own videos and become their own Nas Daily. That is the truth.”
He added, “We promote tourism and love, not politics and hate. And we definitely do not work with the Israeli government.”
In September, the US Justice Department declared the Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN) an “agent of the Qatar government,” and ordered AJ+ to register as a foreign agent.
Justice Department official Jay Bratt said at the time that AJ+ encouraged audiences to question “what conduct constitutes terrorism; demonstrate a disdain for the term ‘Islamist Terror;’ adopt a positive view of Iran; show support for the Palestinian cause and question US support for Israel.”
In his video, Nas showed how false reporting about him was promoted by a network of Al Jazeera “news” subsidiaries “created under a different name to spread the same message.”
According to the video blogger, a regular video on one of Al Jazeera‘s channels would receive around 30,000 views, but the post targeting him was sponsored, which increased its view count to 2 million.
“So Al Jazeera or its affiliates in another country put government money to spread fake news against an individual,” he said, as he showed proof on-screen of the sponsored video.
“If you don’t speak Arabic, you will never notice these stuff. But it’s been happening for decades in the Middle East,” he said, revealing the double standard displayed by Al Jazeera.
He explained that to English-speaking viewers, Al Jazeera shows “good news” but to the Arabic-speaking world, the news channels reported “fake news only to generate hate and fear.”
Nas showed more Al Jazeera and AJ+ reports to further support his claims, saying, “To the English speaking world they say, ‘Let’s remember the Holocaust and never repeat it.’ To the Arab world they say, ‘Did the Holocaust really happen?’ To the English world they support gay rights. To the Arab world they suppress gay rights. It’s two stories for two different audiences. And you wonder why the Middle East is full of hatred and anger. If you’ve ever wondered, this is part of the answer.”