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Young 17-year-old Leora Noor Eisenberg was shocked to discover that a popular news site that so many liberal Americans love is actually run by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, an anti-West, anti-American and anti-Israel media outlet.
By: The Algemeiner
Many young Americans who get their news from the AJ+online media channel are unaware of its ties to the Qatari government-owned Al Jazeera network, a young Zionist activist from Minnesota told The Algemeiner on Sunday.
“As someone who is 17, I’m surrounded by people my age who tend to lean left, if not far-left, who love self-proclaimed liberal, progressive news,” Leora Noor Eisenberg said. “One of their main news sources is AJ+. You see this on Facebook, where they share AJ+ interviews all the time. This is all well and good, until you realize that it’s crazy. AJ+ is a subsidiary of Al Jazeera, and we all know what Al Jazeera is — it goes completely against their self-proclaimed liberal values.”
She continued: “Most people don’t even know that the ‘AJ’ in AJ+ stands for Al Jazeera. People don’t know what AJ+ actually is.”
Eisenberg, who will enroll at Princeton University in September, said the “insane hypocrisy” of AJ+’s popularity among liberals is what drove her to make a video to expose its “hidden hateful agenda.”
The video was posted on Facebook on Thursday, and since then, it has received around 160,000 views, “which for someone my age is pretty amazing,” Eisenberg said.
Eisenberg said she herself was “shell-shocked” when she learned earlier this year that AJ+ was part of Al Jazeera. “Once you realize that, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, that makes perfect sense.’ Their videos are so anti-American, so anti-Western and so anti-Israel, you get it once people tell that to you. So I want other people to have that moment of realization.”
Watch Eisenberg’s video below:
Eisenberg spent almost two months in Israel this summer, taking part in a program called “Video Activism.” According to Eisenberg, the program “teaches young Jews to make hasbarah [public diplomacy] videos.”
“We could do them on more or less whatever we wanted, but they supervised us and helped us with the videos,” she said.
Eisenberg said reactions to her video have been “interesting.”
“In the pro-Israel community, most people are like, ‘Yeah, you go, girl,’ for getting that out there, which is good, but that’s to be expected,” she said. “There are also some people in the pro-Israel community who’ve told me the video was too sensationalist and simplistic. But, of course, it’s simplistic for us; we know this already. But most people don’t.”
“From the non-affiliated community, there have been responses like, ‘Wow, I had no idea, this is paradigm-shifting,’ which is gratifying. But I’ve also gotten, in the anti-Israel community, or at least in the liberal progressive community, the Bernie Sanders groups I post in, people who say, ‘Why do you care? Every single outlet has a bias. Al Jazeera is just representing the Arab point of view.’”
Eisenberg said she is not finished exposing AJ+. She said she is working on a second video involving a statistical analysis of the channel’s content.
“If people complain this first video was sensationalist, I can tell you that the next video will not be,” she said. “It will be much more calm and rational.”
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