Slapped in the face by Gulf Arab states making peace with Jewish state, the anti-Israel movement attacks Israeli Arab vlogger.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
Following the historic signing of peace treaties between Israel and the Gulf Arab states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, it was discovered that the UAE had already been pushing the message of peace in the region by supporting popular Israeli video blogger Nuseir Yassin.
Yassin runs Nas Daily and has millions of followers on social media who have “liked” him after watching the effervescent smile behind his pro-Israel messages. The fiercely proud Arab-Israeli, who hails from the lower Galilee city of Arraba, has a whopping 17 million followers on Facebook, where his daily inspiring videos are, well, inspiring. His website alone has a staggering 30 million followers.
Nas Daily also runs a training program for up and coming video bloggers (called vloggers) that is being supported by the New Media Academy, a social media training center started earlier this year by UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
But having the UAE sponsoring the production of peace and good news has raised the hackles of activists for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, who are outraged that Arab nations have chosen to make peace with Israel while the Palestinians continue to stay away from the negotiating table.
With the major powers and other Arab countries praising the Abraham Accords as a huge step towards peace in the region, the BDS movement issued a statement this week urging people to boycott Nas Daily and his training program, claiming that normalization with Israel is evil.
Yassin’s six-month course will train 80 Arab content creators and pay them as they learn how to produce better videos. That’s too much for BDS, which strives to push only negative messaging.
“While authoritarian Arabic regimes, such like those in the UAE and Bahrain, race to have normalization deals with the Israeli enemy,” the later [sic] is trying to hack the consciousness of the Arab peoples,” the BDS statement said.
But slandering their fellow Arabs, saying they run “authoritarian Arabic regimes,” is the pot calling the kettle black. The respected European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), ranked in the world’s top 25 international think tanks, noted several years ago that Palestinian leaders themselves have already turned the “previously democratic Palestinian state into an increasingly authoritarian regime … and to be sure, Hamas has also pursued authoritarian rule in Gaza.”
Like in many previous cases, the BDS statement has already backfired, with people who never knew about Nas Daily now subscribing to it.
“Thanks to BDS, I now know to follow the brilliant Nas on Twitter,” tweeted Juliet Moses from New Nealand. “He’s a really good guy who believes in co-existence and breaking down barriers. Hence he is the enemy to BDS types!”