Online Al-Jazeera Video Tells Kids Jews Control The Porn Industry

Midan Voice, a youth-oriented YouTube and Soundcloud channel launched in 2018 by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera media network, posted a video last week that regales kids with an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about the adult industry. The video was spotted and translated from Arabic to English by the watchdog site MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.  The video claims that “Jews created and control the porn industry in order to pollute American and Christian values,” according to the MEMRI summary of the Midan Voice video’s content. The video inaccurately claims that in 2016, the Israeli Knesset passed a bill that would have forced internet service providers to “remove” porn sites. “How come the Jews ban pornography in their own country when they were the first to expand porn and invest in it to begin with?” the video says.  “A few people have tried to present the facts about the role of the Jews in porn, but most of them were either attacked—under the pretext of antisemitism and incitement to violence—or had their own videos removed from YouTube and the Internet.” In fact, the Knesset passed a bill that was similar to the recently abandoned United Kingdom “age verification” law. But the bill never took effect and last year was scrapped by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over privacy concerns, as AVN.com reported. The bill would have created a database of Israeli porn users—in a country where only seven years earlier, hackers stole and leaked personal information on all of Israel’s 9 million residents. But facts are not really the point of the video, which goes on to list several prominent figures in the adult industry who were also Jewish, including "American Jew Ron Jeremy, who is known as the 'porn legend’”; Vivid Entertainment founder Steven Hirsch, who the video describes as “a 57-years-old Jew, known as the 'Donald Trump of Porn’”; and Gloria Leonard, “the inventor of the sex phone lines who, throughout her porn journey, would present herself as a good Jewish girl from a New York neighborhood,” according to MEMRI. The video then goes on to ask, "What led the Jews to this holy march towards the porn industry?” The conclusion of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory promoted by the video—which is aimed at teens: “Porn has become a means to pollute Christian culture, because it quickly penetrates American homes,” the Al-Jazeera video states. Photo By Kenneth C. Zirkel / Wikimedia Commons