A blog post for Israeli media has summed up the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatari connections of the Middle East Eye (MEE), a new portal operated by former Guardian journalist David Hearst. The post begins:
August 29, 2019 As the image of Al Jazeera as an independent news outlet crumbles in the West – tainted by the publication of sickening Holocaust-revisionist material and covert propaganda operations such as the infiltration of Jewish organisations in Britain and the United States – the Qatari government has identified new channels to roll out its anti-Western, pro-Islamist narrative unabated. One such covert media arm is the London-based Middle East Eye (MEE), a web portal reportedly sponsored by Doha with extensive editorial links to Al Jazeera and political and ideological sympathies for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. To its audience, MEE portrays itself as a credible and reputable news outlet with focus on the Middle East and the wider region, when in truth it acts as a shameless extension to Al Jazeera and the Qatari state.A closer look at the content reveals an editorial line strikingly similar to Qatar’s state-owned media behemoth. The web portal has no shortage of articles falsely accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing. Or pro-Iranian coverage of the conflict in Yemen, where the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels are fighting the intentionally recognised Yemeni government with the help of the regime in Iran. But if you are looking for articles highlighting Qatar’s systematic funding of Muslim Brotherhood organisations across Europe, you are looking in vain. Likewise, if you search for information on Doha’s role in sponsoring Islamist rebel groups in Syria, you are staring into a massive black hole. Despite MEE’s obvious bias, NGOs like Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch as well as respectable newspapers like the New York Times are blindly incorporating MEE content into their coverage without informing its audience of the web portal’s questionable affiliations.
Read the rest here.
In October 2018,the GMBDW reported that MEE had acknowledged that the late Jamal Khashoggi, apparently murdered inside the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul, had anonymously written several opinion pieces for the portal.
In June 2014 we reported on a series of articles in the UAE-based The National which traced the Hamas and Brotherhood ties of several key individuals involved with MEE including:
- Adlin Adnan, who registered its website and was previously head of policy development at INTERPAL, a US designated terrorist entity that helps to fund Hamas.
- Jamal Bassasso, at that time the sole director of the company that owns Middle East Eye, a former director of Al Jazeera and of the company that operates the website of the Hamas-controlled Al Quds TV.
- Former MEE journalist Rori Donaghy who, as we reported in 2014 who once worked with a Hamas think-tank in Gaza has his own ties to UK Muslim Brotherhood figure Anas Altikriti.
All these ties have been independently confirmed by the GMBDW.