Al-Jazeera has pulled a video questioning the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany and claiming that Israel is the "greatest beneficiary" of the Holocaust.
The seven-minute video was in Arabic and was produced by Al-Jazeera's AJ+ Arabic channel, Haaretz reports.
It was apparently posted by AJ+ to its Facebook and Twitter pages on Friday. According to a screenshot tweeted by Arab reporter Jenan Moussa, the video was captioned "Gas ovens killed millions of Jews. That's how the novel says. What is the truth of the #holocaust and how did the Zionist movement benefit from it?"
It is said to have asserted that while the Holocaust did occur, "it's different from how the Jews tell it".
The narrator reportedly stated that Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis, who also targeted Roma, Arabs, Christians, disabled and homosexuals.
"In all, the Nazis killed 20 million people during the Holocaust and the Final Solution, and the Jews were just a part of that. Then why does the world focus so much on Jews?" the presenter was quoted as saying.
According to the video, the number of Holocaust victims was exaggerated by the Zionist movement "to help them establish Israel." "Israel — who benefited the most from the Holocaust — uses the same pretexts as the Nazis to commit ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and eliminate them," the video reportedly says.
Al Jazeera confirmed on Saturday that the video had been deleted because it "violated the editorial standards of the network".
The Holocaust was a systematic persecution and murder of the Jewish people sponsored by the Nazis and their collaborators. The date of its beginning is most commonly associated with 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. The number of Jews murdered in the genocide is widely debated to date, although the most frequently cited figure is 6 million.
While there are some researchers who deny that the Holocaust ever took place — or claim that the figures have been inflated — there is plenty of evidence that the forced deportation of Jews to ghettos and mass murder did occur, including photographs and documents.
The reasons for the Holocaust remain a subject of discussion, however. According to the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, most historians agree that the Nazis did not initially have a definite plan to wipe out the Jews, and the policy known as the Final Solution (a Nazi euphemism referring to the extermination of all Jews) developed during the war itself.