Doha, Qatar, on June 6, 2025. Photo: Noushad Thekkayil via Reuters Connect.

A YouTube channel with 440,000 subscribers just published a video that surpassed 450,000 views in six days. The channel, Uncivilized, brands itself as “entertainment rooted in education” for “underrepresented peoples and places.” Yet much of its catalog revolves around a single obsession: Israel. Previous productions include “How Israel Will Collapse” and “How Israel Uses Sex to Sell Zionism.” Its newest release, “How Israelis Are Colonizing the World,” argues that Israeli backpackers in Asia, property buyers in Cyprus, and roughly eighty Israelis relocating to a depopulating Italian valley constitute evidence of a worldwide Zionist colonization project -and that violence and colonialism are somehow encoded into Israeli Jewish DNA itself.

A channel that claims to champion the marginalized keeps finding its way back to demonizing one country. It took almost no digging to understand why.

Uncivilized is registered in Qatar’s state-run Media City, home to Al Jazeera. Its founder, Salem Barahmeh, advised Hanan Ashrawi at the PLO Executive Committee, worked for the Palestinian Mission to the United States, served as a Policy and Public Affairs Advisor at Portland Communications – the London public relations firm later exposed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for secretly editing Wikipedia to improve Qatar’s image – and then led the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, whose stated mission includes training journalists how to write about Israel, before launching Uncivilized full time.

Call it what it is. Like Al Jazeera, RT, TRT, Pravda, or Der Stürmer, Uncivilized packages state-adjacent propaganda as independent journalism. Studio lighting and cinematic scoring do not change the reality that it is financed from an absolute monarchy that criminalizes homosexuality, tightly suppresses press freedom, and markets ideological messaging to Western audiences who rarely ask who paid for it.

Nor is this channel an outlier. Qatar has spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing Muslim Brotherhood networks across Europe and American universities, as documented in the Qatar Papers investigation and U.S. Department of Education foreign-funding disclosures. Uncivilized fits neatly into that ecosystem.

Strip away the graphics package and Patreon page and what remains is one of history’s oldest antisemitic narratives. The video’s own claim is explicit: Jewish Israeli violence is “in the DNA,” “in the blood.”

That is not a new argument. In 1940, on Joseph Goebbels’ direct orders, Nazi Germany released Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), depicting Jews as a hereditary contagion spreading across the globe through animated maps radiating outward from Judea. The purpose was openly stated: prepare the German public for what came next. Eighty-six years later, the map is back. Only the logo has changed.

The video’s “logic” is impossible to satisfy. Live in Israel and you are a “settler.” Leave Israel and become a “colonizer.” Israelis who protested their own government and emigrated because they opposed it are condemned anyway. Integrate abroad and you are “taking over.” Build communities together in Cyprus or elsewhere and they become “Zionist territory.” The only acceptable form of Jewish existence is no Jewish existence at all. History already has a name for that idea.

The Uncivilized video then dismisses Holocaust education as a “victimhood fantasy,” recasting children learning what happened to their murdered great-grandparents less than a century ago as indoctrination – minutes after arguing that Jews inherit violence through their blood. That sequencing could not have been accidental.

Reality tells a different story. Israeli Jews number roughly 7.5 million in a world of eight billion. In the towns highlighted by Uncivilized, Israelis typically amount to a tiny fraction of one percent of the local population. Cyprus heard almost the identical accusation last year when its Marxist AKEL party warned that Israelis were taking over the island. Israel’s ambassador called it “plain-and-simple antisemitism.” The Jerusalem Post and the Combat Antisemitism Movement identified it as a textbook antisemitic trope, centrist Cypriot politicians publicly condemned it, and the issue became serious enough to prompt discussion of parliamentary action on hate speech. The accusation collapsed the moment anyone examined the numbers.

Now compare that with actual demographic change in the societies Uncivilized claims to defend. Brussels is roughly one-quarter Muslim, where Islamist parties openly campaign for halal meals in public schools, recognition of Muslim holidays, and broader accommodation of Islamic dress in public institutions. Dearborn, Michigan’s large Muslim population openly shapes local politics. None of this is sinister; it reflects ordinary democratic politics and immigration. But it is vastly larger and more impactful than the handful of Israeli backpackers and property buyers portrayed as a global colonization campaign by a Jewish Israeli diaspora numbering only about 800,000 outside Israel.

There are plenty of documentaries about immigration and cultural friction in the West. Most of them, when they single out Muslim communities the way Uncivilized singles out Israeli Jews, are condemned as Islamophobic – and rightly so. Demonizing an entire people is bigotry, regardless of the target. Yet a film claiming that violence and colonialism are literally in Jewish DNA is marketed as education and reaches half a million viewers with over 142,000 “likes” in less than a week. Had any production argued that violence or Sharia imposition was encoded in Arab or Muslim DNA, every legitimate news organization in the West would rightly denounce it as racist filth. Uncivilized makes the same argument about Israeli Jews and calls it journalism. If the standard changes depending on who the target is, then it is not a standard at all. It’s a double standard, and everyone with their eyes open can see it.

None of this is an indictment of Muslim immigrants, the majority of whom seek exactly what immigrants everywhere seek: better lives for themselves and their families. The target here is a state-backed propaganda apparatus financed by a government that has spent hundreds of millions underwriting Muslim Brotherhood networks abroad, and a video that revives one of history’s oldest blood libels with better lighting. Painting all Muslims or all Arabs with that brush would be exactly the sin Uncivilized commits against Jews.

The remarkable thing is how little effort it took to see what was happening. No whistleblower was needed. No secret archive had to be cracked open. Roughly an hour online and twenty-one minutes watching this terrible video were enough. Qatar’s Media City registration is public. Barahmeh’s résumé is public. The Wikipedia-laundering scandal involving the editing of Qatar’s image is public. Der ewige Jude is public, too, preserved in archives for anyone willing to recognize the pattern.

What is not public enough is the scrutiny. Hundreds of thousands of viewers watched a polished production accuse Jews of carrying violence and colonialism in their DNA, and far too few seemed interested in the obvious questions: Who made this? Who paid for it? Who benefits when antisemitism is dressed up as documentary journalism?

Those questions are not a footnote. They are the story. And these are questions every political leader whose states and cities are featured in Uncivilized videos should be asking.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.