Qatar’s Al Jazeera Hosts Conference Promoting October 7 Denialism, Rehabilitating Hamas, and Rewriting the Gaza War

By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

The information battlefield surrounding the October 7, 2023 Hamas atrocities has entered a new and deeply disturbing phase. This weekend, Qatar’s state-backed media giant Al Jazeera convened what it calls an academic conference on “International Media and the War on Gaza,” but which critics, including analysts cited in a report on Sunday at World Israel News, say is openly dedicated to whitewashing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and legitimizing the Hamas terror organization under the guise of media criticism.

The two-day event, held at both the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies and Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, reads less like a scholarly symposium and more like an orchestrated campaign to rehabilitate Hamas’ image in the international arena. Under the sanitized banner of examining “modalities of discourse” and “the clash of narratives,” organizers launched a full-throated assault on the factual record of Hamas’ atrocities, while simultaneously amplifying unsubstantiated accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — a claim rejected by multiple international legal bodies and contradicted by abundant evidence, as reported by World Israel News.

From the outset, the conference’s promotional materials signaled its intentions. The organizers lamented that “most Western media, and even some Arab media,” had acknowledged the widespread human rights violations committed by Gaza-based terrorists during the October 7 invasion. That acknowledgment — grounded in firsthand testimony, forensic analysis, film documentation, and survivor accounts — was dismissed by conference organizers as capitulation to “the Israeli narrative.”

This framing is not merely misleading. It is part of a calculated and increasingly global attempt to delegitimize the truth about the massacre: the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis, the burning of families alive, the sexual torture and rape of women, the kidnapping of more than 240 civilians, and the documented use of children as hostages. By labeling international reporting on these atrocities as “false reports,” the conference crossed a threshold from ideological bias into outright historical revisionism.

The organizers’ language was unambiguous. The conference’s official website decried what it called invented stories — “false reports” — about “the burning of children” and “the raping of Israeli women.” That denial stands in direct contradiction to the voluminous evidence compiled by Israeli authorities, foreign forensic teams, international human rights observers, and journalists. As World Israel News has documented, rape and sexual mutilation were among the most extensively verified components of the October 7 crimes.

Yet in Doha, these atrocities were dismissed as fiction — a rhetorical maneuver long used by propagandists to undermine the reality of mass violence.

While the event’s ostensible purpose was to examine media coverage of the Gaza war, its real objective, according to analysts quoted in the World Israel News report, appeared to be the construction of an alternate historical record in which Hamas is not a U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for orchestrating mass murder, but a legitimate “resistance faction” maligned by Western manipulation of language.

Speakers repeatedly objected to the use of the term “Hamas terrorism,” insisting instead on “Palestinian resistance factions,” and accused international media outlets of unfairly redefining those groups as terrorist entities. As the World Israel News report pointed out, this recasting of terminology is not a minor semantic shift; it is an attempt to normalize the organization’s ideology, sanitize its actions, and erase its decades-long history of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, kidnappings, executions, torture, and systemic human rights abuses against both Israelis and Palestinians.

One of the speakers, Dr. Manal Mazahreh, an associate professor at the University of Petra, took this argument further, claiming the global media had effectively become “a tool” of Zionist propaganda. “The media cannot be separated from Israeli propaganda,” she declared, asserting that journalism “has long been a key tool for advancing the goals of the Zionist movement.” Her remarks, amplified through conference channels, were devoid of empirical substantiation but rich in the kind of conspiratorial tropes that often serve as academic veneers for political agendas.

Another speaker, Dr. Farid Abu Dheir of An-Najah National University, echoed Mazahreh’s accusations, charging Israeli media with “extremism”—a claim he supported by citing the supportive tone adopted by Israel’s major television networks, Channel 12 and Channel 14, toward the IDF during wartime. As the World Israel News report observed, characterizing a nation’s media landscape as extremist because it supports its own military in the immediate aftermath of genocide is not an analytical position; it is an ideological posture.

Noticeably absent from every session, presentation, and panel throughout the weekend was any acknowledgment whatsoever of Hamas’ responsibility for launching the war. There was no mention of the cross-border invasion, no mention of the massacre, no mention of the murder of babies, no mention of the abductions, no mention of the sexual violence — nothing. The absence was not accidental but integral to the conference’s foundational premise: that the October 7 atrocities were either fabricated, exaggerated, or irrelevant to current events.

The conference’s underlying narrative — that the war in Gaza is disconnected from the events that initiated it — is part of a broader trend identified by World Israel News in recent months: the systematic effort by certain state-funded media networks and academic institutions to obscure the moral and factual origins of the conflict in order to reframe Israel as the unprovoked aggressor.

Qatar’s role in this narrative construction cannot be ignored. As World Israel News reported, Qatar is not merely the host country for this conference; it is the primary financial patron of Hamas and the chief global funder of Al Jazeera. Qatar’s diplomatic maneuvering, combined with its financial patronage of extremist factions, has long positioned it as a strategic sanctuary for Hamas’ top leadership, including political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh. The hosting of this conference on Qatari soil is therefore not symbolic but strategic.

The broader implications of such an event are profound. When a major state-backed media outlet convenes a conference dedicated to historical revisionism, it signals not only an attempt to distort global understanding of October 7 but a deliberate campaign to influence foreign journalists, academics, and opinion-makers. It also attempts to provide intellectual legitimacy to Hamas at a moment when the organization faces unprecedented scrutiny and condemnation.

Such conferences serve as incubators for new rhetorical frameworks — frameworks designed to propagate denialism, to erode consensus on the factual record, and to muddy the moral distinctions between aggressor and victim. As World Israel News has repeatedly warned, this intellectual laundering of Hamas’ crimes has real consequences: it emboldens extremists, fuels antisemitic narratives, and undermines global efforts to prevent future atrocities.

In a media environment already polarized by disinformation and ideological warfare, Al Jazeera’s conference stands out as a stark example of how propaganda can be cloaked in the language of scholarship, how denialism can be marketed as critique, and how the rewriting of history can masquerade as a “clash of narratives.”

But a clash of narratives is only meaningful when both narratives contend with reality. What unfolded in Doha this weekend was not a clash. It was an erasure.

As the World Israel News report observed, the battle for truth after October 7 is no less urgent than the battle for physical security. Memory itself has become a frontline.

And in Doha, those who gathered were not seeking truth — they were seeking its burial.