Tabby Rephael
Jewish Journal, Feb. 2, 2021
“Between the Arabic and English messages, it was like an anti-Semitic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
When I was a little girl in Tehran, my family and I took advantage of the temporary lulls in air strikes during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) to have dinner at various local restaurants. At one of those restaurants, the waiters had a practice of misinforming non-Iranian diners that they were out of tahdig, the gloriously crispy fried Persian rice. And the Iranian diners? They got tahdig by the barrelful because the restaurant felt the need to keep the locals happy. My family made a special request and ordered the tahdig “half and half” so that it was topped with two types of Persian stew, rather than one.
The non-Iranian diners never quite understood they were being duped, allowing the restaurant to ensure there was always enough tahdig for Persian customers. In recent years, I’ve come to see audiences of Al Jazeera English as some of those same duped patrons.
Last week, Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+) English, the Qatari-based network’s online news and current events channel, which primarily caters to younger audiences, tweeted a message in support of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 that read, “Today is #HolocaustRemembranceDay. The Nazis murdered over 6 million Jews, including over 1 million people at Auschwitz. A 2020 study found over 50% of U.S. Gen Z and millennial adults could not identify Auschwitz, and 63% did not know how many people died in the Holocaust.”
Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist.
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