AJC's Engagement with the Arab World Reaches New Heights

NEW YORK, May 5, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- American Jewish Committee's (AJC) groundbreaking outreach to the Arab world through social media has reached new heights, having engaged millions of Arabic speakers across its platforms, the global Jewish advocacy organization announced today.

More than 90 million Arabic speakers have seen the content of AJC's Arabic Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts since their launch in early 2020.

Of the 90 million engagements, there have been more than 20 million views of AJC's groundbreaking Arabic video series, 'An al-Yahud ("About the Jews"), which launched alongside its Arabic accounts, with the majority of viewers hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. 

The five videos released thus far cover:

• The origins and beliefs of the Jewish people
• The history of Muslim-Jewish relations
• The Holocaust
• Jewish ties to Jerusalem
• The antisemitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

In addition, AJC's Arabic social media accounts have accumulated more than 500,000 followers from across the Middle East and North Africa, and the number is rapidly growing.

"It's extraordinarily heartwarming to see the depth and breadth of engagement established between the Arabic-speaking world and AJC in such a relatively short time span," said AJC CEO David Harris. "We have made abundantly clear that outreach to both the Arab and the larger Islamic world is at the top of our 21st century agenda."

For years, Harris has spoken frequently about AJC's transformative initiatives in the Arab world and their essential importance for charting a new path for Arab-Jewish and Muslim-Jewish relations.

Both the Arabic social media accounts and the 'An al-Yahud video series build on AJC's unique, extensive, and longstanding engagement with partners in the Arab and Muslim worlds. As the leading Jewish organization engaged in this critical work, AJC representatives have met regularly over the past three decades with Arab and Muslim leaders across the Middle East and North Africa to exchange views on matters of mutual concern, among them the fight against extremism, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the shared interests of Israel and Arab states.

Recent achievements include the launching of the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council in the United States in 2016, the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Mecca-based Muslim World League (MWL) in 2019, the historic joint MWL-AJC visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2020, and the announcement of a new AJC office, in the United Arab Emirates, to open later this year. 

https://www.ajc.org/news/ajcs-engagement-with-the-arab-world-reaches-new-heights

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SOURCE American Jewish Committee