Yasser Abu Hilala, the former director-general of Al Jazeera, tweeted an image on Friday showing  Mary, who the Christians believe was the mother of Jesus, holding a dead Jesus, alongside an image of a woman in a hijab crying over a dead young man in a keffiyeh.  Superimposed on the image was the claim, “After 2,000 years, & it’s the same killer…”

Pathetic, vile and pure antisemitism. @abuhilalah don’t you add the blood libel, or the protocols of the elders of Zion as well when you are at it? pic.twitter.com/Pcg5UeODkV

— Joshua L. Zarka (@yzarka) August 13, 2022

The origin of the images is unknown and it is unclear whether the photo of the woman and the dead young man are, in fact, connected to the Arab -Israeli conflict. Abu Hilala ran Al Jazeera between 2014 and 2018. The image has since been removed from his Twitter feed.

The claim that Jesus was a Palestinian has been made countless times. In order to create a thousand-year-long Palestinian history, the PA falsely links Palestinians to one of the most significant figures of all time, claiming that Jesus, a Jew from the nation of Judea, was actually a Palestinian. Yasser Arafat’s adviser Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian, is generally credited with creating the talking point of Jesus’ Palestinian identity when she said in an interview to the Washington Jewish Week on February 22, 2001, that “Jesus was a Palestinian.” This became the official PLO platform as evidenced by their frequent reference to Jesus as “the first Palestinian martyr” and whose annual Christmas statement reads, “Every Christmas, Palestine celebrates the birth of one of its own: Jesus.”