US Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol. Photo: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

US Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) has refused to answer whether he would forgo funding from Qatar days after he announced he would no longer accept financial assistance from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). 

Moulton announced last week that he would no longer work with AIPAC, the preeminent pro-Israel lobbying firm in the US, accusing the group of harboring close ties with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative government. Moulton, who has recently entered the Democratic primary for Senator, added that he would return all funds to AIPAC. However, the representative stressed that he continues to support Israel’s right to self defense and existence. 

The representative, however, has accepted financial assistance from the government of Qatar, according to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon. Moulton accepted a lavish trip to the gulf state paid for by the Qatari government and accepted campaign donations from a Qatari-linked lobbying firm, according to documents reviewed by the Free Beacon. During Moulton’s 2020 four day excursion to Qatar, in which the government covered food and housing, he visited the Qatar Foundation. Moulton praised Qatar, predicting that the terror-aligned state has “great potential,” and that he foresees “the friendship between the two countries to grow in the future.” Moulton also accepted roughly $11,500 from Nelson Mullins, a lobbying firm with operatives connected to Qatar, according to documents reviewed by the outlet. 

Moulton’s announcement comes on the heels of his newly-launched Senate campaign. According to various polls, Israel has plummeted in popularity with Democratic voters, with a majority believing that the Jewish state has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza. Some speculate whether Moulton’s refusal to accept AIPAC funding is part of a calculated effort to distance himself with the Jewish state and neutralize potential confrontations with party activists.

Although Moulton has vowed to return funds donated by AIPAC, he has yet to declare that he would no longer accept funds from those connected to the Qatari government. Moulton’s office did not return requests for comment from The Algemeiner on whether the representative would stop taking funds from Qatar. 

Qatar, a small Gulf nation in the Middle East, has extensive and well-documented connections to the Hamas terrorist group. The Gulf nation hosts several Hamas political leaders in Doha and has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza, which critics say has indirectly bolstered the militant group’s control. Israel, along with several Western states, have accused Qatar of serving as a lifeline for the terrorist group. 

Moreover, many skeptics argue that Qatar has a growing influence in the United States, pointing to the gulf nation’s expanding footprint in government, higher education, media, and entertainment.

The gulf nation has spent roughly $72 million on US lobbying firms since 2016 with the goal of improving the country’s image, according to a report by the Middle East Forum.

Through multimillion-dollar donations to leading universities, high-profile lobbying efforts in Washington, and partnerships with major media and sports organizations, the Gulf nation has positioned itself as a key player shaping narratives and policy debates.

Illustrative Cornell University cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot

Cornell University took center stage in another campus antisemitism outrage on Thursday, as its student newspaper published an anti-Zionist opinion piece which promoted Holocaust inversion by melding a Nazi symbol with the Star of David.

The article, titled “Thousand & One Eyes for an Eye” and written by indigenous studies professor Karim-Aly Assam, argued that Israel’s military strategy for the Gaza war against Hamas prioritized revenge for the Oct. 7 massacre over security “under the pretext of obtaining justice.” The article further accused Israeli officials of describing Palestinians as “animals” to justify “ruthless destruction and killing” — a gross distortion of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s describing the Hamas fighters who murdered, raped, and maimed women, children, and men on Oct. 7 “human animals” two days after the atrocities transpired.

Assam’s article implied an equivalence of Israel’s military objective to eradicate Hamas from Gaza with the Nazi genocide of Jews across Europe during World War II, a trope which anti-Israel activists and antisemites traffic to foster negative public opinion against Israel’s efforts to secure its borders and quell jihadist activity in the Palestinian territories that has sabotaged efforts to reach a two-state solution and achieve peace with Israel’s neighbors.

The tactic — Holocaust inversion — is one part of a triad of Holocaust-skepticism, the other two components of which are “denial” and “distortion” — used to defame Jews and deny that they are and have been victims of hatred. Once reserved to neo-Nazi media, Holocaust inversion, experts say, is being increasingly embraced by other more mainstream segments of society.

Assam’s attempt to erase Jewish suffering during the Holocaust is clear, Cornell University professor William Jacobson said in an interview with the New York Post.

“It reflects the normalization of Holocaust inversion, both on the internet and now on Cornell’s campus,” Jacobson said. “This [SS lightning bolt] graphic is specifically inside a bloody Jewish star. No reflection of it being even related to Israel. And it clearly is pursuing the idea that Jews are the new Nazis. And so I think it’s obviously highly offensive.”

Following the incident, Cornell unpublished and then re-published Assam’s essay. Later, Eric Han, a Daily Sun editor — claiming not to speak for the organization but as an individual — defended publishing the drawing, arguing that it “clearly depicts that the Palestinian subject has been violently (i.e. bloodily) branded with the SS symbol.”

He added, “I would find it very difficult to dispute the claim that that the Israeli government is similar to the Nazi regime” and claimed that criticism of Assam is evidence of rising “threats levied against academic freedom on campus.”

On Thursday, Kassam said that he regrets how “some” people “interpreted” the drawing.

“I am deeply saddened to learn that this portion of the artwork has been interpreted by some as antisemitic,” he told the New York Post. “That was not my intention and I have learned from this experience.”

Cornell University stands with other Ivy League campuses in being plagued by incidents which exhibit a severity of anti-Jewish hatred not seen in the Western world since the rise of the Nazis.

Just last week, a Cornell professor who according to the school violated federal anti-discrimination law when he expelled an Israeli student from class opted to retire rather than serve a two-semester suspension he received as punishment for the incident.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

Screenshots taken on October 23, 2025 of three Sora videos created by user “Pablo Deskobar.”

On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published new research from its Center on Technology and Society (CTS) investigating outputs from artificial intelligence-powered video generating programs. Analysts found that “at least 40 percent of the time” the programs would generate responses when presented “antisemitic, extremist or otherwise hateful text prompts.”

ADL researched fed certain antisemitic prompts into AI chatbot apps — OpenAI’s Sora 2, Google’s Veo 3, and Hedra’s Character-3 model — to gauge how the programs would respond to racist material.

Researchers described how of all four tools, OpenAI’ Sora 2 “performed the best in terms of content moderation, refusing to generate 60% of the prompts.”

The ADL report stated that out of the 50 problematic prompts “Veo 3 only refused to generate ten, Hedra only refused two and Sora 1 refused none. Sora 2 performed the best of all the tools, refusing to generate 30 prompts.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote Friday on X about the threat of antisemitic AI videos that, “throughout history, bad actors have exploited new technologies to create antisemitic, extremist and hateful content – that’s where we find ourselves today as AI video generation becomes more sophisticated and accessible.”

A Growing Threat

West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center has previously warned that terrorist groups have started deploying artificial intelligence tools in their propaganda. A January 2024 paper identified the threat which the ADL’s research has now confirmed, with its abstract stating “specifically, the authors investigated the potential implications of commands that can be input into these systems that effectively ‘jailbreak’ the model, allowing it to remove many of its standards and policies that prevent the base model from providing extremist, illegal, or unethical content.”

The unique challenge presented by large language models which experts identify is that responses generated often do not follow the programmed rules, allowing users to generate dangerous content, even when rules are put into place to attempt to prevent it. The creators can put in safeguards against their tools’ misuse, but they so far do not know how to apply them consistently.

Notably, the ADL said that several it shared with OpenAI following initial testing of Sora earlier this year “were refused in the updated version of the tool.”

This new ADL research into generative AI video apps builds on the organization’s findings released in March into AI chatbot apps, when researchers reported varying levels of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish answers from evaluating Chat-GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta).

The ADL called for three policy changes including heavily funding moderation teams, aggressively testing prompts involving hateful stereotypes, and updating keywords in response to real time changes in bigoted vernacular.

“Many of the terms and keywords that are used in hateful or extremist content are obscure and may not be known to engineers or safety practitioners,” the report says. “Video generation platforms should hire research scientists, or other experts within trust and safety teams, who are equipped to keep abreast of the ever-evolving world of extremist rhetoric, which ideally includes partnering with civil society groups who can provide timely analysis and updated language.”

Following the initial Monday report into Sora 2 antisemitic content, The Algemeiner began a further review into material created, hosted, and shared on the app. The videos described here could be found through searching for the terms “rabbi” and “Jews” on the app.

Antisemitism in Action: How Users Navigate Around Safety Features

One way to evaluate how new Sora users are using this technology is through looking at a sequence of videos rather than just one in isolation.

A person with the handle “acm156741” chose to create a series of seven short videos all featuring mixed martial arts star Jake Paul, who allows his likeness to be used in AI videos since he is a self-described “proud OpenAI investor.” In the surreal, comedic videos, the AI-generated Paul uses the claim that he was “promised” something “3000 years ago” as justification for stealing a car and taking candy from a child. Then videos identify him as Jewish, a rabbi, heading for Israel, and money-obsessed.

This technique of identifying Paul as Jewish in one video and then in another video associating Paul with an antisemitic stereotype then overcomes the program’s safety features.