The CNN journalist in question is Tamara Qiblawi, a Georgetown-educated Lebanon native who has worked for CNN since 2015.
By ZVIKA KLEIN Published: APRIL 16, 2023 12:35
Updated: APRIL 16, 2023 16:29
CNN journalist Tamara Qiblawi will delete a string of anti-Israel and pro-terror comments on social media, according to a CNN spokesperson, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The response came to an HonestReporting (HR) revelation last week that the journalist that wrote a slanted article on April 8 with the headline “Attacks in West Bank, Tel Aviv as tensions remain high following Israeli strikes,” initially failed to note that the airstrikes were in response to acts of aggression from terrorist groups in Gaza and Lebanon.
Qiblawi is Georgetown-educated, originally from Lebanon, who has done work for CNN since 2015 and currently holds the position of Senior Digital Middle East Producer at the US broadcaster’s London bureau. According to HR, “Qiblawi’s social media history casts doubt on her commitment to CNN’s editorial standards, specifically when it comes to reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
HR pointed to a Facebook entry, dated May 15, 2015, in which Qiblawi described the events surrounding Israel’s founding with the Palestinian term “Nakba,” (“catastrophe” in Arabic), a term Palestinians use to describe their experience in the 1948 War of Independence, while denouncing the creation of Israel a safe haven for Jews, “mak[ing] way for an ethnoreligious exclusive state.”
She also wrote that Lebanon faced a “ruthless, genocidal onslaught of an Israeli invasion” and wrote of a “desire for resistance to the Zio-Saudi project.”
A CNN spokesperson responded to HR on April 11 that “Tamara Qiblawi has a track record of delivering excellent, balanced journalism for CNN on the Middle East and other topics. She has agreed to delete these posts.” Qiblawi actually deleted her Facebook account and locked her Twitter profile.
CNN reporter Tamara Qiblawi will be made to delete a string of anti-Israel and pro-terrorism comments from her social media (credit: FACEBOOK SCREENSHOT)
A surprising response that Qiblawi made in 2015 after the January 2015 terror attack in Paris, which targeted the Charlie Hebdo magazine and later Hyper Cacher, a kosher supermarket, Qiblawi wrote on Facebook that she was “not convinced” that Islamist terrorists perpetrated the massacre, and complained about “the absence of any critical consideration of the parties with a vested interest in framing Muslims.”
She later responded that “[O]ur tendency towards conspiracies is not based on some kind of mass paranoid schizophrenia but knowledge of our history with the west,” citing an alleged “campaign to dispossess Palestinians in ’48” as one example of a conspiracy by “the West.”
HR executive director Gil Hoffman noted that, in a different incident, after his organization revealed in November that a CNN producer wrote on social media that he was a proud backer of #Team Hitler and defended Hamas, CNN fired him.
Hoffman said HR did not call for Qiblawi to be fired but that she should not be permitted to write about Israel due to her bias. “We were disappointed that CNN did not take any disciplinary action at all against a bylined journalist who reports on Israel and openly calls for its destruction,” Hoffman said. “Israel is clearly not an issue she can report on objectively. By letting this go without even a slap on the wrist, CNN missed a key opportunity to professionally safeguard its coverage of such sensitive matters.”
Fuente: https://www.jpost.com/bds-threat/article-739348
