CNN journalist urged to delete anti-Israel posts on social media

CNN journalist Tamara Qiblawi will delete a string of anti-Israel and pro-terror comments on social media, according to CNN, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The response came to an  HonestReporting (HR) revelation last week that the journalist who 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, who is originally from Lebanon, learned at Georgetown University and has worked for CNN since 2015. He is currently the senior digital Middle East producer at its London bureau.

“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 reported.

HR cited 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.”

Lebanon faced a “ruthless, genocidal onslaught of an Israeli invasion,” she wrote. She also wrote the following: "Can I reconcile my revulsion with a desire for resistance to the Zio-Saudi project[?] Probably not. Cognitive dissonance is better than denial."

CNN told HR on April 11: “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 deleted her Facebook account and locked her Twitter profile.

After the January 2015 terrorist 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 had perpetrated the massacre, and she complained about “the absence of any critical consideration of the parties with a vested interest in framing Muslims.”

Qiblawi later wrote: “[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.”

After HR revealed in November that a CNN producer had written on social media that he was a proud backer of #Team Hitler and defended Hamas, CNN fired him, HR executive director Gil Hoffman said.

HR did not call for Qiblawi to be fired, but she should not be permitted to write about Israel due to her bias, he said.

“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.”