Timour Azhari should have known better. As the Iraq Bureau Chief for Reuters, who currently covers the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon, he is supposed to act as a role model for professional journalism.
Instead, his X (formerly Twitter) account reveals anti-Israel bias that casts doubt on his objectivity.
And it’s not just him: among his followers are top Reuters editors. They either knew about his posts and kept quiet, or had no idea about his activity — both options point to the decline of journalistic standards in what used to be a respected news agency.
Meet Timour Azhari. He’s the @Reuters bureau chief in Iraq. He’s now reporting from Lebanon on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
Some of his tweets make us wonder whether he can report objectively. Take a look below. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/45hF66Nywm
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 13, 2024
Apartheid and “Terror”
Two posts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict expose Azhari’s true colors.
The first was posted during the Israel-Hamas conflict in May 2021, when Azhari was Reuters’ Lebanon correspondent. In it, he advises journalists to mention that “Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians,” otherwise their stories would be “lacking.”
He solidifies this so-called journalistic advice by attributing the accusation to “top human rights” organizations B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch — two agenda-driven non-governmental organizations that place their politicized agendas above the human rights they claim to be protecting:
If this is the manipulative editorializing Azhari practiced as a correspondent, it’s alarming to think about how he mentors his team as a bureau chief.
In a more recent second post, Azhari put the word “terror” in quotation marks in a post about the October 1 Jaffa shooting and stabbing attack, where two Palestinians murdered seven innocent Israelis:
The quotation marks are redundant because of the attribution to the Israeli police. So the message is clear: For Azhari, this brutal attack cannot be labeled as terrorist.
Israel’s “War Machine”
But he has no problem saying that Israel’s acts of self-defense are “brutal.”
That’s the word Azhari chose to describe Israel’s retaliation against Hezbollah, which started firing at its northern communities on October 8, 2023:
And here he labeled Israel as a “war machine,” forgetting perhaps that Hezbollah is the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world:
If this is the anti-Israel editorializing that Azhari is posting on his social media, how can he be trusted to report objectively for Reuters on the current conflict?
Although Azhari’s background as the Beirut reporter for the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera, may explain why he would not think about filtering views which would not have raised any eyebrows on the Hamas sympathizing network.
How can news consumers trust Reuters when such a “journalist” handles its Mideast coverage?
UPDATE – Oct. 31
In response, a Reuters spokesperson said: “These social media posts do not align with our Trust Principles. We are taking appropriate action.”
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