Reuters’ regional head of video and pictures in the Middle East has publicly supported terrorists while working for a pro-Palestinian organization, demonized Israel, and criticized the US for providing military aid to the Jewish state, HonestReporting exposed Monday in a revelation that calls into question his journalistic objectivity.
Labib Nasir, who is currently based in Dubai and editorially supervises Reuters visual content coming out of the region, openly praised terrorists at a media conference in Beirut in 2004 while he was working for the pro-Palestinian organization “Miftah.” According to the conference proceedings, in his public remarks, he said:
The militants or as they are now more commonly and frequently known as “terrorist” that attack Israeli military tanks bent on destroying Palestinian homes, are in fact defending their people and have an inalienable and internationally recognized right to resist attacks on their homes and neighborhoods.
Nasir continued to falsely claim that Israeli communities in the West Bank were not “civilian,” thus suggesting they were legitimate targets:
Illegal Jewish settlements, or more accurately colonies, are in fact built on stolen Palestinian property against international laws and inhabited by terrorist, racist ideologically fanatical armed settlers; they are not civilian Jewish “neighborhoods” or “communities”.
While his words are appalling in their own right — because they refer to communities inhabited by families and children — they resonate ever more loudly in light of Hamas’ brutal massacre of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7. How can a person who holds such views have any editorial say about Middle East coverage at this sensitive time? How can a person with such views be trusted to provide objective, unbiased content on the region? It cannot and should not be tolerated.
Nasir’s full address to the conference (which was ironically held under the title “Media Ethics & Journalism in the Arab World”) is rife with more inaccuracies and anti-Israel vitriol. To quote just a few:
- He labeled as “silly” Israel’s right to defend itself from the very terrorism he supported, criticizing it as “a myth whereby the occupier is defending itself by invading and killing the occupied.”
- He also said it’s important to note when Palestinian “armed fighters” are not killed in combat, as if it sanitizes them from any wrongdoing.
More examples of his activism include an opinion piece titled “Checkpoint Guide,” which refers to the everyday reality of passing through security checkpoints set up by Israel to protect its citizens against terrorists. In it, he called Israeli army soldiers “killer soldiers,” and demonized the Israeli “enemy” as an adversary of humanity:
There is no room to sink any lower, as you watch your enemy rolling down the mountain slowly but surely, humanity will prevail.
A decade later, years after he’d already been hired by Reuters, Nasir took part in a demonstration against Israel’s 2014 Gaza operation that targeted Hamas terror tunnels and publicly criticized the US for providing billions of dollars in military aid to the Jewish state, as quoted in Boston’s WBUR news:
Labib Nasir, a Palestinian from Jerusalem, says he’s angry with Israel, but also the United States government, which provides billions of dollars in military assistance to Israel.
“Most Americans have a limited view of it,” Nasir said. “I’m 100 percent confident that Americans, had they known the truth and seen the truth, that they would not stand for this.”
Unfortunately, it’s not the first time a biased Reuters journalist is exposed, as in the case of Henriette Chacar who has questioned the difference between Israeli civilians and combatants. But Nasir has risen to a much more senior position in the news agency.
Related reading: Reuters Journalist Who Questioned Difference Between Israeli Civilians and Combatants “Contextualizes” Terrorism
Activist-Turned-Journalist
Nasir attended the 2004 conference as the media and information coordinator for “Miftah,” an organization with an anti-Israeli agenda that was headed by then-senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi. Several months later he joined Reuters as a reporter and a producer in Jerusalem, clearly without a sufficient background check. He has climbed the news agency’s ranks ever since.
Did he attempt to set aside his activist agenda? Quite the opposite, as apparent from an interview he conducted in 2010 for Reuters with none other than his former boss Hanan Ashrawi. Any decent journalist would have excused themselves from doing so, but Nasir let Ashrawi get all her talking points across.
The problem is that Nasir understood the power of media already in 2004 when he stated in his conference presentation that: “The visual media have become highly developed in recent years and are a powerful tool that has forced itself into every house.”
Now, this activist-turned-journalist gets to decide what images from the war-torn Middle East are seen in every house worldwide and what stories are told in video and pictures — the most effective ways to influence hearts and minds.
And hundreds of media outlets that subscribe to Reuters rely on this coverage.
As the region is still reeling from Hamas’ atrocities, a person who openly supports terrorism and believes that Israeli civilians’ blood is forfeit should not be allowed near any newsroom, let alone that of one of the world’s largest news agencies which claims to uphold the strictest standards of unbiased journalism.
HonestReporting has submitted an official complaint to Reuters, calling upon it to take the necessary action to maintain the values its audience deserves.
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