After HonestReporting recently critiqued a biased news podcast on Australia’s publicly-funded Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), we asked whether journalist Essam Al-Ghalib could be trusted to report on the Arab-Israeli conflict without bias or agenda having, amongst others, tweeted “#F*ckIsrael” and called the Jewish state “the BIGGEST terrorist in the world.”
As a direct result of our investigative work and calls for accountability, SBS is now asking the same question.
The Australian Jewish News reports:
An SBS world news reporter with a track record of posting anti-Israel comments and false claims about the Jewish State on Twitter – including using the hashtag #F**kIsrael – was suspended earlier this week.
On Monday, an SBS spokesperson confirmed to The AJN that Essam Al-Ghalib is a cross-platform journalist employed on a casual basis with SBS, and action has now been taken in regard to this matter.
“In light of some tweets published between 2014 and 2015, which we’ve become aware of, he [Al-Ghalib] has been stood down from all duties, pending an internal investigation,” the SBS spokesperson said.
Earlier, on February 1, media monitoring website Honest Reporting exposed a series of Al-Ghalib’s tweets he made between 2014 and 2015, including one which said, “A f**king Israeli soldier choking a Palestinian boy”.
Other tweets by Al-Ghalib in that period claimed that Israel put Palestinians in “concentration camps”, that Israeli soldiers are “bloody murderers”, and that Israel is “the biggest terrorist in the world”.
🇦🇺 @SBSNews readers: Do you trust @EssamAlGhalib2 to report on the Arab-Israeli conflict without bias?
Essam Al-Ghalib also described the Jewish state as "bloody murderers," called for the arrest of @Netanyahu, and claimed Israel put Palestinians in "concentration camps." https://t.co/YV829BXXKH pic.twitter.com/W0M52jZtHO
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 31, 2023
Read the full AJN story here.
As a public service broadcaster, SBS has a responsibility to report fairly, accurately, and without a politicized or hate-driven agenda. Essam Al-Ghalib has demonstrated that he should not be reporting on Israel as a result of his openly expressed and hateful bias, which has evidently impacted his work. HonestReporting welcomes SBS’s announcement of an investigation and awaits its conclusions.
UPDATE
According to Al-Ghalib himself, the SBS investigation was launched after he voluntarily disclosed the offending tweets. The SBS Ombudsman’s investigation established that the Israeli military’s perspective had not been deliberately omitted. Two wire reports describing the same incident had been mistaken for separate events – an error that also escaped the editor who reviewed his script.
In her determination of February 20, 2023, Ombudsman Amy Stockwell found that the resulting delay in presenting the Israeli military’s account breached SBS’s editorial standards, but was likely a scripting error rather than deliberate exclusion, concluding that the podcast was otherwise balanced and did not demonstrate a lack of editorial independence or integrity, or clearly condone, tolerate or encourage prejudice.
The podcast was subsequently removed, but the Ombudsman’s findings did not establish deliberate bias, professional dishonesty or antisemitism. Essam Al-Ghalib returned to work, including reporting on Israel and the Middle East.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
