UPDATE: (April 11, 2023) Following the publication of our exposé, Tamara Qiblawi took down her social media accounts. This article has been updated to include screenshots of her Facebook posts.
A CNN journalist shared a string of offensive, anti-Israel and pro-terror comments on social media, HonestReporting revealed on Monday, following up on six other revelations of blatantly antisemitic journalists since last August.
A slanted April 8 CNN International article headlined “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.
An examination of one of the names on the byline reveals a possible explanation.
Tamara Qiblawi, a Georgetown-educated native of Lebanon, 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. However, 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.
For instance, in a May 15, 2015, Facebook entry, she described the events surrounding Israel’s founding with the Palestinian term “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe,” while denouncing the creation of a safe haven for Jews as “mak[ing] way for an ethno-religious exclusive state.”
Mere months before her name first appeared on the CNN website, Qiblawi publicly corresponded with a friend who fantasized about “the end of the Zionist state.” When that friend pictured retiring in “Haifa, the coastal northern metropolis of Palestine [sic]… at the George Habash [PFLP leader] resort, in which European Jewish waiters serve my ever frustrating needs,” Qiblawi responded with “lol,” in addition to liking the comment.
Two days after the January 2015 terror attack in Paris, which targeted the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket, Qiblawi took to Facebook to tell her followers 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.”
In a follow-up comment, the journalist 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.”
Meanwhile, in a 2014 post condemning the Syrian army, she expressed her “desire for resistance to the Zio-Saudi project,” adding that she’d “like nothing more than to support a ‘resistance axis.'” Notably, the “axis of resistance” usually refers to Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and other Iran-backed terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction.
Qiblawi also accused the Israel Defense Forces of a “genocidal onslaught” during the First Lebanon War, criticized Starbucks for purportedly being an “openly zionist corporation,” and liked a comment that dubbed Israelis “racist criminals and liars.”
In a 2011 blog post, she boasted about giving the finger to IDF soldiers guarding the ceasefire line with Lebanon.
Tamara Qiblawi is, of course, entitled to her personal views, even if they are uninformed. But as we previously outlined, producers with a political agenda can be selective with the information they present to the public, resulting in skewed media coverage of the Middle East conflict.
The article she helped write this week came amid the unremitting onslaught of Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel and the West Bank that started in March 2022, and after last week’s Iran-linked rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
In the article, readers are led to believe that the Jewish state is to blame for the latest escalation. Studies indicate that nearly 50 percent of news consumers don’t read past the headline, yet only in the second paragraph does CNN reveal that the IAF raid in Lebanon was a direct response to “an attack the Israeli military blamed on Palestinian militants.”
The piece furthermore presents Israel as the aggressor by misleadingly claiming that it was not violent Palestinian riots, but rather the subsequent “police raids on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem,” that triggered the most recent uptick in hostilities.
Sadly, Qiblawi is but the latest in a series of journalists whose shocking views have been exposed by HonestReporting. Since August 2022, our editorial team has uncovered six antisemitic, anti-Israel journalists, whose employers decided to remove them from their posts in order to safeguard journalistic integrity.
We have contacted CNN’s Atlanta headquarters for comment and urge the organization to protect the balance and accuracy of its Middle East coverage.
Related Reading: SUCCESS: HonestReporting Prompts CNN to Sever Ties With ‘#TeamHitler’ Producer
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