CNN producer deletes most recent anti-Israel comments

CNN is backtracking over a producer’s anti-Israel bias. The network published a story on April 8 about rocket attacks in Israel that “initially failed to note that the airstrikes were in response to acts of aggression from terrorist groups in Gaza and Lebanon,” according to Honest Reporting, an Israel-based media watchdog.

Five reporters shared a byline on the CNN article. Honest Reporting dug into the social media history of at least one of those reporters and found that Tamara Qiblawi had a history of making anti-Israel comments.

“Tamara Qiblawi has a track record of delivering excellent, balanced journalism for CNN on the Middle East and other topics,” a spokesperson for CNN responded. “She has agreed to delete these posts.”

In fact, she has now protected all her tweets from public view.

Qiblawi is a senior digital Middle East producer based in CNN’s London bureau who joined the network in 2015. One Facebook post Qiblawi made referenced the founding of Israel as the “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” She went on to call Israel an “ethno-religious exclusive state.”

Israel is, in fact, the only fully functioning democracy in the middle east where Muslims, Jews and Christians have equal rights and participation in government.

A couple of days after the terror attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, Qiblawi published a post saying she was not convinced that Islamic terrorists were behind the attack because of “the absence of any critical consideration of the parties with a vested interest in framing Muslims.”

In a follow-up post, she said, “Our tendency toward conspiracies is not based on some kind of mass paranoid schizophrenia but knowledge of our history with the West.” Qiblawi said the “campaign to dispossess Palestinians in ’48,” referring to the year that Israel was founded, was one example of a conspiracy that was later revealed to be true

In other past posts, Qiblawi has suggested that the Israel Defense Forces committed genocide and called Starbucks an “openly Zionist corporation.” She also “liked” a post that referred to Israelis as “racist criminals and liars,” according to Honest Reporting.