According to Middle-East watchdog group Honest Reporting, CNN published a “slanted” story on April 8 regarding a rocket attack on the Jewish state that “initially failed to note that the airstrikes were in response to acts of aggression from terrorist groups in Gaza and Lebanon.”
One of the five reporters who shared a byline on the CNN article, Tamara Qiblawi, was found to have a history of posting anti-Israel comments.
Honest Reporting discovered a May 15 Facebook post in which Qiblawi called the founding of Israel “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.”
She also called Israel an “ethno-religious exclusive state,” ignoring the Joint List, a coalition of majority Arab parties in Israel with representation in the Knesset, as well as Arab Supreme Court Justices and Arabs holding Israeli citizenship.
According to Honest Reporting, just “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,” and liked the comment.
Following the terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, Qiblawi posted she was “not convinced” that Islamic terrorists were responsible for the attack because of “the absence of any critical consideration of the parties with a vested interest in framing Muslims.”
The Lebanon native added, “[O]ur tendency towards conspiracies is not based on some kind of mass paranoid schizophrenia but knowledge of our history with the west.”
Qiblawi also claimed that the “campaign to dispossess Palestinians in ’48,” referencing the year that Israel was founded, was an example of a conspiracy that was later revealed to be true.
The CNN producer has also claimed that the Israel Defense Forces have committed genocide and called Starbucks an “openly zionist corporation.”
According to Honest Reporting, she also liked a post that referred to Israelis as “racist criminals and liars.”
After Honest Reporting revealed Qiblawi's posts, the CNN producer restricted her Twitter account.
Qiblawi has been with CNN since 2015 and is a senior digital Middle East producer based out of the network’s London Bureau.
A CNN spokesperson told The Daily Wire, “Tamara Qiblawi has a track record of delivering excellent, balanced journalism for CNN on the Middle East and other topics. She has agreed to delete these posts.”
