Did CNN fire the wrong reporter?
As I'm sure many of you have already heard, CNN fired senior Middle East editor Octavia Nasr - a Lebanese Christian - a couple of weeks ago for tweeting a sympathetic tribute to Hezbullah spiritual leader Mohamed Fadlallah after his death.Did CNN fire the wrong reporter? CAMERA thinks so.
In a June 29, 2010 tweet, Wedeman directed his followers to an "excellent" article, as he put it, by the harshly anti-Israel professor/blogger Juan Cole. Judging by that warm praise, Wedeman embraces, and thinks his readers should likewise subscribe to, the radical and facile narrative put forth by Cole in the recommended piece. Cole's article claimed:Read the whole thing.[Israel's] isolation derives from Israeli policies, of illegal blockades ... and systematic land theft and displacement of occupied civilians under its control, along with aggressive wars on neighbors, which target infrastructure and civilians and are clearly intended to keep neighbors poor and backward.In other words, Cole and Wedeman promote the argument that Israelis send their sons and daughters to war not for the country's security and preservation, but out of sheer malice. The Six-Day War, according to this view, did not stem from Egyptian acts of war and threats of annihilation. The war that followed wasn't forced on Israel when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attacked against the Jewish state on Yom Kippur in 1973. Hezbollah's missile salvo on northern Israel and cross-border kidnaping raid wasn't the reason for war in 2006, nor were the thousands of rockets and mortars fired from Hamas's Gaza Strip, which made life in southern Israel intolerable, the cause for Israel's Gaza operation in 2009. Those crazy Israelis simply want their neighbors to be "poor and backward." (Moreover, according to this line of thinking, Israeli official Mark Regev was lying when he described Israel's belief that "a healthy, successful, prosperous Palestine is in the interest of the state of Israel. Living next to a failed state, a failed economy, would only be a recipe for further violence.")
That Wedeman presumably shares Cole's extraordinary biases should in and of itself raise red flags at CNN headquarters. But even if he does inwardly share Cole's sharply biased views, is Wedeman able to be objective in his reportage?
It seems not.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:10 PM
2 Comments:
Carl what does anything have to do with the fact Octavia Nasr is a Lebanese Christian? You are not trying to imply that Lebanese Christians are sympathetic to Israel, are you? I hope not because Bridgett Gabriel and half the Lebanese Christians I know can tell you what virulent Jew hate they lived through as children growing up in Lebanon.
Furthermore, what Nasr wrote and the fact CNN and Ben Wedeman are fueled by antisemitism are really two different things.
The connection here escapes me.
The Christian Arabs hate the Jews as much as the Muslims do. Anti-Semitism makes for strange bedfellows in the Middle East.
Post a Comment
<< Home