Red State‘s Bonchie wrote a must-read post earlier today about how CNN announced on Thursday the resignation of photo editor and occasional news article writer Mohammed Elshamy after virulently anti-Semitic posts were discovered on his Twitter feed.

It probably won’t surprise many of you to find out that this isn’t the first time the network has had to part ways with an employee who has engaged in anti-Semitism.

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit‘s blog writes:

A week ago, Jewish Insider reported that “Former CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill claimed that news outlets like NBC and ABC were ‘Zionist organizations’ that produced ‘Zionist content,’ during a panel on Friday at the annual Netroots Nation summit held by progressive activists in Philadelphia…Hill’s comments came less than a year after he lost his CNN perch after calling for a ‘free Palestine from the river to the sea,’ during an appearance at the U.N. The statement was interpreted by many as a call for the elimination of Israel, something Hill denied.” In 2014, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “CNN International correspondent Diana Magnay referred to a group of Israelis as ‘scum’ after she claimed that they were standing on a hill near the town of Sderot cheering as bombs landed in Gaza, according to a screen-shot of the comment captured by National Review.”



When CNN’s senior editor of Mideast affairs Octavia Nasr was fired in 2010, for tweeting, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot,” Cal Thomas opined, “The dirty little secret here is that she was simply expressing viewpoints that is widespread not only in the American media but much of the Euro media. […] Christiane Amanpour [CNN international journo] holds many of these views as well, I would daresay, but she is smart enough and sophisticated enough not to stick them on a Tweet.”

Yep. Like Democratic politicians in Washington, D.C. (like, for example, the Congressional Black Caucus), some liberal journalists and commentators at major news networks are better at hiding their anti-Semitism than others.

As Bonchie noted earlier in his write-up, CNN‘s chief media firefighter Brian Stelter has barely touched this issue. We know that would not be the case if this had happened at Fox News, of which Stelter has been unrelentingly critical:

Would Stelter and the rest of CNN shrug this off if any other outlet made this mistake? Of course they wouldn’t. Imagine for a second that The Daily Caller hired a white supremacist, even inadvertently. Would CNN at least put out a story detailing what happened? Would there be a myriad of scolding tweets from CNN personalities? The answer is unequivocally yes, so while I can perhaps believe that CNN didn’t intentionally hire this guy, their hypocrisy is glaring enough to not ignore.

Not only that, but consider this, too, in the context of CNN‘s history of flirting with anti-Semitism: Not only have they had these hate-filled individuals on their staff, but they also have provided cover for anti-Semitical politicians like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

As I wrote last week on the issue of Stelter backpatting himself over his network’s definitive labeling of President Trump’s controversial tweets about The Squad as “racist”, CNN‘s standards on how to label controversial comments made by politicians are staggeringly inconsistent.

They’ll call Trump’s tweets “racist”, but when it comes to anti-Semitical comments made by Omar and Tlaib, qualifiers similar to “critics say” and “some suggest” always apply in their straight-news reporting.

Ideally, they should let readers and viewers draw their own conclusions on the meaning behind comments politicians make rather than deciding for them. But that standard for CNN only applies when it comes to Omar’s and Tlaib’s incendiary remarks, not Trump’s.

Lastly, there is this, too:

It’s so weird how CNN has an entire crack team dedicated to finding old tweets or going after gif makers & forklift operators but they somehow missed those. — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) July 26, 2019

Yeah. Odd, that.

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— Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter. –