The state-owned international television news network France 24 has cut its links with a second journalist from its Arabic service who posted anti-Israel and antisemitic tweets.
Dina Abi-Saab, a correspondent in Geneva, refused to sign the station’s ethics charter and her employment was terminated.
Abi-Saab used the hashtag #Resistance when tweeting about rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel. She compared Israeli bombings of Gaza Strip buildings to Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and referred to terrorist Omar Abu Laila who was killed by the Israeli army as a “martyr”.
من يتذكر برجي التجارة في نيويورك؟9-11 صنف عملاً ارهابياً، والعالم كله يعلم اليوم اي يد ارهابية تستهدف المباني السكنية في #غزة. #برج_الشروق وقبله #برج_هنادي و #برج_الجوهرة مبان مدنية يضم بعضها مؤسسات ومكاتب صحافية، قصفتها اسرائيل ودمرتها اوسوتها بالأرض #غزة_تحت_القصف #فلسطين pic.twitter.com/5NvLFQFRk6
— Dina Abi-Saab (@dabisaab) May 12, 2021
A correspondent in Lebanon, Joelle Maroun, was fired by the production company through which she worked for France 24, in March for posting antisemitic tweets.
One said: “They asked Hitler ‘what did you do with the Jews?’ He said ‘nothing extraordinary, [I just had] barbecue with the guys”.
Another message advised every Palestinian to kill one Jew, so all of them would be annihilated.
Two other journalists working for France 24’s Arabic service who posted anti-Israel messages, Laila Odeh and Sharif Bibi, signed the ethics charter. Odeh, the station’s correspondent in Jerusalem, also participated in a journalistic ethics seminar organised by France 24’s parent company France Media Monde (FMM).
Odeh tweeted on several occasions when terrorists had been killed by the army that they were “martyred” or “died as martyrs”. Bibi tweeted in 2011, before becoming a journalist, a text taught in Lebanese schools, vowing to eradicate Israel, after his friend was killed in a protest on the border with Israel. He deleted the tweet.
The tweets were first exposed by media monitoring site Camera (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) in March.
فيديو يوثق عملية اعتقال نفذتها قوات الاحتلال في مدرسة الحاج زياد جابر في الخليل لشقيق الشهيد عمر أبو ليلى وهو طفل في الثاني او الثالث الابتدائي في ٢٠ اذار الحالي. #HRC40 #OccupiedPalestine @UNNewsArabic @Refugees @UN_News_Centre @unicefchief @UNICEFOman @UNICEFmena @unic https://t.co/tkn0492OLb
— Dina Abi-Saab (@dabisaab) March 24, 2019
When alerted to the existence of the tweets, FMM commissioned an external investigation.
The probe confirmed that Maroun had posted neo-Nazi messages and she was fired by production company Median.
“We immediately cut all ties with that person and we even wanted to sue her for her horrific statements but we were told we could not because we are a media company and not an association fighting antisemitism,” FMM CEO Marie-Christine Saragosse told a parliamentary hearing last month. “We were also told that legal action regarding messages on social media cannot be taken after one year.” Some of the tweets were several years old.
The probe concluded that the three other journalists had posted messages that violated the company’s ethics charter, which bans all hate, partisan or biased messages on private social media accounts.
“We asked two lawyers to look into these messages and they said they were partisan messages,” said Saragosse.
#القسام تستخدم صواريخ جديدة في الضربات الأخيرة التي استهدفت تل أبيب ومطار بن غوريون #مطار_اللد. صواريخ "A120، M75 ,SH85, J80، J90" وصفها بيان القسام بأنها "تحمل رؤوساً متفجرة ذات قدرة تدميرية عالية، ويصل مداها إلى 120 كيلومترا" #غزه #غزه_تقاوم #فلسطين
— Dina Abi-Saab (@dabisaab) May 12, 2021
The case was raised in the National Assembly (parliament) by MP Meyer Habib, who represents French citizens living abroad in the eighth electoral region, which includes Israel and the Palestinian territories.
He quoted Maroun’s pro-Hitler messages: “Rise up Hitler, there are people who must be burnt”; “Every Palestinian must kill a Jews so that the problem would be resolved.”
“Those statements were not said by jihadist fighters (…) but by France 24 Arabic journalists,” Habib said.
