Twitter’s New ‘Curator’ for Middle East News has Long Anti-Israel History

BY HUGH FITZGERALD

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/11/twitters-new-curator-for-middle-east-news-has-long-anti-israel-history;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Twitter has just created a new post for an “editorial curation head” who will regulate all coverage at the site having to do with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It’s quite a responsibility. Twitter looked high and low for someone suitably objective, or so they pretend, but the person they have just appointed, Fadah Jassem, turns out to be anything but. A report on Ms. Jassem is here: “New Twitter Curator for Middle East News Apologizes for Past ‘Ill-Informed’ Tweets About Israel,” by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, November 2, 2021:

Twitter’s newly-appointed “editorial curation lead” for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) began her new job with an apology after coming under fire for previous tweets about Israel.

Fadah Jassem announced her new position on Monday in a Twitter post, saying, “Very excited to get stuck in and delve deeper into the discussions that matter from this diverse and lively region.” The London-based, former Al Jazeera reporter added the emoji flags of 16 countries in the MENA region, as well as the Palestinian one, but the Israeli flag was not included.

So her background includes being a reporter for Al Jazeera, the viciously anti-Israel pro-Palestinian news outlet owned by the government of Qatar. That by itself ought to have disqualified her. But there is more. She added to her Twitter post emoji flags of 16 countries that belong to the MENA region, but managed to leave out the flag of Israel.

An oversight? Or the vexilogical equivalent of a Freudian slip? Fadah Jassem could not possibly have omitted by mere forgetfulness the emoji flag of Israel. It’s the best known, and the most discussed, for good and bad, among the MENA countries. Leaving it out was a deliberate expression of her antipathy to the Jewish state, a semaphoring to her Arab and Muslim audience – the same one she addressed when she worked for Al Jazeera – that her views hadn’t changed with the job, and she would make sure that Twitter covered Israel and “Palestine” in a way they would approve.

After Twitter users noted the missing Israeli flag, Jassem posted another tweet that featured the flags of Israel, Turkey and Djibouti, adding that she could not access the flag of Oman.

Fadah Jassem posted the Israeli flag only after many complaints came into Twitter, and she pretended that there had been nothing sinister about her initial failure to post Israel’s emoji flag. After all, she had also failed to post the emoji flags of Turkey and Djibouti. Isn’t that proof enough, she wants her critics to believe, that there was nothing anti-Israel in her leaving out the flag of the Jewish state? But Turkey and Djibouti are arguably not fully included in the MENA region; western Turkey is considered to be in Europe; Djibouti lies at the northeast corner of the Horn of Africa, halfway down the continent’s east coast and far from the Middle East. Israel, however, is situated at the very center of the MENA region, and to leave its flag out, as Jassem did, while making sure to includes an emoji flag for “Palestine,” was not, as she pretends, an innocent lapse.

Other users resurfaced several years-old posts from Jassem, including a September 2010 retweet that said Israel was “not born” but instead “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine.” In December of the same year, she quoted Nation of Islam leader and notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan at least four times in posts singling out Israel, such as “we give you our tax dollars to support Israel every year.” She called his speeches “a great example of faith transcending boundaries.”

How “objective“ does Twitter think its MENA coverage, as “curated” by Fadah Jassem, can possibly be, If the person put in charge of “curating” Twitter’s coverage of MENA retweets with evident approval, in September 2010, someone else’s tweet that claimed Israel was not “born” but “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine”? How can Jassem possibly be allowed to continue, now that her outrageous view of Israel has been revealed, to be Twitter’s “curator” of posts about MENA, including coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

And what about Fadah Jassem’s admiration for America’s leading antisemite, Louis Farrakhan, whom she has repeatedly retweeted? Wouldn’t his infamous record have alerted her to stay clear of his malignant drivel, whether he is denouncing all Jews as “children of Satan” or praising Adolf Hitler?

Many people know about Farrakhan’s deep antisemitism, but apparently the newly-appointed “curator” of tweets about MENA lands is not among them. Or perhaps she did know about his view of Jews, and didn’t care. That would make her behavior even worse.

Here’s just a bit from Minister Farrakhan’s farrago of antisemitic hate:

In June 2010, Farrakhan sent letters to several leaders of the Jewish community demanding that they acknowledge the evils they have perpetrated and that they must now work to further Farrakhan’s goals, especially by providing him with money. The letter ended with a threat to “ruin and destroy your power and influence here and throughout the world” if his terms were not met. This is the crime of extortion.

On Saviours’ Day, Feb. 25, 1990, Farrakhan gave a speech that included this“The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters. … The Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress.”

On Saviours’ Day, Feb, 25, 1996, Farrakhan said this about Jews: “And you do with me as is written, but remember that I have warned you that Allah will punish you. You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of Allah, you would be wise to leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.”

We can now present to our people and the world a true, undeniable record of the relationship between Blacks and Jews from their own mouths and pens. These scholars, Rabbis and historians [that Nation of Islam researchers studied] have given to us an undeniable record of Jewish anti-Black behavior, starting with the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, the labor movement of the North and South, the unions and the misuse of our people that continues to this very moment.”

–From a letter sent by Louis Farrakhan to Jewish leaders, June 24, 2010

Osama Bin Laden didn’t destroy the Twin Towers. That was a false flag operation to take the world’s attention away from the great disunity in America after George W. Bush stole the election.”[you can guess who, according to Farrakhan, was behind that “false flag” operation] –Louis Farrakhan in The Final Call, March 15, 2016

“I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.” –Oct. 16, 2018, tweet from Louis Farrakhan (@LouisFarrakhan).

“Pedophilia and sexual perversion institutionalized in Hollywood and the entertainment industries can be traced to Talmudic principles and Jewish influence. Not Jewish influence, Satanic influence under the name of Jew.” –Louis Farrakhan, Saviours’ Day speech, Chicago, Feb. 17, 2019

Farrakhan-related posts were uploaded by Jassem shortly before she was employed as a freelance producer by NBC News’ London desk, the media watchdog HonestReporting said.

Farrakhan has famously declared that “Hitler was a great man.”

Yet Fadah Jassem has retweeted, admiringly, tweets by Louis Farrakhan. How likely is it she will move to ban him at Twitter for his obsessive savaging of Israel?

After her earlier tweets quoting Farrakhan came to light, Jassem later issued a public apology on Twitter. “I can see that I have been ill-informed with some tweets when [I was] younger. I apologize for any offense caused by these particular tweets and like I said for forgetting the Israeli flag with reference to MENA as I did others,” she wrote in response to HonestReporting’s Emanuel Miller on Monday [Nov. 1].

She can “apologize” all she likes — her taqqiya is showing — and she carefully does not tell us in which of her tweets she showed herself to be “ill-informed,” but she does not address the main issue: why has she repeatedly and approvingly tweeted remarks by the semi-demented antisemite Louis Farrakhan? And how was it that she just “forgot” to post the Israeli emoji flag along with the 16 others that she did post, including one of the “State of Palestine”? And the main point, that she fails to address, is her retweeting of another’s tweet describing Israel as “not [having been] born” but, rather, “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine.”

She has since made her Twitter account private.

She’s now fearing more discoveries of damning tweets she may have made in the past, and is worried about others having access to her future expressions of opinion; she’s decided to hide all of her tweets, past, present, and future. What should we make of someone who is supposed to “curate” the content about MENA on Twitter, but has made her own Twitter account private? It’s not surprising that she would try to hide such remarks as the one about Israel being “not born” but, rather, “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine.” But what does Twitter, what does CEO Jack Dorsey, now think, based on this new information about Jassem’s own tweets, and her determination to hide them, about the decision to hire her and give her the immense responsibility for  “curating” the tweets of everyone else about MENA?

According to Jassem’s job description, she will lead efforts to facilitate “the curation of the best, most relevant, and timely content that reaches, engages and delights one of the largest daily audiences in the world.” Wouldn’t it be better to hire someone who will “inform” that large audience, rather than “delight” it by playing to its prejudices?

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, has in the past shown a disturbing indifference to antisemitic content.

Twitter’s critics have often pointed out the company took action against Trump for violating the company’s rules, but always sits back when Ayatollah Khamenei bashes Jews and Israel. Khamenei has, on many occasions, referred to Israel as “cancerous,” and has at other times said it is an “evil, wolf-like entity.” Earlier this year, he referred to Israel as a “deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

His comments appear to violate Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy,” which bars users from threatening people with violence, among other rules.

“We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance,” Twitter’s policy says.

When it comes to Israel and Jews, users are allowed to threaten all they want. Twitter allows antisemitic abuse to continue to appear on its website.

And along with antisemitic and anti-Israel tweets that he has allowed to be posted, Jack Dorsey has not taken any steps to remove Holocaust-denial tweets.

Dorsey has been quick to edit content deemed to be “misinformation” when it comes to politics, the coronavirus pandemic and other issues of consequence. But when users on his platform spread harmful lies about the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, he does nothing.

Among the tweets that a group protesting outside of Dorsey’s home broadcast to the world were these, still up at Twitter:“The holocaust is fake to distract from the truth. 6 million Jews did not die”; “Joe Biden’s win is as fake as the holocaust”; “The holocaust is fake and gay.”

Dorsey has yet to ban any neo-Nazi material. Apparently, he is willing to ignore the stated policy of his own company, which declares “We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance.”

Jack Dorsey’s policy of tolerating antisemitic tweets, Holocaust-denying tweets, tweets calling for the murder of Israelis and the destruction of Israel, infuriated the British comic Sacha Baron Cohen, who called Dorsey out this past May: “Why do you allow #HitlerWasRight ?!” he wrote. “Those who celebrate the Holocaust aim to perpetuate another. #StopHateForProfit.” Baron Cohen was apparently reacting to an Anti-Defamation League report released recently that said more than 17,000 tweets used variations of the phrase “Hitler Was Right” between May 7 and May 14. But those tweets were not deleted, nor those who posted them banned – the way Donald Trump was — from the site.

Given what all this tells us about Jack Dorsey, no one should be surprised that Fadah Jassem has been chosen to be “Editorial Curation Lead” for all tweets about the MENA region. Her anti-Israel views, her years of propagandizing at Al Jazeera, her admiration for Louis Farrakhan – all these make her an ideal candidate for the position. And judging by Jack Dorsey’s demonstrated tolerance for “Hitler was right” tweets, Holocaust-denying tweets, destroy-Israel tweets, Fadah Jassem should feel right at home.