Unfortunately, CBS and CNN did not perform due diligence when they recently allowed on to their news programs a woman from Gaza, Dunia Abu Rahma, whose bloodcurdling hatred of Israel and of Jews has now been revealed by those at HonestReporting who investigated her social media posts. More on her television appearances, and her views, can be found here: “CNN & NBC Give Airtime to Woman Who Celebrated Hamas Massacre & Wished Hitler Had Finished the Job,” by Chaim Lax, HonestReporting, October 19, 2023:
…Dunia Abu Rahma, a 22-year-old architecture student from Gaza, has appeared in recent days on both CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and NBC News to tell her story.
Abu Rahma told the veteran CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, “All I want them to know is that there are civilians, people who wish to live a normal, peaceful life, to feel safe, because we are human, and all we want is to have our rights and live peacefully. As a woman and as a girl, all I want in this life [is] to educate and to graduate and have a job and have a family.”…
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? All she wants the public to know is that she, and all the Palestinians, only want to “live a normal peaceful life.” All they want is their “rights and to live peacefully.” But she’s lying. That’s not what she wants. She wants, her many social media posts reveal, for the Jewish state to disappear, and for the Jews — not only Israelis — to be killed.
Throughout Hamas’ October 7 slaughter, Dunia Abu Rahma both tweeted and reposted several tweets supporting the massacres.
Soon after the Hamas assault began in the early morning, Abu Rahma tweeted “Good morning. I wanted them to loot and liberate the country in my graduation year.”
A couple of hours later, she posted two tweets in succession. One read: “He really freed the prisoners!” This is presumably a reference to the hordes of Hamas terrorists and local Gazans who were rampaging through Israeli communities at the time.
The second post was a quote tweet of a video of a brutal lynching of an Israeli soldier on the streets of Gaza with the caption: “On my own, I go down and beat him with them.”
Yes, she missed the fun of joining a bunch of Hamas goons in tormenting and torturing — and almost certainly killing — a lone Israeli soldier. Too bad she couldn’t have been there. She can dream, can’t she?
Later, she tweeted happily about the border with Israel being overrun, saying in one tweet that she was planning on transferring from her university in Gaza to Bir Zeit (a university in the West Bank) and tweeting later that “In this case, we will pray at Al-Aqsa [in Jerusalem] next Friday.”
On October 7, Dunia Abu Rahma also reposted several tweets by other accounts celebrating the carnage.
One read: “It looks like a blessed Saturday, people of Palestine, good morning” while another mentioned that “One’s heart flutters with joy with every missile that comes out.”
And her heart, too, fluttered with joy, as rocket after rocket was launched from Gaza into the cities of southern Israel. How many Jewish deaths, how much Jewish destruction!
She also reposted an image allegedly of Hamas taking IDF captives captioned “Blessed October” as well as an image of a bloodied Israeli female teenager being manhandled by terrorists with a caption justifying the vicious treatment of Israeli women by Hamas….
Yes, how exciting, how exhilarating, seeing IDF soldiers taken captive, and even more wonderful to see brave fighters of Hamas tormenting them, or better still, having their way with Israeli girls, raping them to their hearts’ content. How good to see the yahudim brought low, tormented, tortured, and killed!
In one tweet, Abu Rahma posts “May God forgive you, Hitler. I wish you had finished with this group of people who went astray.”…
No ambiguity there. It’s language from the Qur’an: The Jews are “those who went astray.” And here is Dunia Abu Rahma, wishing that Hitler had not just murdered six million of them, but finished with all of them. What does Anderson Cooper think, now that he realizes he had on as a guest someone who praises Hitler for murdering Jews, and only wishes he had stayed in power long enough to finish the job?
In December 2021, she shared a video of a soccer game between Algeria and Tunisia and captioned it “The house of the Jews will be destroyed.”
In other words, so obsessive was Abu Rahma’s genocidal hatred of Jews that even a soccer match between two Arab teams, having nothing to do with Israel or Jews, could manage to set her off: “The house of the Jews will be destroyed.”
Along with her antisemitic posts, Dunia Abu Rahma has also called for the destruction of Israel.
Following a tweet that said, “We want a truce,” Abu Rahma commented “We want to get rid of it,” referring to Israel….
Abu Rahma makes clear she wants Israel to disappear. There is no other interpretation of her rejecting the possibility of a truce, and instead insisting that “we [the Palestinians] want to get rid of it.” Rid of Israel, that is.
She wants Israel in the future to disappear, so that “from the river to the sea” there will again be only the Arab state of Palestine. But there never was an Arab state of Palestine. Abu Rahma does not realize that Jews lived in this same area for at least 3000 years — that is, 1600 years before there was a single Muslim Arab in the Land of Israel or, indeed, anywhere.
What happened here was a failure of due diligence. Though both NBC News and CNN have enormous staffs, apparently no one thought it necessary to look into Dunia Abu Rahma’s own views before providing her with sympathetic airtime. Had they done so, they would have discovered she shares the views of Hamas, that is, an annihilationist attitude toward Israel. And they might then have chosen some other Gazans, less fanatical in their hatred of Israel, and of Jews, to interview. Perhaps they’ve learned a lesson at CNN and NBC News, now that Abu Rahma’s mental makeup has been exposed. They need to thoroughly check the social media posts of possible guests from Gaza. Will they do it? Knowing the American media, I doubt it.