Octavia Nasr, CNN editor, longtime reporter of Middle East affairs, was fired for not promoting the Anti-Arab blatantly partisan (and racist) non-objectivity of CNN, by posting a tweet about the death of a Shi’ite cleric from Lebanon. A cleric who championed among other things, fatwas AGAINST the Honor Killing and female circumcision standard Anti-Arab Right Wing bogeymen. And actually denounced the Iranian cleric government, so much for the notion of a Monolithic Islam.
It should be noted that in the United States, which has a much smaller total population than the Billion or so Muslims total in the world, has a nasty little problem with husbands offing their wives over “infidelity” real or perceived, and in a not very surprising contrast to the Right Wing propaganda, these are more often described as “crimes of passion” and one would have to be a member of a really non-mainstream group to be given the harshest sentencing possible for such crimes. Yet a Muslim cleric, Shi’ite and with ties to Hezbollah, beats the “Awesomely Superior and Moderate”United States justice system in terms of actually defending women. To hear the Right Wing Freaks like Blitzer tell it, a Muslim would be lynched anywhere in the Arab or other Muslim countries for opposing honor killing. Blatantly Anti-Arab. Oh, and opposing United States Imperialist policies automatically gets you ostracized by the Wrong Wing as being “anti-American”.
How many U.S. newspaper editors or writers were actually fired for eulogizing, (in more than 256 characters including spaces like a Twitter tweet) such blatantly racist American “christian” leaders like Billy Sunday, who was a Nazi sympathizer, or Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond or George Wallace or Jerry Falwell?
Yes sir, plenty of “objectivity” there, almost as “fair and balanced” as DumFox Noose Nutwerx.
While right-wing news outlets, such as the Weekly Standard and the conservative WorldNetDaily gleefully reported on Nasr’s departure from CNN, others expressed concern for the double standard which has emerged when discussing Middle East affairs in the US mainstream media.
“The standard here is based on nothing that Nasr reported for CNN. [Her Twitter post] was barely a one sentence expression of sympathy. Firing her was a decision that was completely disconnected from her work so it’s a decision that’s very troubling. Lou Dobbs’s thoughts about immigrants were on CNN every night and CNN stood by him as the criticism mounted and the factual inaccuracies piled up,” said Hart.
“In this case, a stray comment is enough to terminate someone’s role at CNN almost overnight,” he said. “The discrepancy is rather revealing and CNN would have a very hard time revealing precisely what their policy is on this. It’s hard to find precedent for this. She has a history of covering the region and that is not easily replaced.”
