A Palestinian journalist Tala Halawa was dismissed by The BBC for a tweet from the year 2014, in which she criticized an attack on Gaza. Halawa had joined BBC three years after the tweet.
On Wednesday, Tala took to Facebook to express her disappointment over her dismissal from BBC.
“I was judged based on a single offensive and ignorant tweet posted seven years ago during the traumatic Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2014, specifically during the Shujaiyya attack where 55 Palestinian civilians, including 19 children and 14 women, were killed in 48 hours by Israeli strikes,” Halawa wrote.
“Israeli settlers had also kidnapped and burnt alive 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir in East Jerusalem. I was a young Palestinian woman tweeting in the heat of the moment as I witnessed horrific, undeserved deaths met with international media silence and used a popular hashtag at the time without thinking,” she added.
Tala further said that “the BBC, instead of seeking avenues for apology, reconciliation, and dialogue, unfortunately opted for trial with social media, amplifying troll voices and capitulating to pressure from external pro-Israel interest groups and right-wing media outlets determined to eliminate Palestinians from public life.”
“The BBC’s immediate dismissal at the whim of a pro-Israel mob is all the more absurd given the actual reason pro-Israel groups trained their sights on me: I recently published a video report for the corporation about celebrities being criticized, trolled and cancelled for supporting Palestinian self-determination. But I am not alone. This pro-Israel censorship campaign is industrial in scale and international in its reach,” she concluded.
This bias towards the people who speak for the Palestinian cause in the west is not new. Earlier this week, the renowned intellectual Cornel West resigned from Harvard citing anti-Palestinian bias as one of the reasons.