(There's a never-ending supply of these.)
Jim Clancy, CNN reporter and anchor of thirty-four years service suddenly out of a job after he uses the word "
hasbara" in a tweet. Let's nick some content from the Jerusalem Post, lol:
CNN’s Jim Clancy resigns after controversial Israel tweets
Veteran CNN anchor Jim Clancy stepped down on Friday, one week after a series of Twitter posts in which he mocked
pro-Israel tweeters on a thread discussing the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Neither CNN nor Jim Clancy gave a reason for his departure, which was reported by AdWeek. Clancy had worked at CNN for 34 years.
Although Clancy’s Twitter account no longer existed as of Thursday, the tweets have been preserved on a number of websites, including Twitchy and Mediaite, and by Tablet journalist Yair Rosenberg.
On Jan. 7, Clancy posted a tweet arguing that the cartoons posted by the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked last week by Islamist gunmen who killed 12, did not mock the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
“The cartoons NEVER mocked the Prophet,” he wrote. “They mocked how the COWARDS tried to distort his word. Pay attention.”
Challenged on the accuracy of the statement by Oren Kessler, a deputy director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Clancy tweeted, “Hasbara?,” a Hebrew term used to describe public relations efforts by the Israeli government.
In the ensuing debate, Clancy argued that “Pro-Israel voice [sic] try to convince us that cartoonists were really anti Muslim” and accused a pair of Twitter accounts of being part of a public relations campaign for Israel. One of those accounts, called Jews Making News, is an anti-Semitic account “Dedicated to fingering #Jewish main players & their minions in news stories.”
Clancy later told the Twitter account for Human Rights News, “You and the Hasbara team need to pick on some cripple at the edge of the herd.”
Jay Ruderman, head of the Ruderman Family Foundation, which is dedicated to advocacy and inclusion for the disabled, demanded an apology from Clancy and CNN. Ruderman said the use of the term “cripple” was insensitive.
http://www.jpost.com/International/CNNs ... ets-388022
The amazing thing about the affair is that, reading between the lines, it's clear that, initially at least, Clancy was just being a good little liberal and trying to defend Muslims and Islam from sweeping (aka, "racist," "islamophobic") accusations.
In that context, Clancy was indeed wrong: he underestimated the genuinely anti-Islamic nature of Charlie Hebdo's material (or at least the extent to which it was bound to be perceived as such by most Muslims), and so he wound up trying to make the usual case that "not all Muslims are like that," etc., etc., blah blah blah. In effect, he got his targets inverted: he wanted to defend Muslims from the usual accusations and so he tried to claim that what Charlie Hebdo was doing was not in fact peddling the usual accusations.
But clearly that's not so. The one exception might be the cartoon with Mohammed himself doing a facepalm and complaining about the Allahu Akhbar types (caption: "Mohammed overwhelmed by fundamentalists" bubble: "It's hard being loved by idiots"; image here
http://i.imgur.com/UvtIQjK.jpg . . . I won't hotlink it, I don't want to see some jihadi chopping off Bradley's head on YouTube someday, lol). Clancy may have been thinking of that image: it's among those most talked about and reproduced, presumably since it's "safer" than the others, and it actually does have a defensible satirical point. If he had looked farther, however, he undoubtedly would have seen that there wasn't much point defending Charlie Hebdo with the "satirical nuance" argument. Charb & Co. were out to shock and offend, pure and simple.
At any rate, I wonder if it wasn't simply a matter of displaced anger. After a lifetime of playing shabbos goy to Wolf Blitzer and his crew, Clancy must be pretty fed up with the ways of the Jewish commentariat. And so when he saw them going on about "provocation" on the part of Charlie Hebdo, he rushed in to defend Charlie in the mistaken belief he was defending Muslims . . . presumably because he just couldn't stand the hypocrisy of those who were, once more and yet again, doing all the talking.
And then, when he was challenged on it, he lost his cool and blurted out the forbidden word . . . cut to scene of Chief Rabbi rending his robes in fury . . . "Hasbara!"
Because you're not allowed to notice. (Shoah trumps Nakba every time.)
Some of Clancy's tweets:
The notion that every Muslim is a terrorist opponent of truth, justice and the American way needs to be tested. Methinks.
— Jim Clancy (@clancycnn) January 8, 2015
The Hasbara (Israeli explaining the inconsistencies of Human Rights) team has declared victory over @ClancyCNN – next up, #ICC
— Jim Clancy (@clancycnn) January 8, 2015
Here's the rub: @JewsMakingNews @elderofziyon are accounts with about 50 followers…who are also part of a PR campaign that is anti-Muslim
— Jim Clancy (@clancycnn) January 8, 2015
These accounts are part of a campaign to do PR for #Israel @JewsMakingNews @elderofziyon Nothing illegal – but PR not HR : Human Rights
— Jim Clancy (@clancycnn) January 8, 2015
That would explain a great deal.
@HumanRights2K Get a grip, junior. It's my Friday night. You and the Hasbara team need to pick on some cripple on the edge of the herd.
— Jim Clancy (@clancycnn) January 8, 2015
This is what the fine "journalists" at Twitchy call an "incoherent anti-Israel tirade." (You can read the whole thing here:
http://twitchy.com/2015/01/07/cnn-clown ... el-tirade/.)
p.s. If there are any students out there reading this, print yourself up a resume under the name Avi Gelbstern and send it off to these folks:
http://www.hasbarafellowships.org/. You could finance a personal revisionist library with the money, and tell them that you're using it to combat Holocaust denial online.
