'This Is CNN': Staffer Quits US Liberal News Network After Anti-Semitic Tweets Exposed

It's perhaps the most embarrassing resignation the network has suffered since three staffers were forced to quit in June 2017 after publishing an entirely false story claiming Trump transition team member Anthony Scaramucci had met the chief executive of a US$10-billion Russian investment fund to discuss lifting sanctions.

A photo editor for CNN resigned 25th July after a series of anti-Semitic tweets he posted prior to securing a job at the liberal news network.

Mohammed Elshamy celebrated a Jerusalem bombing attack that wounded scores of people and killed four, referring to the victims as “Jewish pigs”, promoted fundamentalist Palestinian organisation Hamas, and the removal of the Israeli flag from the country’s embassy in Cairo, Egypt in August 2011.

Elshamy made his Twitter account private following the exposure.

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) July 25, 2019

​“The network has accepted the resignation of a photo editor, who joined CNN earlier this year, after anti-Semitic statements he’d made in 2011 came to light. CNN is committed to maintaining a workplace in which every employee feels safe, secure and free from discrimination regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion,” CNN said in a statement.

Elshamy’s most recent by-line on the CNN site was 21 July, in a piece remembering Anas al-Dyab, a photographer connected to Syria’s the extremely controversial White Helmets group, who’d died earlier that day.

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) July 25, 2019

​The US Media Research Center’s NewsBusters platform, which is concerned with “exposing and combating liberal media bias”, condemned CNN for hiring Elshamy without conducting more thorough due-diligence, noting that for all its hosts claims President Donald Trump is a racist and anti-Semite, the network seemed unable “to catch those tendencies of prospective employees during the hiring process”.

“CNN was the same network that sent out reporter Andrew Kaczynski to hunt down and dox Trump supporters who made and shared mean memes about them, but they wouldn’t investigate the histories of their prospective employees. This is CNN,” NewsBusters’ Nicholas Fondacaro wrote.

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) July 25, 2019

​Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of the global social action agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he didn't think CNN's statement was good enough, the Jewish Journal has reported.

“They owe the Jewish community and the victims of terrorism an apology,” Cooper said.