Twitter has just created a new post for an “editorial curation head” who will regulate all coverage at the site having to do with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It’s quite a responsibility. Twitter looked high and low for someone suitably objective, or so they pretend, but the person they have just appointed, Fadah Jassem, turns out to be anything but.

A report on Ms. Jassem is here: “New Twitter Curator for Middle East News Apologizes for Past ‘Ill-Informed’ Tweets About Israel,” by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, November 2, 2021:

Twitter’s newly-appointed “editorial curation lead” for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) began her new job with an apology after coming under fire for previous tweets about Israel.

Fadah Jassem announced her new position on Monday in a Twitter post, saying, “Very excited to get stuck in and delve deeper into the discussions that matter from this diverse and lively region.” The London-based, former Al Jazeera reporter added the emoji flags of 16 countries in the MENA region, as well as the Palestinian one, but the Israeli flag was not included.

So her background includes being a reporter for Al Jazeera, the viciously anti-Israel pro-Palestinian news outlet owned by the government of Qatar. That by itself ought to have disqualified her. But there is more. She added to her Twitter post emoji flags of 16 countries that belong to the MENA region, but managed to leave out the flag of Israel.

An oversight? Or the vexilogical equivalent of a Freudian slip? Fadah Jassem could not possibly have omitted by mere forgetfulness the emoji flag of Israel. It’s the best known, and the most discussed, for good and bad, among the MENA countries. Leaving it out was a deliberate expression of her antipathy to the Jewish state, a semaphoring to her Arab and Muslim audience – the same one she addressed when she worked for Al Jazeera – that her views hadn’t changed with the job, and she would make sure that Twitter covered Israel and “Palestine” in a way they would approve.

After Twitter users noted the missing Israeli flag, Jassem posted another tweet that featured the flags of Israel, Turkey and Djibouti, adding that she could not access the flag of Oman.

Fadah Jassem posted the Israeli flag only after many complaints came into Twitter, and she pretended that there had been nothing sinister about her initial failure to post Israel’s emoji flag. After all, she had also failed to post the emoji flags of Turkey and Djibouti. Isn’t that proof enough, she wants her critics to believe, that there was nothing anti-Israel in her leaving out the flag of the Jewish state? But Turkey and Djibouti are arguably not fully included in the MENA region; western Turkey is considered to be in Europe; Djibouti lies at the northeast corner of the Horn of Africa, halfway down the continent’s east coast and far from the Middle East. Israel, however, is situated at the very center of the MENA region, and to leave its flag out, as Jassem did, while making sure to includes an emoji flag for “Palestine,” was not, as she pretends, an innocent lapse.

Other users resurfaced several years-old posts from Jassem, including a September 2010 retweet that said Israel was “not born” but instead “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine.” In December of the same year, she quoted Nation of Islam leader and notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan at least four times in posts singling out Israel, such as “we give you our tax dollars to support Israel every year.” She called his speeches “a great example of faith transcending boundaries.”

How “objective“ does Twitter think its MENA coverage, as “curated” by Fadah Jassem, can possibly be, If the person put in charge of “curating” Twitter’s coverage of MENA retweets with evident approval, in September 2010, someone else’s tweet that claimed Israel was not “born” but “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine”? How can Jassem possibly be allowed to continue, now that her outrageous view of Israel has been revealed, to be Twitter’s “curator” of posts about MENA, including coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

And what about Fadah Jassem’s admiration for America’s leading antisemite, Louis Farrakhan, whom she has repeatedly retweeted? Wouldn’t his infamous record have alerted her to stay clear of his malignant drivel, whether he is denouncing all Jews as “children of Satan” or praising Adolf Hitler?

Many people know about Farrakhan’s deep antisemitism, but apparently the newly-appointed “curator” of tweets about MENA lands is not among them. Or perhaps she did know about his view of Jews, and didn’t care. That would make her behavior even worse.

After her earlier tweets quoting Farrakhan came to light, Jassem later issued a public apology on Twitter. “I can see that I have been ill-informed with some tweets when [I was] younger. I apologize for any offense caused by these particular tweets and like I said for forgetting the Israeli flag with reference to MENA as I did others,” she wrote in response to HonestReporting’s Emanuel Miller on Monday [Nov. 1].

She can “apologize” all she likes — her taqqiya is showing — and she carefully does not tell us in which of her tweets she showed herself to be “ill-informed,” but she does not address the main issue: why has she repeatedly and approvingly tweeted remarks by the semi-demented antisemite Louis Farrakhan? And how was it that she just “forgot” to post the Israeli emoji flag along with the 16 others that she did post, including one of the “State of Palestine”? And the main point, that she fails to address, is her retweeting of another’s tweet describing Israel as “not [having been] born” but, rather, “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine.”

She has since made her Twitter account private.