You Don’t Tweet about Hezbollah

It only took 140 characters to end the twenty-year career of Octavia Nasr, a Middle East expert for the American channel CNN. On July 4th, the Lebanese journalist posted a message on the social network Twitter in which she said that she was “sad to hear of the passing” of the Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, “one of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

The problem is that American and Israeli security agencies consider the spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shiite movement to be one of the most sought after terrorists in the world. Octavia Nasr quickly issued an apology on the CNN website and admitted “an error of judgment” for having written “a simplistic comment.” She explained that she admired Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah because he “took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on women’s rights.” The Ayatollah distinguished himself in November of 2007 by issuing a fatwa condemning all violence against women and calling on women to exercise their right to self-defense.

Nasr’s explanations were not sufficient to calm the intense furor aroused by her tweet. The vice-president of CNN International, Parisa Khosravi, decided that, as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Octavia Nasr was no longer credible and that she should therefore leave the network.

For Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Moussawi, CNN demonstrated “intellectual terrorism” in making this decision. “This measure reveals the double standard in the West regarding matters in the region and unmasks the United States, which pretends to protect freedom of speech,” he said. One month ago, the dean of White House correspondents, Helen Thomas, also was forced to retire after expressing controversial views on Israeli politics.