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“We are not anti-Semitic”: Fired presenter Helen Fares makes serious accusations against SWR
The journalist Helen Fares, who was fired from SWR, does not mention the massacre of October 7th in her Instagram posts, like many alleged critics of Israel
© Screenshot Instagram
The presenter Helen Fares called for a boycott of Israeli products on Instagram, whereupon the public broadcaster SWR fired her. Now the journalist defends herself in a statement against the accusation of being anti-Semitic.
Fares justifies her call in the statement by saying that “millions of people around the world are engaged in the boycott movement, including thousands of Jews, and these people have asked us to increase pressure on the Israeli government to stop its activities in Palestine encourage anti-Semitism themselves. The “millions of people” are probably a reference to the BDS movement. BDS stands for “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”, the aim of which is to isolate Israel economically, culturally and politically for its policies towards the Palestinians. The Bundestag clearly condemned the BDS with a large majority in 2019 and classified it as anti-Semitic.
Helen Fares recommended a boycott app
Fares had called on Instagram to stop buying Israeli products. In the article she gave the example of Alpro’s chocolate milk, which she now avoids. Alpro, like its French parent company Danone, has close ties to Israel. You have to know that Danone was once founded by the Jew Isaac Carasso, whose son Daniel fled from Frankfurt to the USA to escape the Nazis in 1941. For the boycott, she even recommended a cell phone app that identifies Israeli products.
After criticism on social media about the video, SWR reacted and separated from Fares. The broadcaster’s statement on Monday stated, among other things, that she had “repeatedly expressed extreme political positions on her private social media account” and had thereby given up the “independence” necessary for journalists. Strangely, the station avoided the word anti-Semitism.
First speaker at the Palestine Congress – then not
However, the station could have noticed Fares’ stance on the Palestine conflict earlier. In previous postings, Fares accused the Israeli government of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians. Critics of Israeli politics are being “intimidated and criminalized” in Germany in order to keep them “quiet.” She called the Israeli prime minister “fascist.” She doesn’t mention the October 7 massacre, in which Hamas terrorists brutally killed 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians, in her postings.
Fares was initially announced as a speaker at the “Palestine Congress 2024”, which will take place in Berlin in mid-April: on the event’s website it was stated that she would take part in a panel discussion on “Germany’s ‘feminist foreign policy'”. Since Tuesday, after her dismissal from SWR, her name suddenly no longer appears in the program.