RNA - Veteran US TV journalist Jim Clancy has abruptly left the international news broadcaster after 34 years, following a seemingly tangential Twitter argument over Charlie Hebdo that escalated to a verbal war between Clancy and pro-Israel social media users.
“The cartoons NEVER mocked the Prophet,” he wrote. “They mocked how the COWARDS tried to distort his word. Pay attention,” Haaretz reported.
The tweets were posted last January 7 after two gunmen attacked the French satirical weekly, killing 12 people.
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.
Responding to pro-Israel activists, Clancy argued that “Pro-Israel voice [sic] try to convince us that cartoonists were really anti Muslim”.
He also 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.”
The argument angered pro-Israel activists, including Jay Ruderman, head of the Ruderman Family Foundation, who demanded an apology from Clancy and the CNN.
Afterwards, he closed his twitter account.
In a surprise move, Clancy, who anchored the global news show “The Brief,” announced he was leaving CNN after 34 years of work.
He posted the following message: "After nearly 34 years with Cable News Network, the time has come to say farewell! It has been my honor to work alongside all of you for all of these years."
A CNN spokesperson issued the following statement in response: “Jim Clancy is no longer with CNN. We thank him for more than three decades of distinguished service, and wish him nothing but the best."
The TV anchor had worked at CNN for more than 30 years, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Rwandan genocide and the Iraq wars, according to a biography that has since has been deleted from CNN’s website.
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