Adeel Raja, a Pakistan-based CNN contributor has been fired after he tweeted ‘The world today needs a Hitler’ amidst the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Hamas. His pro-Hitler statement indirectly calling for another Jewish genocide drew a heavy backlash following which the American multinational media outfit decided to cut ties with him.
CNN later released a statement informing about the severing of ties with the controversial freelancer. “Adeel Raja’s reporting contributed to some newsgathering efforts from Islamabad. However, in light of these abhorrent statements, he will not be working with CNN again in any capacity,” the statement said.
Raja, who was employed as a freelance contributor with CNN since 2013, tweeted the pro-Hitler remark at around 12:45 pm Sunday and deleted it hours later after it attracted widespread criticism. Several social media users flagged his tweet as anti-semitic and slammed the freelancer for spreading hatred against Jews and indirectly calling for their genocide.
And it is not just Raja’s recent pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic tweet that has caught the attention of social media users. He has been a lifelong supporter of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and had made no bones about expressing his admiration for him from time to time. Screenshots of those tweets have also gone viral since then. One screenshot shows him saying that he is supporting Germany in the final of the FIFA World Cup because Adolf Hitler was a German and he did “good with those Jews”. The next day, he tweeted, “Hail Hitler!”
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and is responsible for killing more than 6 million Jews.
After his anti-Semitic tweets surfaced online, many Twitter users had urged CNN to fire him and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ban him from the social media site after his latest tweet.
Raja presented himself as a freelancing contributor to CNN on his Twitter profile, although he removed it after the blowback on his post. He had a byline on the network’s website as recently as September last year and his first CNN byline is dated January 2, 2014—months before his anti-Semitic tweets during the Fifa World Cup.
The Israeli-Palestine conflict has drawn sharp reactions from various Islamic countries, especially Pakistan, where there has been an overwhelming outpouring of hate against Israel ever since the conflict broke out. Only recently, Pakistani actress Veena Malik tweeted a misattributed Hitler quote to justify the genocide of Jews.
In a tweet, the reality show turned Twitter troll attributed a quote to Adolf Hitler and quoted ‘I would have killed all the Jews of the world… but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.”
Pakistanis on social media have also been urging their Prime Minister Imran Khan to nuke Israel for its attempts to save its own citizens agaianst Hamas rocket fire.
