Reuters hired writer who mocked Israel with ‘no due diligence’

Reuters failed to carry out due diligence on a journalist who mocked Israel and defended the Palestinian “pay for slay” policy before she was hired and then went on to write a sympathetic story about a terrorist for the news agency.

Reporter Henriette Chacar triggered a social media backlash earlier this month when she wrote that Mahmoud Aleiwat, 13, who shot and wounded two Israelis in East Jerusalem, “dreamt of being a chef”.

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Chacar promotes her article on the Intercept

Ms Chacar had previously been labelled “outrageous” by her editor at Reuters, the JC revealed, after she questioned the difference between Israeli civilians and combatants — but was allowed to keep her job in a company that prides itself on its reputation for unbiased reporting.

Now two Reuters insiders have separately told the JC that a full investigation into the previous political positions of the Jaffa-born journalist was never conducted.

Speaking anonymously, one whistleblower said: “It was shocking. Action should have been taken. Were these doubts raised? Why were they not dealt with at the time? Why was she hired? The recruitment approach at that time caused huge ructions in the Jerusalem bureau. Aggravation and concern.”

Before being hired by the newswire in January 2022, there were “obvious red flags” about Ms Chacar, one of the whistleblowers added.

In August 2020, she had tweeted: “Accidentally named Israel’s security agency ‘shit bet’ instead of ‘shin bet’ in a draft.” And in 2018, she had shared a post by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer in which he praised Israel’s controversial Nation State Law. Mocking the Jewish state, Ms Chacar had added: “A [racist] light unto the nations.”

She also wrote an article for American news website The Intercept in 2018 saying that the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” programme — which hands out cash to families of terrorists — was “rooted in a cultural attachment to the Palestinian national struggle”.