Helen Fares, psychologist, journalist, presenter of the SWR format “Mixtalk” and native of Leipzig with Syrian roots, has so far particularly liked chocolate milk from a very specific brand. She says this in an Instagram story on her personal account, which is currently causing a lot of excitement.
In the video from a supermarket, she reports how she is looking for alternatives to this product – because her favorite chocolate milk comes from a company that is on a boycott list for Israeli products.
In the evening, SWR announced that it was releasing Helen Fares from her moderation duties. The broadcaster announced that she will no longer moderate SWR’s digital dialogue format “MixTalk”. “The SWR released her from her moderation duties after she repeatedly expressed extreme political positions on her private social media account,” the statement said.
It is important to the SWR that the post in question was not created in the context of employment for the SWR. The broadcaster pointed out to them that moderators of a debate format had a duty of neutrality to protect the independence and credibility of the program. “Ms. Fares lacked this neutrality in her social media activities.”
In the video, Fares uses an app that was programmed by a Palestinian software developer. You can use it to determine whether the company comes from Israel or supports Israeli companies using the product name, manufacturer or item number. The app has been downloaded over a million times for Android phones alone. The fact that the SWR presenter is promoting this boycott app has now brought her accusations of anti-Semitism.
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Fares had already had problems with Aktion Mensch because of statements about the Ukraine war. The organization has taken a podcast episode with her off the internet because of her comments.
In her Instagram account, Helen Fares has long been drawing attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. Her posts are becoming increasingly aggressive: “Another catastrophe is imminent: Fascist Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announces a ground offensive in Rafah,” says her last message. At least 30,000 people have already been murdered in the Gaz Strip – “including around 10,000 children”.
Her current video, which is no longer available on Instagram but can still be found on X, also puts SWR in the firing line. According to the “Bild” newspaper, the Green Party politician Volker Beck wrote to the SWR director and ARD boss Kai Gniffke and told him that he did not consider such an “anti-Semitic boycott attitude” to be compatible with the public service mandate.
The criticism of the CDU Bundestag member Matthias Hauer is similar. “The #SWR should rely more on presenter skills and less on self-proclaimed ‘activists’,” he writes on ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ 2.0 is NEVER activism and must never happen again!”
The journalist and author Hasnain Kazim writes: “Six months ago today, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdered, raped and burned people alive. And a SWR presenter can think of nothing else than to promote an app that recognizes brands in the supermarket that are connected to Israel so that people can boycott these products. This is ‘Don’t buy from Jews!’ in 2024. Crazy.”