Former SWR presenter Helen Fares reacted to her expulsion from the public broadcaster and the anti-Semitism allegations against her on Instagram. “We are not anti-Semitic because we boycott buying products from companies that support Israel. A country that has to answer for genocide before the International Court of Justice because it slaughtered tens of thousands of people,” says the 29-year-old in a video on her profile.
She published this together with the Instagram channel “Jewish Voice,” which describes itself as a “Jewish organization committed to peace and justice in the Middle East.”
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“Thousands of Jewish people” also support the so-called boycott culture, which is intended to put pressure on the Israeli government to change its actions, Fares said in her video message. “Not recognizing the Jewish people who stand for peace, solidarity and protection – that is anti-Semitic.”
Fares accuses SWR of “not being able to deal with the fact that people from the right wing wrote letters and demanded my dismissal.” Elsewhere in her video she also speaks of “right-wing trolls”. There were “hundreds of very threatening messages and calls for me to lose my job and be deported.” These were the reason for her expulsion, not what she said.
On Monday evening, SWR announced that it was releasing Helen Fares from her moderation duties. According to the broadcaster, she will no longer moderate the digital dialogue format “MixTalk” “after she repeatedly expressed extreme political positions on her private social media account.”
The background is Fares’ Instagram posts in which she called for a boycott of products from Israel and recommended an app that could be used to identify such goods. Then he had X account “ÖRR Antisemitism Watch” written: “An anti-Semite works for the SWR”. And the author Hasnain Kazim befand: “That’s ‘Don’t buy from Jews!’ in 2024. Crazy.”