Vox.com has sought to reverse the overt Jew hatred of “Muslim selfie star” Zakia Belkhiri, blaming “Islamophobes” for using her comments as an “opportunity” instead.
Ms. Belkhiri – who shot to internet fame for taking pictures of herself outside a Flemish nationalist protest – was offered gleaming coverage by the likes of Vox.com, which announced: “She decided to take some cheerfully defiant selfies in front of the protesters”.
Following the Breitbart London story about her anti-Semitism, the Vox.com article was updated, but not in the way you might assume.
Instead of asking tough questions of Ms. Belkhiri, and posting her anti-Semitic comments for all to see, Vox journalist Emily Crockett used the situation as an opportunity to attack anonymous, “Islamophobic” Twitter accounts.
Citing Breitbart London, Crockett’s update said:
But of course, with virality comes increased scrutiny. Within days, screenshots of an offensive tweet Belkhiri apparently sent in 2012 (reading “Hitler didn’t kill all the jews, he left some. So we [would] know why he was killing them”) began circulating, and getting coverage particularly from right-wing and anti-Muslim media sources.
Belkhiri, who had already been tweeting about wanting to be left alone by the media before her tweet resurfaced, briefly deactivated her Twitter account. Then she reactivated it to tweet a lengthy, heartfelt apology to the Jewish community in both Dutch and English, before deactivating her account again.
Her apology probably wouldn’t be enough for everyone. Still, some used the incident as an opportunity to spout even more of the Islamophobic hatred that Belkhiri was protesting in the first place.
Her article is the second to be updated after the BBC also used Breitbart London coverage to shift their narrative when the facts failed to back up their glorification of Ms. Belkhiri.
The BBC dejectedly wrote that the story of the selfie star had “a not so pleasant postscript”.
Ms. Belkhiri returned to Twitter to suggest her comments were about Zionists, not Jews – even though her initial comments decried the “Jew language” Hebrew, and she made referencehttps://twitter.com/emilycrockett/status/734783827147665412s to the Holocaust – not something that was perpetrated on Zionists, but Jews.
But this isn’t something Vox seemed to be concerned about. Nor were her initial claims that the anti-Semitic quotes were “photoshopped” – an excuse that was revealed to be a lie when she finally took responsibility and “apologised”.
Crockett, to her credit, was at least engaging with critics on Twitter, offering this “hot take”:
Hot take: Nobody should call for genocide of anybody.
And with that, I’ve got other work to do. Cheers, Twitter!
— Emily Crockett (@emilycrockett) May 23, 2016
But she also was very forgiving of Ms. Belkhiri:
And really did seem heartfelt. Can’t see now, but it was several paragraphs renouncing earlier views and apologizing https://t.co/fzKxarPfTh
— Emily Crockett (@emilycrockett) May 23, 2016
And of course, when asked if she’d do the same with anti-Semitic tweets, which predominantly emerge from one constituency (at least where I’m from), she had to bring up Donald Trump:
With Trump running for president it’ll probably be sooner rather than later tbh.
— Emily Crockett (@emilycrockett) May 23, 2016
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