Old Fish and Jon Stewart Beat Up On Israel

I call Christiane Amanpour an “Old Fish” because that is what alumnae of New Hall, a Catholic girls’ school in Chelmsford, England, call themselves. I know this because several of my relatives attended that school a few years ahead of Amanpour. And that’s exactly what Amanpour, with her special house blend of arrogance and ignorance reminds me of — a real old fish, as old as a coelacanth, and like a fish, she rots from the head down. Check out her program; you’ll see that I’m not being unfair.

The overbearing Ms. Amanpour doesn’t care for Israel, nor does the man who hosted her recently on The Daily Show redux, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz (in arte Jon Stewart). Stewart doesn’t want anyone to think he has any special feelings for Israel. He’s just like the Sulzberger family, owners of the New York Times, who during World War II made sure that newspaper didn’t report “too often” on the Nazi murder of Jews — indeed, the paper hardly covered the subject (see Laurel Leff’s brilliant Buried By The Times), because they were afraid that would be considered special pleading for Jews, and for the Sulzbergers, that would never do. Stewart wants to make sure you understand that he holds no special brief for Israel, and what better way to do that than to be unfair to the Jewish state?

You can find more about their televised tête-a-tête here: “Jon Stewart & Christiane Amanpour Use Daily Show Interview to Muddle Image of Israel,” by Chaim Lax, HonestReporting, April 11, 2024:

In a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart hosted CNN anchor and host Christiane Amanpour to discuss the ongoing war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

While both veteran TV personalities had interesting takes on the ongoing conflict, including on the role of Arab states and on the political diversity of Israeli society, the remarks by both Stewart and Amanpour were marred by claims and comments that were either outright distortions of the truth or lacking in proper nuance.

Put together, these problematic assertions could help create a fictitious narrative portraying Israel as the key aggressor in a war that is uniquely destructive, removing inherent responsibility from other regional actors.

The following are just some of the problematic claims and comments made by both Jon Stewart and Christiane Amanpour that help to create such a false image of the war:

• In response to Jon Stewart’s quip that “There are journalists on the ground [in Gaza], they’re being killed,” Christiane Amanpour says that, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), almost 100 media workers and journalists “have been killed…in Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon in six months.”
  However, Amanpour omits the fact that this statistic includes Israeli journalists and that, even by the CPJ’s own records, a substantial number of journalists killed in Gaza were affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terror organizations.

Amanpour surely knows that there is no invisible protective shield for journalists. In a setting of urban warfare, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, where the terror group Hamas embeds its operatives and its weapons among and inside civilian structures, there will unavoidably be civilian casualties. And some of those civilians will be journalists. But Amanpour makes it sound as if the IDF deliberately targets journalists. It does not. Furthermore, she ought to have noted that many of those who now work as journalists in Gaza have been active members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups. This information comes from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) itself. In fact, many of those “journalists” started their careers as journalists only at the beginning of the Gaza War. And among the 100-odd journalists killed while reporting from Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, some were Israelis. Why didn’t Amanpour report any of this? Because she wanted to make Israel look bad, as a deliberate killer of journalists who, we are supposed to believe, had no connection to Hamas and were only plying their admirable trade of bringing truth to the outside world.

• Amanpour mentions a “terrible law” that aims to “throw out any organization from Gaza, including Al Jazeera.” This is a misrepresentation of a law recently approved by the Knesset (Israeli parliament), which allows the government to temporarily shut down the Israeli offices of foreign media outlets deemed to be a threat to Israeli national security during war. The law will not impact journalists in Gaza.

Israel will not be “throwing out” any organization from Gaza. Turn on the television — you’ll see dozens of Israel-hostile journalists reporting from Gaza without any interference from Jerusalem. The new law only allows the government to expel journalists from Israel proper, not from Gaza, and then only once it has been determined that they represent a danger to national security. This is a measure that in wartime any nation would likely adopt — there were no Japanese and German reporters remaining in the United States during World War II, sending home reports on the “demoralized” Americans. What Amanpour calls a “terrible law” — and then proceeds to get wrong — will simply remove, for the duration of the war, any foreign media in Israel that are deemed a “threat to national security.” That’s exactly what every other country under the sun would do.