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Jon Stewart & Christiane Amanpour Use ‘Daily Show’ Interview to Muddle Image of Israel
On a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart hosted CNN personality 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 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, 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.
Amanpour credits Al Jazeera with “trying to tell the truth in this waging war.”
The CNN host ignores the fact that Al Jazeera is a news outlet run by the authoritarian regime in Qatar; that it has known ties to Hama;s and that it has been a purveyor of fake news about Israel’s conduct during the war.
Amanpour says the Oslo peace process “failed because the people responsible for enacting it didn’t do it and actually sabotaged it,” seemingly placing blame on both Israel and the Palestinians.
However, in reality, then-US President Bill Clinton said it was the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat that was the key factor in the “sabotaging” of the peace process by walking away from negotiations and initiating the violent Second Intifada.
With regards to Israel’s stated claim of continuing the war until Hamas is destroyed, Jon Stewart rhetorically asks “So, you’re just going to kill everyone?”
This implies that Israel is indiscriminately killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza in hopes of eliminating Hamas, rather than what it is actually doing: Going after Hamas targets that are deeply embedded among Gaza’s civilian population, in order to improve the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians that have suffered from the terrorist organization.
At one point in the interview, Amanpour draws a line between the American reaction to the war in Gaza and its reaction to the Rwandan genocide, implicitly comparing Israel’s defensive war against terrorism to the ethnic cleansing of a minority population.
Later, Amanpour claims that “At the moment, the Israeli government wants none of it. It doesn’t want the UN, it doesn’t want the Arab countries.”
Despite this image of Israeli recklessness and intransigence, Amanpour’s claim is belied by the fact that Israeli officials have expressed a degree of openness to certain Arab countries providing order and helping administer humanitarian aid and civil services in Gaza.
Near the end of the interview, Stewart questions why the war between Israel and Hamas is “not the top priority” and “not the only session that’s going on at the UN.”
In his formulation of the question, Stewart is exaggerating the import of the war in Gaza, making it out to be a unique conflict deserving of excess attention rather than one of many conflicts currently plaguing the world.
Soon after, Stewart claims that the figure of children killed in Gaza (“over 10,000”) is unprecedented and that he has never “heard of anything like that.”
Not only is Stewart ignoring the fact that Hamas’ listing of children casualties is highly contested, but he is once again making the war in Gaza into a unique phenomenon that deserves special attention and ignoring the high number of children killed in other conflicts, such as the Syrian civil war (30,000 children killed) and the Yemen civil war (at least 11,000 children killed or injured).
By peppering their conversation with baseless assertions and context-free claims about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, both Jon Stewart and Christiane Amanpour are subtly creating a false image in the audience’s mind that portrays Israel as the aggressor and removes the bulk of responsibility from Hamas.
With the powerful influence that both Stewart and Amanpour have on American public opinion, this negative image of Israel’s conduct is not only poor journalism, but is also a powerful propaganda tool that can be used to weaken Israel’s fight against terrorism and strengthen the possibility of Hamas’ survival.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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