Local Opinion: Christiane Amanpour’s troubling extremist affliction

On April 10, CNN’s marquee performer, Christiane Amanpour referred to the roadside ambush and brutal slaying of British Israelis Lucy Dee and her teenage daughters Rina and Maia as a “shoot out.” Six weeks later, on May 24, under pressure from the Dee family and a press watchdog group, Amanpour issued an on-air apology:

“During that live interview (with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh) I misspoke and said that they were killed in a shootout, instead of a shooting.”

Dodging the duty to characterize the event for what it was — unprovoked brutality by terrorists against unarmed vacationers — Amanpour tried to pass her comment off as a slip of the tongue. In so doing, she compounded her subversion of truthful reporting.

Then, deploying the language of half-hearted retractions, Amanpour apologized for “any harm she may have caused the family,” instead of acknowledging her dreadful affront to a grieving widower and father, and to a stunned nation. One of the authors of this opinion was in Israel at the time and witnessed the sadness that overtook the entire county in the wake of these brutal killings.

Rabbi Leo Dee, husband and father of his murdered wife and daughters, understandably rejected the apology. He pointed out that by referring to the killings as a “shootout,” Amanpour implied moral equivalence between terrorist and victim.

By asserting that the women were involved in a shootout, was Amanpour suggesting that Rabbi Dee’s family was traveling armed, an ungrounded and frivolous assertion? Much more insidiously, Amanpour was implying the doomed Israeli women were armed — not with weapons — but with the provocation inherent in merely being Israeli Jews.

Amanpour’s disturbing logic would have CNN viewers believe that being Israeli and Jewish is somehow a criminal act. Regrettably there is a demonstrable pattern of Amanpour’s defamatory portrayals of life in Israel stretching back more than a decade. For instance, her 2007 report “God’s Jewish Warriors,” was riddled with falsehoods and distortions condemned by independent journalists and commentators. Then, as now, Amanpour’s bosses at CNN appeared unperturbed by her drift from honest reporting to shameful propagandizing.

Such moral disingenuousness has become familiar to Israelis. As Rabbi Dee put it: “We build, they murder us and destroy, but it’s our fault because we built in the first place.” Overt and hostile assaults on Jews are but a part of the picture. Distortions born of biases like those displayed by Amanpour work to equally grievous effect. Words that otherwise intelligent people use like “apartheid”, “massacre” and “systematic violence” to describe defensive measures by a beleaguered nation against unremitting terrorist violence possess the hidden venom of prejudice and lead to a radical estrangement from the truth. Rabbi Dee might just as well have added: “The world lauds movements of self-determination, but ours is called racism.”

The late Jonathan Sachs, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, explained that the tendency to seek scapegoats is a fundamental dualism that exists within many of us and requires enormous effort to discern and disarm. Antisemitism, as with other forms of racism, constitutes an attack on truth that serves hidden extremism. This extremism has made Amanpour both victim and perpetrator.

Antisemitism, wherever and however it appears, merits a robust response. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, for example, took a significant and admirable step toward framing such a response by formulating a working definition of antisemitism which included several examples. We believe the definition and examples boil down to this: Antisemitism must be seen as any act which, by intent or willful disregard of the facts, distorts events in a manner that disparages Jews or Israel.

Antisemitism represents an attack on truth that serves the goals of racists and extremists. Amanpour’s breezy comingling of terrorist and victim demonstrates just how easily extremism seeps through the cracks and can masquerade as an alleged slip of the tongue.