On their way to Tveryah on the second day of Pesach, three members of the Dee family, immigrants from England, were attacked by two Arab terrorists who fired a Kalashnikov assault weapon at them, causing their car to crash.
The attackers then shot the women at short range. Sisters Maia and Rina, 20 and 15 years old, were killed at the scene. Their mother, Lucy, succumbed to her wounds three days later.
That same day, CNN International anchor Christiane Amanpour conducted an interview with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, during which she remarked, “We have a young 15-year-old Palestinian boy who’s been shot and killed by…Israeli security forces. We also have the mother of two sisters, Israeli British sisters. They were…killed in a shootout, and now the mother has died of her…injuries.”
Shootout.
As if the women had been militants exchanging fire with some Arabs, perhaps even starting the battle, rather than having been ambushed and murdered in cold blood. More than 20 bullets had been fired at them. None had been fired at the terrorists.
Although the Amanpour interview flew under the radar for a month, on May 11, the watchdog group HonestReporting called on the CNN correspondent to apologize for her gross mischaracterization of the attack. Rabbi Leo Dee, the husband and father of the victims, who had been driving in a separate car when his wife and daughters were murdered, echoed the group’s call.
Ms. Ananpour sent a personal apology to Rabbi Dee, but, considering the untold number of people who had watched the interview, he insisted that there be an on-air apology. After Rabbi Dee told an Israeli news organization that he was considering a lawsuit against CNN, Ms. Amanpour obliged.
On her program, in a matter-of-fact tone, Ms. Amanpour said,“I misspoke and said [the Dees] were killed in a ‘shootout’ instead of a shooting. I have written to Rabbi Leo Dee to apologize and make sure that he knows that we apologize for any further pain that may have caused him.”
She didn’t add, as she might have, that she had also been remiss to juxtapose the calculated, willful slaughter of a mother and her two daughters with the unintended death of a Palestinian boy who had been part of a crowd that opened fire and threw Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers.
As it disturbingly happens, Ms. Amanpour has something of a record of less than objective reportage when it comes to Israel, and of insensitivity to Jews.
Last year, during an interview with Israeli cinematographer Dror Moreh, she addressed him thus: “You are an Israeli…you said that…atrocities [committed by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad]…really, really made you angry and upset. Many will want to know, you know, do you feel equally angry about the horrible situation that’s going on in your own country, and the human rights attacks, killings of Palestinians?” As if Israel targets innocent Palestinian civilians.
And in 2020, she compared the Trump administration to the Nazis, saying “It was the Nazis’ warning shot across the bow of our human civilization that led to genocide… After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump…”
The jaw of even the most anti-Trump observer had to drop at so atrocious a comparison.
That record (and it’s considerably longer—limited space here) might lead an observer to believe that the “misspeaking” for which Ms. Amanpour offered her apology was something more than a slip of the tongue, that it may have reflected something darker about the journalist’s biases.
At this writing, Rabbi Dee has not initiated any lawsuit. Indeed, he was reported to be pursuing a meeting with David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers, which owns CNN. The rabbi was quoted as saying that he has always sought “peace, harmony and reconciliation” and hopes “to have the same with Christiane Amanpour and CNN.”
At the same time, though, he asked, “Why does it take the threat of legal action to have CNN wake up to the moral equivalency they so often employ between Jewish victims of terror and the terrorist regime perpetrators who are committed to another holocaust of the Jews?”
Why, indeed?
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