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CNN aired a one-hour documentary that presented a biased perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, placing blame on Israel while absolving Palestinians of any wrongdoing, and featuring pro-Palestinian voices as analysts.
By Rinat Harash, Honest Reporting
In an hour-long documentary aired this week, CNN attempted to explain Hamas’ horrific attack against Israel on October 7 by presenting a skewed history lesson on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It absolved Palestinians of any wrongdoing, blamed Israel, and gave a one-sided platform to pro-Palestinians masked as analysts.
The first few seconds of CNN’s “Inside Hamas,” a documentary asking what has led to Hamas’ monstrous massacre, provide a good answer to this query: It shows footage of terrorists frantically shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they rampage through Israeli towns, followed by an audio recording of US President Joe Biden calling their atrocities “pure, unadulterated evil.” But the next 50 minutes are nothing more than a shameful attempt to find an excuse for that evil.
The underlying premise guiding the entire documentary, which has been archived as a podcast after its broadcast, is the need to absolve terrorists while blaming their victim – Israel. It runs so deep that even as footage of the carnage is displayed on screen, an unidentified narrator blames the Israeli blockade and the Israeli “assumption” that Palestinians won’t “resist” it. There is no mention of Egypt’s part in the blockade and the word “resist” is used as a euphemism for killing Israelis:
“We cannot expect that Israel will continue to blockade Gaza, deprive them of their freedom and assume that they will not at some point resist. At some point it is going to boil over.”
It continues with a whitewashing of the terrorist acts that were just displayed, when CNN’s Sara Sidner asks analysts “How do you define Hamas?”
Did she not see the footage? Did she not report on the killing, raping and kidnapping? Does she not know that Hamas is a proscribed terror group whose definition should not be a matter of relativistic debate? Or does she shamelessly seek to open it up for debate? The answers edited into the documentary suggest it’s the latter: One analyst says “Hamas primarily is a social, religious, political movement,” while another says that “Hamas is a nationalist movement that’s committed to the notion of armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine.” Sidner does not follow up with a question to clarify that this “liberation” actually means the liquidation of Israel.
But this is all just an introduction to what can only be defined as an Orwellian history lesson on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, omitting any fact that might contradict the underlying premise mentioned above.
Rewriting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The historical retrospect begins with this sentence:
“But the rise of Hamas and what led up to its massacre of more than a thousand men, women, and children in Israel is a story that begins long before Hamas ever existed. This did not start on October 7.”
Now that Hamas is safely out of the picture, the oversimplified historical narrative goes back to the establishment of the state of Israel as the root of all evil. Its main points are:
“The Jews accept that deal [the UN partition plan]. The Arabs do not. And so war broke out.”
“In order to pave the way to establish Israel as a Jewish state there needed to be a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
“By the end of 1948, a newly formed Israel had claimed 78% of the land of historic Palestine. The Palestinians who hadn’t fled to neighboring countries settled in the remaining 22% of land that Israel had yet to conquer.”
Here’s what CNN omitted:
-Arabs had been slaughtering Jews for decades prior to the UN partition resolution. After the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newly formed country. The Jewish state had no choice but to defend itself.
-Many Palestinians fled during the war, heeding the call of Arab leaders who wanted them to make way for the advancing Arab armies. Others stayed and their descendants live in Israel to this day as equal citizens.
-Israel pushed back the invaders who tried to conquer it. There was no premeditated plan to conquer “Historic Palestine,” the area that actually constitutes the biblical homeland of the Jewish people (the map displayed by CNN mistakenly locates even the Golan Heights in Israel, although it remained Syrian after the war)
The narrative goes on to describe the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 as the reason for Palestinians’ feelings of statelessness and need for “liberation.” Strangely enough, there is no mention of the existence of such feelings under the rule of Egypt and Jordan, who had previously controlled these areas from 1948. There is also no mention of the constant attacks that have been launched at Israel prior to 1967 from the very territories it had captured.
From here, it’s an easy ride for CNN to present both the PLO and Hamas as products of the Israeli occupation, and not of their fundamental refusal to recognize the existence of the Jewish state.
With this equation in mind, Israel is blamed for practically everything that went wrong since:
-The violence after the 1993 Oslo Accords was triggered by the massacre of Arabs by a settler in Hebron;
-The 2000 Camp David Summit was an Israeli-American set up for rejectionist Arafat;
-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was the reason for the Second Intifada;
-Arafat, who pre-planned it, is excused, and Hamas’ suicide bombings are presented as a legitimate reaction to Israeli policy:
“If you protest nonviolently and so on you are shot at, you are imprisoned. So they left only one avenue actually, which is armed resistance.”
This twisted narrative leads viewers to believe that Palestinians have been merely reacting all these years to the original sin of Israel’s creation, followed by its West Bank occupation and Gaza blockade. Namely, Israel has brought October 7 upon itself.
But in order to establish this narrative, CNN uses some very specific “analysts.”
Pro-Palestinian Talking Heads
A significant amount of airtime in the documentary is given to Tareq Baconi and Laila El-Haddad. The former is displayed as an “author” of a book on Hamas and the latter as a “journalist” and “social activist.”
What CNN fails to mention, in what can only be described as a journalistic sin, is that they are both members of “Al-Shabaka,” a pro-Palestinian think tank with an anti-Israeli agenda. Baconi is also the president of Al-Shabaka’s board, and has blamed Israel for using the Holocaust to justify its “colonization of Palestine.”
Can these people be considered reliable, impartial experts on Hamas or Gaza? While they undoubtedly have a lot of knowledge on the subject, their activities disqualify them from any such role. The least CNN could have done is mention their background and balance their views with analysts who hold a different agenda. But the network was happy to give them a one-sided platform to spread their propaganda, under respectable titles.
Ultimately, CNN fails in its mission to explain what led to the atrocities of October 7. It reverts to the familiar jargon of “occupation,” “blockade” and “Nakba.”
But the terrorists who slaughtered Israelis and kidnapped them on October 7 did not shout “Free Free Palestine!” They also didn’t yell “End the blockade!” nor chanted slogans about the 75-year-old plight of Palestinian refugees. They shouted “Allahu Akbar” and reveled in the slaughter of Jews in the name of their Jihad.
Article 7 of the Hamas charter says it best:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”
Which is exactly what happened on October 7.
Why didn’t CNN include this explanation in its documentary rather than wasting so much journalistic prestige on covering it up?
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