Last week CNN stooped to a new low in coverage of Israel/Palestine. Wolf Blitzer, the former AIPAC employee turned host, decided to cover the deaths of two Palestinian teens in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. You’d think this is a step forward until you see how it was done.
On his show “Wolf,” Blitzer brought on CNN’s Ivan Watson, who worked on a package report on the shooting deaths which actually showed the Israeli forces firing a kill shot at Nadeem Nuwara. This footage corroborated the footage from a security camera that was disseminated by Defense for Children International Palestine just days earlier. The DCI video went viral on YouTube amassing over 560,000 views as of this writing.
The segment begins with Watson’s package. The very first source quoted in Watson’s package was an Israeli military spokesperson. Yet, after the package showing Israeli soldiers firing and killing a Palestinian teen was completed, Blitzer turns to his CNN colleague Watson and asks:
Ivan, a little while ago you spoke with an IDF, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman. What did he say?
I guess Blitzer wanted to make sure viewers heard the official Israeli perspective, even though it was already provided at the very beginning of the clip. So, Watson proceeds to relay the comments of the Israeli military spokesman again. At this point you’d think Blitzer, the former AIPAC employee, was framing the segment with his questions to ensure the Israel perspective on the events overtook any impression the horrifying video had on CNN’s viewers. And then Blitzer says:
Ivan, I want you to stand by because Michael Oren is here. He’s the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, former spokesman earlier in his career for the Israel Defense Forces as well.
Yup, that’s right. Not only do we get an official quote from the Israeli perspective to start the clip, not only is the reporter then asked to repeat the Israeli perspective after the clip, a former Israeli official is brought on to comment about it.
Oren, if you may not know, became a CNN contributor earlier this year. Oren proceeds to dismiss the video by claiming that “we don’t know anything” about what happened. He even says the two boys,whose funeral processions and burials were filmed here, may not even be dead and that the entire thing might be staged.
For Oren, it is just as likely or more so that these masses were staged, that these burials were staged, that those corpses were not corpses, that the tears, wails and laments of family and friends were not real, than it is likely for an Israeli soldier to shoot and kill a Palestinian child.
How disgusting a human being must you be to make such a claim? If you have the stomach for it, the entire transcript is here.
This is as blatant as I have ever seen the pro-Israel bias on this network. What you have here is a segment with three CNN employees, two of them, Blitzer and Oren, have very clear and obvious pasts working to support Israel and its image in the United States. Together, these two heap all sorts of skepticism and doubt on the journalism of their very own CNN colleague. If you were confused about what their priorities are, you shouldn’t be anymore.
This is Zionism and this, sadly, is CNN.
