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.

1. 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 Hamas; 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.