Christiane Amanpour interview of Husam Zomlot

 Letter to CNN

Sent to Deborah Rayner deborah.rayner@warnermedia.com

•Ryan Kadro at ryan.kadro@warnermedia.com

Veronica Molina at veronica.molina@warnermedia.com

• Copy Christiane Amanpour at christiane.amanpour@warnermedia.com

bcc letters@camera.org

Sent to CNN January 28, 2025. Unprofessionally, Ms. Rayner blocked letters criticizing the unprofessional interview given by Christiane Amanpour, so this letter never reached her.

Dear Ms. Rayner, Mr. Kadro and Ms. Molina:

I watched the softball interview of Husam Zomlot by Christiane Amanpour and was, as is usually the case when Amanpour has anything to do with the genocidal Palestinian Arab war designed to destroy Israel, she acted as a propagandist for the Palestinian Arabs rather than a legitimate journalist.

As is usually the case when Palestinian Authority officials are interviewed, Zumlot repeatedly lied but was never called out or even questioned about his numerous lies by Amanpour.

Among his lies:

He repeatedly referred to what he called a genocide waged against the Arabs in Gaza. Any check of the facts makes it clear that is an indisputable slander. As Amanpour undoubtedly knows (if she doesn't, then she is clearly unqualified to be a serious journalist), the proportion of civilian casualties in Gaza is probably the lowest in modern warfare, with the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths roughly 1/9 the norm recognized by the United Nations Security Council in its meeting of May 22, 2022.

He said the Palestinian Arabs want peace. Yet the Hamas charter clearly calls not only for the destruction of Israel, but for the murder of Jews around the world. This is hardly a peaceful vision, but Hamas receives strong support among Palestinian Arabs and polls show it would decisively win any election, which is the reason Mahmoud Abbas has avoided elections for the last two decades.

It is not only the Hamas charter that calls for the destruction of Israel; both the Fatah and PLO charters also call for the destruction of Israel. (There was a publicity stunt in 1995, but the PLO charter has never been changed. If you believe it has, please send me a copy of the amended charter.)

He refers to murders in Gaza, but Israel has not murdered anyone in Gaza. There happens to be a war, started by Hamas with its barbaric October 7 massacre, and in a war people get killed. It's not murder unless one party deliberately targets civilians, and it is well documented that Israel takes more measures than any other country ever has not only to not target civilians, but to call off strikes against terrorists when too many civilians are present.

He said the Palestinian people have a state, but Amanpour never pointed out that they don't, they have autonomy and almost all the Arabs in the disputed portions of Judea, Samaria and Gaza have had their own governments for three decades, but they fail to fit the recognized criteria for being a state.

He also kept repeating "occupation," but even the so-called "occupation" (which was never an occupation under the generally recognized meaning) ended three decades ago.

He said Israel is determined to undermine any chance of the so-called "two-state solution." A responsible journalist would have pointed out that Israel has offered the Palestinian Arabs a sovereign state several times, but each time the Palestinian leadership has refused, just as it has rejected numerous proposals going back to 1937 - about three decades before the Arabs in the area decided to redefine themselves as Palestinians.

The coup de grace was when Zomlot made a Freudian slip and revealed the actual goal of the Palestinian Arabs, including the Palestinian Authority, the destruction of Israel, when he said "Israel has got to go." At this point, Amanpour jumped in to save him from his own brief moment of saying what he really meant by interjecting "you mean the (non-existent) occupation has to go."

This was a fitting conclusion to an interview in which near the beginning Zumlot said he had come on October 7 and warned Israel - which at that point hadn't had a chance to do anything and was in the midst of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust - was going to wage war against the Palestinian people. What nonsense! Yet Amanpour let it go, not even bothering to ask him whether he had any criticism of that barbaric slaughter or whether he supported it.

It's time CNN barred Amanpour from having anything to do on the air with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Sincerely,

Alan Stein