Friday, October 23, 2026
From Ian:
Barack Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history
Barack Obama’s Belfast speech was a shameful, distorted rewrite of Israel's history
Never mind 3,000 years of Jewish history, two Temples in Jerusalem, or centuries of Jewish longing for Zion. In Obama’s telling, the Jews somehow became interlopers in their own land.The Fraud Squad By Abe Greenwald
MORE DISTURBING still was Obama’s treatment of Palestinian violence.
Speaking about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Obama declared that “you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”
Think about that.
When terrorists murder approximately 1,200 people and kidnap 251, the principal issue is not whether their actions will produce meaningful political change. It is that they committed an act of unimaginable barbarity.
By discussing the massacre in terms of its political effectiveness, Obama risks reducing a moral atrocity to a tactical mistake. Would the slaughter have been any less reprehensible had Hamas managed to advance its political objectives?
Indeed, no political claim, no matter how loudly asserted, confers a license to murder families in their homes or drag hostages into Gaza.
And terrorism did not begin with Israel’s founding, let alone the 1967 war. In 1929, Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in Hebron, destroying an ancient Jewish community nearly two decades before independence.
WHAT OBAMA did in Belfast was more than distort Israel’s history. He turned the descendants of ancient Israel into trespassers in their own homeland, while treating the massacre of Jews as a failed political strategy.
Obama is, of course, entitled to his own opinions. But he is not entitled to his own version of history.
The Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel long before Barack Obama entered the world stage. And they will still be there long after his shameful revisionism has been forgotten.
Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.Jonathan Tobin: Amanpour leaves ‘CNN,’ but a legacy of anti-Israel media bias remains
There’s a whole lot more to the curious case of Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a.k.a. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, but it’s best to let the feds sort all that out. The point is, she’s a phony, and she’s made a career of pointing at Israel, AIPAC, the Jews, and the United States to draw attention away from her own fishy shenanigans.
On to Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed describes himself as a doctor and physician, yet he’s never held a license to practice medicine. Lately, he’s been playing up his all-American roots, but he’s also claimed to be an Egyptian citizen. El-Sayed portrays himself as a humble Michigander in a Senate race against fat cat Mike Rogers, who owns a yacht in Florida. But El-Sayed is also rich. He and his wife own properties around the world, including a place in Dubai. When asked about his family’s documented links to the Muslim Brotherhood, he simply lies. So, once again, a con artist.
And, once again, an Israel-hater and terrorist sympathizer. Like Omar, he attacks Israel and AIPAC to cast himself as a saint who wants to ensure that American resources go to Americans in need.
All the flimflam artists are on the same page these days, and it doesn’t matter if they’re associated with the “left” or “right.” Rich-kid socialists think that screaming “intifada” loud enough can drown out those calling them hypocrites. Democrats and liberal journalists regularly stage run-ins with Jews in Judea and Samaria to boost their resistance credibility. Hasan Piker—the Maoist with the $200,000 Porsche—says Israel is worse than Hamas. Tucker Carlson—who claims to have physically wrestled with demons in his bed—peddles Putin propaganda, nicotine pouches, and Jew-hatred. When Nick Fuentes inadvertently streamed himself watching gay porn, he blamed it on Zionist saboteurs.
At least these charlatans and imposters are getting something out of the anti-Semitism racket. Their earnest supporters and fans are just dupes.
Amanpour may like to claim that she was “fiercely independent” and devoted to the facts, though that has never been true of her work. And there is no better illustration than the way she has used her influential perch to skew coverage against the State of Israel, and to depict it and its people as uniquely evil and almost always in the wrong.
Her bosses at CNN and elsewhere have not only tolerated her bias but encouraged it. Indeed, if she’s a role model for the rising generation of the press, it’s because she has practiced a form of journalism and reporting the news from her own biased perspective. From the time she first became a star during the First Gulf War to the present, Amanpour turned the skewing of stories into an art form. She always managed to make whatever she reported conform to her pre-existing ideas about the good guys to be extolled and the bad guys to be vilified.
Coverage of Israel and its ongoing battle for survival against Arab and Muslim opponents who want to destroy it demonstrated this regularly.
The list of outrageous examples of her anti-Israel bias is too long to relate here. Those who want to take a deep dive into the extensive catalogue of her journalistic malpractice can visit the CAMERA media monitoring organization’s website page devoted to her for a taste of the consistent way in which she misrepresented the truth when it came to anything about the Jewish state.
Some of the highlights include incidents such as when she said on air on Oct. 25, 2025 that the Israeli hostages held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, who were tortured, raped and starved by the terrorists, “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” Never mind that some of the hostages were actually being abused while held captive by “average Gazans.” While she was later forced to retract that lie, it was in line with the way she and others in corporate media became stenographers for Hamas, accepting every false claim the terrorist organization made, while treating anything coming from Israel with the deepest skepticism.
In 2024, she compared Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, currently serving a life sentence for five murders, to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years until he was freed and eventually became that country’s first black president.
Her toying with the truth didn’t begin on Oct. 7.
Six months earlier, during Passover, she described a terror attack in Judea and Samaria of a Jewish family in which the wife and two daughters of Rabbi Leo Dee—Lucy Dee, and daughters Maia and Rina—who were ambushed and shot and killed while driving in their car as being a “shootout.” She apologized for this, but the instances in which she “misspoke” (most of which never generated retractions) almost always demonstrated outrageous bias against Jews.
Years before that, she provoked justified anger from the pro-Israel community for her 2007 CNN documentary series “God’s Jewish Warriors.” It depicted all Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria, as well as their supporters, as mad fanatics. The series never acknowledges the Islamist extremism that defines mainstream Palestinian Arab opinion and that has impelled them to reject every attempt at compromise for a century.
Amanpour never hesitated to demonize Israelis. She also played fast and loose with Jewish history. In 2020, she compared President Donald Trump to German Nazis who perpetrated the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, a year before the start of World War II. Under pressure, she again apologized, though later retracted the apology.
In this, Amanpour was a forerunner for what would eventually become standard practice at liberal outlets like CNN or The New York Times. It’s an era in which a new generation of journalists considers it to be their obligation to promote their conception of woke truth, regardless of the facts, and dismiss efforts at objectivity and reporting both sides of a story as the “neutrality” she disdains.
And that’s why she fears any effort to return CNN or any other outlet to upholding honest journalism by Weiss and Ellison.
