CBS, Hamas & Israel

By David M. Friend

CBS News has an obvious problem with Israel.

I was watching the "60 Minutes" segment last week where correspondent Cecilia Vega interviewed three former US State Department employees who resigned over the Biden administration’s military support for Israel in its was against Hamas.

It was so one-sided, it was as if I was watching a segment on Al-Jazeera.

It began with an interview of Hala Rharrit, who was tasked with monitoring Arab social media and news stories, and reporting up the chain about what she was seeing. She says she was told to stop sending pictures of what she described in the interview as “massacres of mostly children” in Gaza and “children that were starved to death.”

Rharrit implied it was some government conspiracy to cover up for Israel. I guess it never dawned on her that images on Arab social media could have been fabricated and manipulated. But we’ll never know because Cecilia Vega never pressed her. She swallowed whole what a tearful Rharrit claimed to be the truth.

Then, there was a guy by the name of Josh Paul. He accused the United States of enabling what he said was Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. He indicted Israel and the United States, saying most of the bombs dropped on Gaza and all of the jets flown by the Israeli Air Force, were American made.

After stating that obvious fact, Vega eagerly jumped in saying “The Israeli airstrikes, you could say, were made in America.”

At that point, Paul’s eyes lit up and he wholeheartedly agreed. Oh yes, of course, 100%. Thanks Ms. Vega for saying it better than I could. Those are my words but easily could of been his.

Paul really showed off his utter stupidity and should have lost all credibility in Vega’s eyes, when he said that after October 7th, Israel missed a golden opportunity to “press for a real, just and lasting peace” with the Palestinians.

What???

Israel had just endured the worst single day murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Twelve hundred of its citizens were killed, beheaded, raped and butchered. Another 240 were kidnapped, some paraded in the streets of Gaza amongst jubilant crowds. The terrorists of Hezbollah based in Lebanon were raining missiles down on Israel in solidarity with their Hamas compadres.

Yeah, that’s a perfect time for the Israelis to stop and say, let’s make peace with the Palestinians because it’s so obvious we can live happily ever after.

Vega should have responded to Paul with utter incredulity but that wouldn’t have fit with her narrative.

But wait, there’s more.

There was Andrew Miller, who resigned from the State Department in June. He was an assistant under secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

He says he was “unaware” of any so-called red lines, any restrictions, placed on Israel for using American armaments.

All Vega had to do was to ask him how he would know that? Was he was privy to all the conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and even President Joe Biden? Don’t you think a thinking journalist would have asked that question?

The theme of the “60 Minutes” report was, if only the United States didn’t supply armaments to Israel so it could defend itself after 10/7, there would be peace, love and harmony in the Middle East and the United States would be beloved in the Muslim world.

To end the segment of this poor excuse for journalism, was an old antisemitic trope that Vega allowed to be spewed. That Jews control everything.

Vega asked Andrew Miller when, in his view, would the war end? He replied, “When Israel says it’s over. It ends when Netanyahu says it’s over.”

Yup, the Jews are in control.

Didn’t matter that Hamas was still holding hostages in Gaza. No acknowledgment that Hamas started the war and has refused to surrender. Not a word of what Secretary of State designate Marco Rubio said at his confirmation hearing on Thursday, that “there is a difference between those, who in the conduct of armed action, deliberately target civilians and those who do as much as they can to avoid civilians being caught up against an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform, against an enemy that hides in tunnels, against an enemy that hides behind women and children and puts them at the forefront and uses them as human shields.”

The “60 Minutes” report cited, without qualification, casualty figures from Gaza that were even higher than the already discredited death toll Hamas has touted.

Vega and her producer, Ayesha Siddiqi, totally ignored the study by the Henry Jackson Society that I wrote about in December.

The society did an extensive and scientific analysis of the number of war fatalities as reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.

The report documented that Hamas repeatedly misclassified dead men as women and adults as children. Their analysis found that most of the fatalities were men ages 15-45, generally the age of the Hamas soldiers, contradicting claims that innocent civilians were being disproportionately targeted.

The Gaza Ministry of Health lumped into the war’s fatality count the Gazans who died of natural causes, thought to be about 5,000 each year. The study also found instances of registered cancer patients included on war fatality lists.

Basically, any Arab who died in Gaza was listed as a casualty of Israeli aggression.

Nothing at all about that on “60 Minutes” and not one dissenting voice in the segment who could dispute the trio’s allegations.

But we shouldn’t be at all surprised.

Remember what I wrote back in October in my column, A Jew at CBS? It was after CBS News honchos publicly humiliated Tony Dokoupil, the Jewish co-host of their morning news program, for his interview with the proud Israel-hating author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Dokoupil asked Coates probing questions about his new, anti-Israel book, and he got openly slapped around by his bosses.

They said their dressing-down of Dokoupil was “about preserving the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News.”

No. It was actually the opposite. It was an attack on a Jew.

At CBS News, it is apparently risky to challenge the Israel-haters. Best to let them bash away.

That report on “60 Minutes” was a one-sided hit piece, plain and simple. It was a hatchet job. It gave new meaning to the expression “never let the facts stand in the way of a good story,” except it wasn’t even a good story.

But one thing you have to keep in mind about “60 Minutes”and I learned this after 14 years at CBS. It is a sacred cow. Challenge it at your own peril. I know this first hand and I still have some of the scars to prove it.

One last thing…

Lots of people have many different opinions on the deal that is freeing the Israeli hostages that have survived almost a year-and-a-half in Hamas hell.

But here’s what I’ll tell any non-Israeli who wants to opine on whether Bibi Netanyahu agreed to a good deal or a bad deal.

Since October 7, 2023, you haven’t lived with even one-tenth of the pressure that Israelis have lived with.

You haven’t sent your sons and daughters, your husbands, wives, brothers and sisters, to defend your country.

You haven’t had sleepless nights dreading a knock on the door with the worst of all possible news.

You haven’t scooped up your children and rushed them into a bomb shelter when the almost daily missile alarm is sounded.

You can’t judge, and you don’t have the right to judge.

All you should do is be thankful the living hostages are coming home and grieve with the families of the hostages who aren’t.

And you should pray that Israel has done enough to weaken Hamas with the loss of too many precious lives, that the terrorists will never be capable of perpetrating their savagery again.