Vampire Weekend's Surprising Jewish Stories
6 min read
The CNN reporter isn’t the only journalist to slander Jews.
When a terrorist opened fire on Lucy Dee’s car as she drove from her home on a family vacation on April 7, 2023, the terrorist shot at Lucy’s car over 20 times with a Kalashnikov rifle. Lucy crashed the car; the terrorist walked up to it and shot Lucy, her 20-year-old daughter Maia, and her 15-year-old daughter Rina, again at close range, killing all three.
Last week, CNN’s chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour, changed these well-established facts, telling viewers the Dees “were killed in a shootout.” Huh? “Shootout” implies some sort of fight between two armed groups or individuals. That’s not what happened here, so why use the term?
Amanpour’s bizarre comment came at the start of an interview she did with the autocratic Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, Mohammad Shtayyeh, and seem designed to downplay the cold-blooded murders of the Dees, creating the completely incorrect impression that they were combatants in an even fight, instead of the victims of a brutal attack. It’s an outrageous lie.
“This is the perfect example of ‘terror journalism,’ where you have moral equivalence between the terrorist and victim,” explained Rabbi Leo Dee, Lucy Dee’s husband and father of Rina and Maia.
“Terror journalism” abounds when it comes to Jews and Israel, as journalists invent Jewish culpability in order to minimize violence against them.
Take Britain’s ITV News. Just a few days before Amanpour’s outrageous smear, reporter Daniel Henry also described the Dees’ murder as being some sort of firefight. “They’re driving and they’re caught in a crossfire, and that crossfire eventually kills two daughters and a mother,” Henry erroneously told viewers. (Both ITV and Daniel Henry later apologized.)
Is the thought that a Palestinian terrorist would calmly murder three women in cold blood really so hard to entertain? Journalists are meant to accurately report the news to the best of their abilities, not invent distorted narratives. Yet when it comes to Israel and to Jews, the normal rules of journalism seem to get suspended, as journalists twist facts and invent outright lies, trying to minimize violence against Israelis and Jews.
Take the April 2023 announcement by the German Government that they were appointing a new committee to re-examine the Munich Olympic Massacre, when terrorists affiliated with the PLO infiltrated the 1972 Summer Olympic Games and murdered 11 Israeli athletes.
After more than half a century, the facts of the massacre are well established. Encyclopedia Britannica describes the facts:
Soon after staging their attack on the Olympic Village, terrorists shot two Israelis dead. Days later, in the midst of a botched attempted escape, the terrorists loaded the remaining Israelis onto two helicopters, then murdered them: “a terrorist tossed a hand grenade into one of the helicopters…A second terrorist sprayed the interior of the other helicopter with bullets at close range….”
So it was a shock when some news outlets invented entirely new stories, removing any mention of the terrorists' merciless brutality. Reuters incorrectly reported that the Israeli athletes merely “died after a stand-off” with German police. The New York Times used the term “shootout,” reporting that the Israelis died in a shootout between the Palestinian terrorists and West German police, distorting the story and omitting the facts that terrorists killed the Israelis using a grenade and machine gun at close range.
In May 2023, Israel came under attack from hundreds of missiles fired at civilian targets by Islamic Jihad bases in Gaza. One Israeli died and several were injured in the fusillades.
Many news outlets ran articles describing Islamic Jihad, a radical terrorist group affiliated with Hamas, which has a stated aim of wiping out the Jewish state. The Qatar-based news site Al Jazeera accurately describes its maximalist goals as “establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and other areas of what is now Israel.”
The Washington Post took a very different tack, sympathizing with the radical group and whitewashing its violent intentions. In the Post’s alternate reality, Islamic Jihad is merely “committed to armed resistance against Israel.” (In an even more surreal twist, reporter Miriam Berger describes Israel not as the sovereign state it indisputably is, but in Islamic Jihad’s very own terms, as “a self-described Jewish state established in 1948 on land Palestinians claim…” Minimizing a country’s right to exist and whitewashing a terror group committed to its destruction is a disturbing position for a newspaper of note to take. It’s a classic example of “terror journalism.”
One of the most egregious recent examples of a news outlet making up falsehoods occurred after a Hanukkah trip went horribly awry.
On November 29, 2021, a group of Orthodox Jewish boys boarded a party bus for what was supposed to be a fun tour of central London to celebrate Hanukkah. As the bus drove down Oxford Street in the center of the city, a group of Muslim men surrounded the bus, banging on the doors, screaming at the boys inside, making obscene gestures, performing Heil Hitler salutes, and throwing objects at the windows. The boys inside were terrified; one screamed “Call someone - it’s urgent!” in Hebrew (Tikrah lemishu, ze dachuf!)
When the BBC reported on the story, they completely misrepresented what happened, instead accusing the Jewish boys in the bus of verbally attacking the Muslims outside. After their report was already filed, the BBC changed its online reportage to say - falsely - that the Jews on the bus were screaming anti-Muslim invectives to the people outside.
The charge was easy to disprove: the entire episode had been filmed. Witnesses complained that the BBC’s reportage bore no resemblance to the attack they’d seen and heard. (The Board of Deputies of British Jews hired a linguistics expert to review the attack footage; he concluded no Jew had uttered an anti-Muslim slur during the attack.) Even after it became clear that no anti-Muslim insults were uttered by the Jewish kids, the BBC did nothing to amend its coverage for months.
A year later, after official complaints, the BBC apologized, sadly too late to undo much of the damage and ill will that its initial inaccurate reporting has caused.
In the face of this sort of inaccurate reporting, it’s crucial that we fight back. Make sure you’re informed, and when you see slanted or flawed reporting, speak up. Write letters to the editor; post your concerns on social media.
Editor's note: Amanpour finally apologized for her inaccurate remarks on May 23, weeks after uttering her outrageous slur.
