Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has essentially accused CBS News of leaving so much of an interview with him on the cutting room floor that it effectively changed the tenor of the interview. CBS News’s goal was obvious: To make Israel look genocidal and to make the Trump administration look either feckless or complicit.
Ambassador Huckabee in addition to making that point, proved it, by providing a link to the full transcript, which is available on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem:
— Ambassador Mike Huckabee (@USAmbIsrael) August 8, 2025
CBS News’s pro-Hamas propaganda begins with the image that CBS elected to use for the video. You can see a small version of the image in Ambassador Huckabee’s tweet, and you can see a larger image on the interview page itself.
On one side of the image is a still of Ambassador Huckabee. On the other side is a photograph of plump, crying children waving bowls. Children who are experiencing a famine are not plump. Instead, they look more like Evyatar David, whom Hamas proudly showed starving in underground tunnels, with David being forced to dig his own grave:
The family of the hostage Evyatar David has shared new footage of his kidnapping.
— Vivid.???????? (@VividProwess) September 6, 2024
The footage shows a Hamas terrorist hitting him with a rifle, with gunshots in the background, while he is tied up and afraid.
We are dealing with the sons of Satan.
pic.twitter.com/kbOYLgemBG
The only people being deliberately starved and tortured in Gaza are the hostages held in Hamas' dungeons.
— Embassy of Israel to the USA (@IsraelinUSA) August 2, 2025
Hamas has released a grotesque propaganda video of Evyatar David, a 24-year-old Israeli civilian kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023.
He went to… pic.twitter.com/azYpqJY4IK
In WW2 the Japanese were brutal in the treatment of allied prisoners of war. Starved & emaciated, a quarter of them died of malnutrition. Camp commanders were put on trial for war crimes & executed.
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) August 4, 2025
Then in 2025 we have Evyatar David & Hamas. He's digging his own grave. pic.twitter.com/R4bnNQTlET
That’s what starvation looks like.
Moreover, we know that, as often as not, those plump children are posing for the camera. Sometimes, Pallywood forgets to turn off the camera:
Oops! Hamas forgot to cut the part where their “starving girl” breaks character and laughs during the fake famine scene.pic.twitter.com/1357aZqAAi
— Liza Rosen (@LizaRosen0000) August 8, 2025
There’s also the fact that Bild, a German publication, revealed on August 5 that Anas Zayed Fteiha, who works for Turkish media, was staging these photographs. (And again, all the people waving their pots in the staged images are clearly well-fed.) I don’t know whether, two days after the Bild report emerged, CBS News used one of Fteiha’s photos, but it sure looks like his work.
Thus, the CBS News propaganda begins instantly, the moment you go to the landing page for the interview. But the real propaganda is how Huckabee’s interview has been edited. Of course, given that it was a long interview and CBS had only three-and-a-half minutes of airtime, the editors had to make cuts. But which cuts to make is a purely editorial choice, and what’s left on the cutting room floor is stunning.
Here is a complete transcript of the aired interview:
Transcript: CBS News/Abm. Mike Huckabee aired interview on August 7, 2025 by Andrea
And here is a transcript of the full, unedited interview from the embassy website. I’ve made only two changes: I noted where the reporter interjected language that was not in the interview, and I highlighted in yellow every word that CBS News deleted from the final video:
Full Transcript: CBS News August 7, 2025 interview with Mike Huckabee by Andrea
Again, editing was inevitable and necessary. What was left behind is striking.
In the interview that aired, the reporter is importuning Huckabee to admit that
Per the aired interview, Huckabee’s response is to assure the reporter that all the suffering is Hamas’s fault (which is true), that he doubts reports about IDF slaughtering GHF recipients, and that Israel is bad at genocide and that, if its people are bad actors, it will prosecute them itself.
The impression one is left with is that terrible things are happening to Gaza civilians thanks to Israel, and that Huckabee either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or is part of problem.
Here is just a small sampling, though, of what CBS News cut from Huckabee’s responses:
That’s only some of what CBS News did not include in its aired Huckabee interview, but it gives you an idea of how CBS News is manipulating its audience.
People viewing the report think they’re hearing from Ambassador Mike Huckabee, but they’re not. Instead, they’re hearing carefully curated sentences that turn much of what he said on its head. Instead, the whole advances the propaganda narrative that Israel is a genocidal sinner and that Hamas and the people of Gaza are victims of a new Holocaust.
It’s disgusting. More than that, though, it’s a fraud on the American people and a libel against Israel. Congress needs to investigate the fraud, and the nation of Israel needs to sue for libel.
Image created using AI.