The first thing you notice when watching a recent 60 Minutes segment featuring three former State Department officials who resigned over U.S. support of Israel is that it’s an astonishingly shoddy piece of journalism.
At this point, no one expects dispassionate reporting from the once-legendary investigative news show. Only recently, after all, the program doctored a transcript of a Kamala Harris interview to make her sound more coherent. But the producer of this segment, Ayesha Siddiqi, couldn’t even be bothered to find a single dissenting voice to dispute perfunctorily the many fictions of anti-Israel activists Hala Rharrit and Josh Paul. The segment, “Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations,” could easily have run on Qatari-state television.
The second thing you notice is that learning why Hamas apologists purportedly left the State Department is far less interesting than contemplating how on earth they ever got into our government.
Rharrit, for instance, is introduced as having worked on “counterterrorism” and “human rights” in Africa and the Middle East, giving viewers the impression that she has been a vital cog in U.S. diplomatic efforts abroad. Don’t get me wrong, the State Department is teeming with officials sympathetic to the Hamas cause, but Rharrit was merely an “Arabic language spokesperson” on Oct. 7, tasked with the tedious job of monitoring publicly available Arab press stories and social media to understand how the United States was being perceived in the Middle East (quite poorly, one imagines, as has been the case long before Oct. 7).
Rharrit contends she uncovered images of “fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of mostly children” and evidence of other atrocities. Higher-ups, Rharrit tells 60 Minutes, demanded she stop including images of Palestinian children in Gaza dying of hunger in her report, which was a good catch, considering there was no starvation in Gaza.
Now, even if the Rharrit story were true, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the Middle East knows, the Arab media are notorious for doctoring images and concocting stories of outrages to gin up anger against Israel and the U.S.
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That, though, seems to be exactly what Rharrit and 60 Minutes are trying to do. Correspondent Cecilia Vega never presses Rharrit on the veracity of these images, nor much else. Instead, Vega begs one question after the next, helping the guest prop up their central accusation: By giving Israel weaponry, the U.S. is complicit in war crimes.
So says Josh Paul, former director of the office overseeing U.S. weapons transfers, who resigned 10 days after the Oct. 7 massacre — before Israel had a chance to identify all their dead, before the Israel Defense Forces entered Rafah, and before Hamas’s fake casualty numbers were regularly spread by American media.
Paul’s public resignation letter is a demented work of moral equivalency, in which he questions the “one-sided” U.S. support of Israel over Islamic fascists. True to form, Paul engages in a vile bit of victim blaming on CBS, lamenting that Israelis aren’t more open-minded about having their citizens massacred. This wasn’t the time for war but rather a time to leverage international goodwill to make peace with the terrorist state in Gaza. If Israel had only rewarded Hamas for burning its children alive and raping its women, Paul maintains, the hostages would have been released already.
Modern legacy media, captured by a red-green alliance, craves this kind of content. And, so, Paul made the rounds, appearing on the New York Times editorial page and Christiane Amanpour’s show on CNN, among many others, spreading myths about Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” According to Paul, Israel had it coming.
Paul, not incidentally, is now an adviser for Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a George Soros-funded anti-Western shop founded by the late Islamist Jamal Khashoggi and chaired by Nihad Awad, a man who was “happy to see” the mass murder of young Israeli women attending a music festival.
60 Minutes didn’t bother mentioning this association despite the fact that Awad is also the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, unindicted co-conspirators in a Hamas terrorism-funding case. A longtime champion of the Muslim Brotherhood, Awad recently eulogized Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, the fundraiser and ally of al Qaeda. That’s the sort of guy Paul has no problem allying with. Rharrit, naturally, has also headlined fundraisers for CAIR.
Paul and DAWN have weird ways of showing their support for “democracy” in the Arab world, demanding international boycotts of Israel, where Arabs have equal rights, but none against the illiberal theocracies and autocracies that litter the Islamic world. Like so many other “human rights activists,” Paul is prone to siding with theocrats and tyrants. At the State Department, he ensured that decidedly undemocratic kingdoms like Saudi Arabia and Qatar were well armed. There was one group of people he wanted to leave defenseless.
Indeed, what’s perhaps most galling about the 60 Minutes segment is that the underlying premise that we are facilitating Israel’s wanton murder of civilians is never questioned. It is a lie. The casualty numbers repeated by Vega are even more useless than the “obviously fake” ones pushed by the Palestinian Health Ministry, which CBS News and others have regularly spread.
Both “studies” referenced by Vega offer higher casualty numbers than even Hamas. The Lancet’s numbers are just conjured up using sorcery, while Airwars assumes that all deaths in Gaza are civilian unless otherwise proven. The group’s extraordinarily unscientific methodology relies on information provided by the victims’ “friends and family” and local “accounts of the violence.” Since terrorists refuse to wear uniforms, and everyone in Gaza is either a supporter of Hamas or threatened by it, we have absolutely no idea how many combatants or children or women have died. If history is any indication, it will be significantly fewer than pro-Palestinian groups assert.
Yet, Vega lets Rharrit repeat Pallywood propaganda about casualties being “overwhelmingly children,” a fact apparently deduced by scrolling through some pictures on the internet. You’d think the U.S. had developed magical bombs that exclusively target toddlers but leave terrorists unscathed. Not even a recent United Nations study on the war backs such a claim, though 60 Minutes doesn’t bother offering any counterevidence.
The IDF estimates it has killed over 17,000 terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, among them women and “children,” which would be a better civilian-to-combatant ratio in an urban warfare setting than perhaps any in history. Whether you believe those numbers or not, what is clear is that Israel is terrible at “genocide.” It drops leaflets warning civilians to leave areas it is about to attack embedded Hamas positions. It often puts timers on bombs so that people can evacuate. It regularly places soldiers in danger to minimize civilian deaths. Not to mention, it gave Arabs an autonomous Gaza nearly 20 years ago that could have been an independent nation by now if the people had embraced reality.
None of that is discussed because it would have muddied the plot. Instead, the 60 Minutes segment pivots on an Israeli attack on a Hamas tunnel in which sources contend two powerful 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs were used. We don’t know if it’s true, though 60 Minutes expects us to be horrified by the scene. If we did send Israel these bombs, good. Hamas built over 300 miles of concrete-supported tunnels deep in the Earth with funds plundered from international aid. The faster they were destroyed, the faster Hamas could be defeated, and more lives would be saved.
But 60 Minutes isn’t concerned about the “complicity” of the Biden administration in sending American tax dollars to fund the UNRWA and Iranian state, which in turn was used by terrorists to fund an operation that murdered and kidnapped American citizens. 60 Minutes has barely anything to say about Hamas, Iran, or Hezbollah. Never once in the segment does anyone bother pointing out that no bombs would be dropped on Gaza if the Palestinian government returned the hostages, including the American citizens, and surrendered.
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Not once do I hear anything about how Palestinian leaders intentionally sacrifice their citizens as martyrs to the cause. This is not a theory. As if anyone needed to hear it, the late Yahya Sinwar was captured telling Hamas commanders not long after Oct. 7 that civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices” of “high civilian casualties” would “add to the worldwide pressure on Israel to stop the war.” Israel is the only nation on Earth not only tasked with protecting its own people but its enemy’s people as well.
None of this is to say that innocent civilians aren’t dying or that war isn’t gruesome. It is to say that every aspect of this tragedy is on the head of Palestinian leaders, who have refused to make peace with Jews for over a century. And 60 Minutes is responsible for trying to obscure this reality, undermine our allies, and lift our enemies.