Christiane Amanpour
Christiane AmanpourREUTERS/Carlo Allegri

David Litman, media and education research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), criticized television host Christiane Amanpour after she implied on her television program there is a comparison between the actions of Israel and those of the Syrian regime.

Amanpour’s comments came during an interview she held with Dror Moreh, the Israeli director of “The Corridors of Power,” during which the topics of Ukraine, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Syria were raised.

Towards the end of the interview, Amanpour asked Moreh, “You are an Israeli. I don’t know whether you were in Israel at the time, but you said that this red line in the neighboring country of Syria, where all these atrocities were being committed really, really made you angry and upset. Many will want to know, you know, do you feel equally angry about the horrible situation that’s going on in your own country, and the human rights attacks, killings of Palestinians. Obviously, we know Israelis are also attacked, but what is your perspective, as an Israeli given the whole ‘never again’ paradigm in which you place this investigation?”

Litman, in an article posted to the CAMERA website, fired back at Amanpour, noting that the UN estimates over 306,000 civilians (not including combatants) have been killed, or about 30,000 a year, during the Syrian civil war, while the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict has claimed in total, from December 1987 (the start of the First Intifada) to May 2021, approximately 14,000 Israeli and Palestinian Arab lives, including both civilians and combatants.

“Put another way, the Syrian civil war cost more than twice as many lives in a single year – without even counting combatants – as have been killed in 34 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There simply is no comparison,” he pointed out.

Litman then goes on to point out how “Amanpour’s comparison is morally obscene and dripping with partisan framing”.

“While Amanpour frames the conflict in terms of ‘killings of Palestinians’ – only mentioning that Israelis are ‘also attacked’ as an afterthought – she conveniently ignores the context that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian deaths in 2022 (totaling 167 as of December 13, according to the Palestinian Authority) occurred while they were attacking Israelis. Others were killed in crossfire, or in the context of clashes. It would be like framing the coalition strikes against the Islamic State as the ‘killings of Muslims’ without mentioning the affiliation and activities of those particular Muslims,” he wrote.

“By contrast,” continued Litman, “of the 31 Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists last year, 27 of them (87%) were civilians who were deliberately targeted. These deaths came amidst a significant growth of terrorist activity in the West Bank. According to a tracker maintained by the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there were 796 Palestinian terror attacks between March and December 2022.”

“Thus, even putting aside the vast gulf between casualty figures of the two conflicts, Amanpour’s framing inverts reality. Contrary to her propagandistic framing and implication, the data shows Israel has targeted combatants in the context of fighting a wave of deadly terrorist attacks by the Palestinian side which targeted civilians,” he added.

Litman concluded his article by pointing out that “there is simply no comparison, both statistically and morally, between Israel and Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. By glibly attempting to make the comparison, Amanpour once again demonstrates that she places her contempt for the Jewish state over her commitment to honesty.”

Amanpour is notorious for past controversial statements related to Israel. In 2013, during an interview with then-Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, she insisted on referring to Judea and Samaria as the “occupied West Bank”, claiming that the term was “an international term”.

Bennett stressed in his response, “One cannot occupy his own home.”

A similar incident occurred last year when Bennett, this time as Prime Minister, gave an interview to Amanpour, during which she asserted that “the West Bank has been occupied since 1967”.

Over Amanpour's protests, Bennett said, "I also object - these are not occupied territories, these are territories in dispute and we have claim to our own place as well as them - I get it, no one's going anywhere, we have to figure out how to live together."

In 2020, Amanpour caused an uproar when she called the Trump presidency an “assault” on human civilization comparable to that carried out by Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938.

The Israeli government demanded an apology from CNN over the comparison. Amanpour ultimately apologized for the comparison, saying, “Hitler and his evils stand alone, of course, in history. I regret any pain my statement may have caused. My point was to say how democracy can potentially slip away, and how we must always zealously guard our democratic values.”