CNN Paints Hezbollah as More 'Tolerant' Than GZM Protesters

If the MSM doesn’t understand why Fox News is cleaning their clocks, one big reason is that otherwise American viewers are confronted with two choices when it comes to cable news: watch MSNBC and be called racist, or watch CNN and be dubbed Islamophobic.

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Regarding the latter channel, Ronald Radosh watches Fareed Zakaria on CNN so you don’t have to:

Fareed Zakaria spoke last Sunday on CNN — on his weekly program Fareed Zakaria GPS — with his usual haughty display of what he considers to be the great wisdom he regularly presents to his audience. The would-be secretary of State told his viewers this:

And now for the “Last Look.” With all the talk about places of worship and where they do and don’t belong, I wanted you to see this. This is the Magen Abraham synagogue. It’s not in Miami. It’s not in Tel Aviv. It’s in Beirut. That’s right, Beirut, Lebanon.

The synagogue is just now emerging from a painstaking restoration project. When the repairs began over a year ago, the temple was literally a shell of its former self. So why did this nation, often teetering on the brink of religious hostilities and hostilities with Israel, restore a Jewish house of worship? To show that Lebanon is an open and tolerant country.

And indeed, the project is said to have found support in many parts of the community, not just from the few remaining Jews there, but also Christians and Muslims and Hezbollah. Yes, Hezbollah — the one that the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Hezbollah’s view on the renovation goes like this. “We respect divine religions, including the Jewish religion. The problem is with Israel’s occupation of Arab lands … not with the Jews.” Food for thought. Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. Stay tuned for “Reliable Sources.”

If you insist on seeing his delivery, you can watch it here.

This reminds me of nothing less than the famous phony documentary the Nazis made about Theresienstadt as they were creating this showplace concentration camp to try to fool the world, to show everyone how good they were to those Jews they were actually sending to the death camps.

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Ron adds:

Writing in The New Yorker some years ago, Jeffrey Goldberg called Hezbollah “the most successful terrorist organization in modern history.” And he went on to write that a Lebanese Shiite scholar named Amal Saad-Ghorayeb has advanced what in Lebanon is a controversial argument: that Hezbollah is not merely anti-Israel but deeply, theologically anti-Jewish.

Her new book, Hezbollah: Politics & Religion, dissects the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology. Hezbollah, she argues, “believes that Jews, by the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws.” The organization, she adds, holds “a real antipathy to Jews as Jews.”

I assume this means that the supposedly informed Zakaria is not familiar with the reporting and analysis of Jeffrey Goldberg. Of course, we know that this is not the case.

Somehow, he has obviously chosen to disregard what he probably does know, in order to score cheap shots and make Hezbollah seem more tolerant than the United States. They allow a synagogue to be restored; most Americans oppose and are trying to stop a mosque from being built near Ground Zero. For Zakaria, the Hezbollah controlled Lebanon is more tolerant than the democratic United States.

This “insight” of his is supposed to be “food for thought.”

So please. Flood the CNN network brass with protests, demand they correct his crude hosanna to a group our own government condemns as terrorist, and ask that others be invited on to correct the horrendously false impression he gave to viewers. You can reach CNN by linking to its complaint site.

And finally, as the current incarnation of the almost defunct Newsweek seeks to rebuild itself after being bought by billionaire Sidney Harman, we got the bad news that Zakaria has already jumped ship and moved immediately to the still surviving Time, which last week did its best to paint Americans as crude Islamophobic zombies.

Now, its subscribers will have to read his words along with the already anti-Israel and anti-neocon screeds of Joe Klein. Perhaps in another year, with such an august group of pundits, Time too will need to find another Sidney Harman to save them.

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But then, this isn’t the first time a CNN journalist has publicly insulted his viewers (or the lack thereof).

Related: “The Narrative of Hate.”

Related: “Also — ABC, does it ever occur to you that you that you were going after your own potential viewers here? Please, never wonder why your evening news ratings are dying when you pull stunts like this on the public.”

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