Somehow I missed this move by CNN. I hadn’t seen anything about it until I read Tom Friedman’s column in the Times and, then, Jack Shafer’s insistently simple-minded article in Slate.
Here’s Octavia Nasr’s offending Tweet:
Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.
It is a stupid piece of journalism, and distorted besides. Of course, her defense of the now dead Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah told you just about nothing of Hezbollah and absolutely nothing about the Shi’a terrorism that he’d supported against Israel and other Muslims in Lebanon.
I suppose these were the reasons she was let go.
But the fact is that Nasr is one of the dozens and dozens of television journalists either ignorant of or biased against Israel. None of them know history, any history. Still, they have viewpoints or, rather, feelings. They do not hide their prejudices. But I have to be honest: some of them don’t know that they’re prejudiced.
This, however, is not the case with Christiane Amanpour who was chief cook and bottle washer for CNN for many years...until, that is, she moved to ABC where she does This Week. She knows just what she is talking about and just how she is slanting her reportage on both Israel and the United States in the Middle East. Her strength is her hauteur.
The competence of Americans to judge Middle Eastern issues would increase dramatically if she were suddenly to find herself out of a job.
An irrelevant postscript: By the way, Jamie Rubin, Amanpour’s husband, former assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Clinton administration, published on June 12 a completely silly article about the foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration. Its title: Obama’s foreign policy successes. Its goal: to back up a job application with the Obamii.