On January 12, 2025, CBS News’ hit investigative program 60 Minutes aired a 13-minute segment on three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned from their posts in response to American support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the October 7 atrocities.
While the departure of State Department employees in protest of American foreign policy is newsworthy, this segment presents its audience with an imbalanced report by omitting certain salient facts about its interviewees, obscuring important information about Israel’s conduct during the war, and injecting subtle notes of bias throughout the presentation.
Josh Paul & Hala Rharrit: Anti-Israel Voices Within the State Department
The bulk of the report is based on interviews with three State Department officials who resigned over American support for Israel’s war against Hamas: Josh Paul, Hala Rharrit, and Andrew Miller.
While their resignations were portrayed as the result of moral outrage at Israel’s war conduct, 60 Minutes withheld that two of these interviewees have a history of anti-Israel activism and associations with anti-Israel organizations.
Josh Paul, who served as a director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, was the first State Department official to resign post-October 7, a mere 10 days after the Hamas atrocities and before Israel undertook a full ground operation in the Gaza Strip.
In his resignation letter, Paul condemned both Hamas’ attack and Israel’s response, criticized America’s “one-sided” support for Israel, compared the Hamas kidnapping of Israeli children from kibbutzim with Israel’s detainment of Palestinians involved in violence, and implicitly accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.”
Since leaving the State Department, Paul has joined DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), an advocacy organization that promotes boycotts of Israel, opposes the Abraham Accords, and supports international sanctions against the Jewish state.
DAWN’s executive director is Sarah Leah Whitson, an anti-Israel activist who dabbles in antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories and who was credited with cultivating Human Rights Watch’s shift to an anti-Israel paradigm. Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and who has openly voiced support for Hamas, serves on DAWN’s board of directors.
It is also interesting to note that while in his position, Paul was responsible for facilitating the transfer of arms to Saudi Arabia during its bloody fight against the Houthis in Yemen. Even though he opposed this action, and spoke against it in official memos, he did not resign his role in the State Department. It was only Israel’s response to the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust that caused Paul to leave his position.
Josh Paul now works for @DAWNmenaorg, whose chairman is Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR who infamously praised the Oct. 7 massacre.
Which means Josh Paul and Hala Rharrit—two former State Dept. officials who were just platformed by 60 Minutes—have ties to CAIR. Not a coincidence. https://t.co/g8snbYQFFq
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) January 13, 2025
Another interviewee whose animus towards the Jewish state was obscured by 60 Minutes is Hala Rharrit, a former Arabic spokesperson who resigned in April 2024.
Since leaving the State Department, Rharrit has served as a speaker at several CAIR events, including as the guest speaker at a fundraising gala for CAIR Connecticut.
While presenting as a civil rights organization, CAIR has a history of its leaders supporting Hamas, spreading antisemitic rhetoric, and denouncing Jewish communal organizations.
In the wake of the October 7 attack, several CAIR leaders justified it as “legitimate” resistance, with executive director Nihad Awad even saying that he was “happy” on the day of the invasion of southern Israel.
When not speaking on behalf of CAIR, Rharrit has also publicly accused Israel of ” attempted ethnic cleansing” and an “unfolding genocide,” has disregarded the role that Hamas’ use of civilian infrastructure plays in Palestinian deaths in Gaza, and has extended support towards those who have been arrested for their anti-Israel activism.
By failing to disclose this information, 60 Minutes has falsely portrayed Josh Paul and Hala Rharrit as impartial observers instead of the anti-Israel activists that they truly are.
More info on Hala Rharrit, the former State Dept. official who hobnobs with CAIR and is being platformed by 60 Minutes:
🔸️She’s a fan of Hamas Colonel Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.
🔸️The very first post she uploaded to her new Instagram account is an interview she did for the… https://t.co/4BL1aQKgsF
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) January 13, 2025
The 2,000-Pound Bombs & Other Context-Free Allegations
The 60 Minutes segment highlights one specific Israeli attack on a Hamas tunnel in Gaza City near the beginning of the war, which it claims likely used 2,000-pound bombs (based on sources who spoke to the program) and which killed 81 women and children (based on information by the British organization Airwars).
According to Dr. Brian Cox (an American law professor who formerly served in the Israeli military), 60 Minutes is only presenting half the story to its viewers, showing the damage from the possible use of 2,000-pound bombs without explaining any practices undertaken by the IDF to mitigate civilian harm (such as the likely use of delayed fuses) and what strategic calculations were undertaken prior to the alleged deployment of such munitions.
In effect, 60 Minutes is using the 2,000-pound bombs as a bogeyman to sway American public perception and influence future transfers of offensive weapons from the United States to Israel.
Breaking Down Misleading News Coverage of Gaza — @60Minutes Edition
Subject: Request by @Israel for @POTUS Biden Administration to Deliver 2,000 Pound Bombs
Read on for a🧵presenting in-depth analysis of this spectacularly misleading segment posted today by 60 Minutes. 1/8 https://t.co/ROgzBaCeVA
— Dr. Brian L. Cox (@BrianCox_RLTW) January 13, 2025
Along with this context-free discussion of 2,000-pound bombs, 60 Minutes also leaves out several salient facts about Airwars’ casualty figures.
Aside from the organization’s past use of questionable methodology, in this specific case, 60 Minutes fails to inform its viewers that Airwars concedes there were likely secondary explosions (a signal that Hamas weapons were targeted) at the site of the bombing, that Airwars largely bases its reports on social media posts and not official statistics, and that the report features a caveat that the organization “has quantified the youngest generation of each family as children based on available images due to the lack of ages found for the victims.”
Without this information, viewers of this report are left with the false impression that Airwars’ statistics are based on official numbers and that all killed were victims of Israel recklessly using disproportionately sized bombs in an urban environment.
8/8 Posts above address substantive points raised in this @60Minutes segment. To conclude, let’s zoom out to consider broader context reflected in segment.
Main point of segment is to emphasize & reinforce concern related to prospective transfer of 2,000 lb bombs by USA to… pic.twitter.com/fv7FarZo2q
— Dr. Brian L. Cox (@BrianCox_RLTW) January 13, 2025
60 Minutes’ Subtle Biases
Aside from the above issues, this 60 Minutes segment is also replete with instances of subtle bias that, when joined together, work to skew the viewer’s impression of Israel’s war against Hamas and Israeli-American relations.
Some instances of this bias include:
- Citing a controversial Lancet study that claims that there are 70,000 Palestinian casualties in Gaza (20,000 more than the official casualty numbers provided by Hamas). As HonestReporting has previously noted, this study is marred by its questionable methodology, reliance on faulty figures, and a lack of impartiality on the part of the study’s authors.
- Insinuating that American taxpayers are funding a potential genocide in Gaza with billions of dollars in military aid to Israel. No mention is made of the fact that most of this money is used in American industry and not directly sent to the Jewish state. On the contrary, 60 Minutes gives an impression that American taxpayers are practically throwing free weapons at Israel.
- Erroneously asserting that Israel has “continually blocked aid to the people of Gaza.”
- The unsubstantiated claim by Hala Rharrit that Israel’s actions are counter to American interests and have placed a “target” on America’s back. This assertion disregards the threats that the United States has faced from Islamist terror organizations prior to October 7 and places the blame on Israel for terrorism rather than on the terrorists themselves.
- The claim that there is “widespread dissent” in the State Department due to American support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. According to 60 Minutes, a “record number” of officials have sent cables to the secretary of state concerning this support. However, in a recent interview with the New York Times, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he has received only “20 or so” such cables about Gaza.
From hiring a Gaza producer with terror ties to forcing journalists to apologize for fair questions, @CBSNews is losing trust. Their refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and daily bias show an agenda. Will they choose integrity over activism? pic.twitter.com/wy3LftDOmw
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 17, 2024
Since October 7, there have been numerous instances of CBS News exhibiting anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the war.
This bias includes the network’s employment of producer Marwan Al-Ghoul, who has close ties to the PFLP terrorist organization, the official directive not to refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the reprimanding of anchor Tony Dokoupil over his questioning of author Ta-Nehisi Coate’s latest screed against the Jewish state, and disregarding certain facts in order to discredit Israeli actions.
This latest piece by 60 Minutes can, sadly, be added to CBS News’ repertoire of institutional bias and misinformation.
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Photo Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib via Flash90
