Zionist Organization of America

Is CNN actively engaged in PR on behalf of Iran? Is the global media outlet involved in a campaign to launder the Iranian regime’s history of anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions?

First, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour mistranslated the comments of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to imply that he, unlike his Holocaust-denying predecessor, publicly acknowledged and condemned the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.

And more recently, a CNN report  by Reza Sayah presented a utopian portrait of a tolerant and benevolent Islamic Iranian regime in whose Jews, the reporter suggested, enjoy the same religious freedoms as those living in the Jewish state of Israel. “Sure, it may seem like we’re in Israel,” Sayah says, “but in fact we’re in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The report, which seemed more like a promotional advertisement for Jewish life in Iran than a news investigation, omitted all controversial and unpleasant historical facts regarding the treatment of Iran’s Jews since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. For example, there is no mention of the 1999 arrest of 13 Iranian Jews in Shiraz on charges of spying for the “Zionist regime.” There is no hint of the fact that more than 17 Jews were executed since the Revolution, mostly on charges of spying for Israel and the U.S., including Jewish community leader Habib Elghanaian in 1979, and businessman Ruhollah Kadkhodah-Zadeh, hung in 1998 for allegedly helping other Iranian Jews emigrate to Israel.  There is no mention of the previous Iranian president’s Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic rhetoric. There is no attempt to look beyond the rosy picture of Islamic tolerance that is presented and no effort made to provide viewers with a fuller picture of the Islamic regime’s attitude toward Jews over the past 35 years.