Flashback: Former AIPAC editor Wolf Blitzer calls opposition to Zionism “racist” (1989)

In November of 1989, Wolf Blitzer appeared on a panel at the University of Pennsylvania alongside Norman Finkelstein. The topic of discussion: Israel.

A clip from a video recording of the event appears below.

Asked whether “the Palestinians, too, have the right to a secure homeland,” Blitzer sidesteps the question and calls opposition to Zionism “racist.”

Finkelstein, a Jewish political scientist, pushes back:

When this debate took place in 1989, Blitzer was the longtime Washington Bureau Chief of the The Jerusalem Post.

From the back flap of his book Territory of Lies (about Jonathan Pollard, who spied on America for Israel), published the same year:

Earlier in his career, Blitzer was an editor for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)'s newsletter the Near East Report:

“Fortune magazine has called [AIPAC] the second most influential lobby in Washington,” wrote The New York Times on April 29, 1998.

"[AIPAC's executive director, Howard A. Kohr] is proud of the talent at AIAPC. Its graduates are extraordinarily well connected and include... Wolf Blitzer, the chief White House correspondent for CNN.”

Blitzer is now anchoring much of CNN's coverage of Israel's assault on Gaza at this key moment, including interviews with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the IDF.

He was originally hired by CNN during the first half of 1990, just months after his discussion with Finkelstein.

Journalist Max Blumenthal—who is a longtime critic of Israel (and is Jewish, for those who care)—recently excoriated Blitzer & CNN's reporting as slanted propaganda by “ideologically committed Zionists” who are “echoing the Israeli government's hasbara,” writing in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on October 15:

CNN went 2 hours today without showing any video of Gaza destruction, and did not include a single non-Jew in studio for 1.5 hours. The network made sure everyone in studio was a committed Zionist.

Its coverage began with the ardently Zionist Jake Tapper repeatedly branding the Hamas attacks of October 7 as "the greatest loss of life of the Jewish people since the Holocaust" – as though the Israeli soldiers who were killed inside military bases while maintaining the siege of Gaza had been defenseless prisoners in Birkenau.

Wolf Blitzer, a former staff researcher for AIPAC, appeared next to give a fawning interview to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Herzog, who has declared the entire population of Gaza collectively responsible for Hamas' attacks, framed Israel's fight as "good versus evil."

Blitzer then tossed to Dana Bash, the daughter of a rabbi and ex-wife of former CIA and Pentagon chief of staff Jeremy Bash, whose father was also a rabbi. Following the interview with Israel's president, Bash fluttered with emotion and delivered the mask-off moment: "The way that [Herzog] framed this as nothing more important that good versus evil was really telling, I thought."

Finally, after two hours of coverage uniformly echoing the Israeli government's hasbara, CNN featured its first non-Jewish in-studio personality. It was former DHS flack Juliette Kayyem, a neoconservative Christian Arab who is raising her children Jewish with her Jewish husband. Kayyem previously advised the Israeli spyware firm, NSO Group, whose Pegasus malware has been used to spy on journalists and human rights activists around the world.

It needs to be acknowledged that CNN has handed its studio over to ideologically committed Zionists who have been raised to view Israel as their second country, and who are personally invested in Israel exacting blood vengeance on the population of Gaza, which they view with absolute contempt. They are weaponizing historical Jewish suffering to ensure political space for Israel to massacre Palestinian ghetto dwellers, and to enforce conformity to their hyper-sectarian line within the Beltway media. And it is clear that anyone inside the networks who questions this festival of unabashed Israeli militarism will face severe professional consequences.

Blitzer's rather lengthy (>1500 word) bio on the CNN website says he was a “correspondent” for The Jerusalem Post, instead of “Washington Bureau Chief,” as listed in his 1989 book.

His former role as an editor for AIPAC's Near East Report is not mentioned at all.

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A version of this article was originally published as a thread on Twitter/X on October 23, 2023.