On August 22, CNN finished airing a six-part series on “Jerusalem: City of Faith and Fury,” concluding with a distorted narrative of the Six-Day War, a topic CNN has a history of rewriting. As CAMERA has already documented, and will document further in the coming days, the series has been full of factual errors and historical revisionism.

In addressing the Six-Day War, CNN accentuated even further its habit throughout the series of distorting events to portray Arabs as powerless victims. In some cases, this narrative is laid absurdly bare, such as when the narrator tells viewers “[t]he [Jordanian] shelling is meant to target Jews in West Jerusalem, but it’s the Palestinian Arabs living in the area that are left defenseless.” Yes – CNN suggested that when Arabs were trying to kill Jews, it was really Arabs who were the victims.

Just minutes later the same kind of inversion occurs again:

(Narrator) “Once Ammunition Hill is under Israeli control, the Israeli Army brings their fight deeper into Jerusalem. But it’s the Palestinian Arabs that are left vulnerable.”

(Fadi Elsalameen) “They see, contrary to what they were hearing on the radio at the time, you know, ‘we will defeat the Israeli presence,’ and all of a sudden it’s completely the entire opposite. People started getting frantic, and again another wave of refugees started marching towards Jordan.”

Again, CNN portrays the Arab attempt to remove Jews from their presence in Jerusalem – for that’s what happened in parts of the city conquered by Arab armies – as truly a tragedy for the Arabs since they failed in the mission. The question is why CNN would create a narrative in which Arab attempts to drive the Jews into the sea as unproblematic, but Jewish survival and self-defense as a tragedy for the Arabs.

Beyond creating perverse concepts of victimhood, CNN butchers and slants the history in a number of other ways, including the below examples.

CNN’s Omissions on the Origins of the War

If one was to explain what events led to the Six-Day War based only on the CNN series, the answer would be: (1) some Palestinian terrorists placed a mine and killed 3 Israeli soldiers; (2) Israel responded with a retaliation raid into the West Bank that escalated into a battle between Israeli and Jordanian forces; and (3) Egypt felt it had to defend Jordan’s honor and thus responded by closing the Straits of Tiran.

It should go without saying that this narrative is laughably absurd. It leaves out not only the context of just how prevalent and serious the attacks were against Israel at the time, but also other crucial events leading up to the Six-Day War.

CNN begins the narrative with the November 13, 1966 retaliation raid carried out by the IDF, which targeted Palestinian Arab terrorists in the Hebron Hills. The operation resulted in a battle between Israeli and intervening Jordanian forces.

That CNN acknowledges there had been Palestinian terror attacks prior to the retaliation raid might seem to be a positive. But it casts focus on a single incident. The reality at the time had been characterized by near constant attacks from both Palestinian Arabs and neighboring Arab state forces. At least 35 such attacks were carried out in 1965 by Fatah alone (Palestinian sources claimed as many as 110).[1] The sole incident mentioned by CNN – the landmine attack on November 12 that killed three IDF soldiers – was actually the seventieth terrorist incident since January 1965.[2] Such attacks had been killing Israeli civilians and soldiers alike.[3]