Leslie Stahl, the 83-year-old “See BS News” reporter, asks a heartless question of Jewish American Keith Siegel, a former Hamas hostage.
A former hostage accuses Hamas of starving him while he was a captive, and she immediately tries to undermine the credibility of his accusation by questioning whether Hamas really meant to starve him or were just forced to starve him because they themselves didn’t have any food, the poor babies.
Stahl asks this question in the face of the barbarities that Hamas committed during their attack on October 7, and the known fact that any supplies from the outside world, including food, always winds up in the hands of the terrorist organization.
While Siegel discussed how his captors treated him, he stated that after his wife, Aviva, was released from captivity, Hamas became “very mean and very cruel and violent.”
“They were beating me and starving me,” Siegel said. Stahl followed by asking, “Do you think they starved you because or they just didn’t have food?”
Siegel denied that his torturers didn’t have enough food, recounting, “No, I think they starved me, and they would often eat in front of me and not offer me food.”
To suggest that Hamas was itself starving and therefore they had no food to give and therefore they were innocent of his charges is Stahl’s effort to limit the reputational damage to Hamas. It also signals that “See BS News” stands with Hamas. “They’re really not that bad, are they? Isn’t it possible that they just didn’t have any food to give you? Let’s not be too hard on the darlings.”
This isn’t journalism; it’s activism.