host of Comedy Central's ever-popular Daily Show

Shalom CAMERA E-Mail Team:

Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's ever-popular Daily Show, has won a wide audience for his skillful use of a satiric comedy to cut to the essence of serious political issues. But on October 27, 2009, he waded into a deeply contentious issue and got in over his head. In a segment dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Stewart hosted Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti and anti-Israel agitator Anna Baltzer . Barghouti presented a familiar narrative of Palestinian grievances of the kind often heard. But it was the pairing with Baltzer that sparked indignation among many viewers. Fortunately, the segment's producers edited out much of Baltzer's misinformation about Israel, making the version actually broadcast substantially less objectionable.

Baltzer, a fellow traveler with extreme anti-Israel groups like the International Solidarity Movement, routinely invokes her Jewish heritage as a ploy to lend credibility to her defamatory anti-Israel message.
She portrays Israel as a criminal state, relying upon her audience's lack of familiarity with the facts. Immediately after the show's airing she sent out a call to flood the Daily Show with letters of support for her. A constant refrain of her supporters and sponsors is that she "has a right to be heard." Falsely portraying herself as a Jew who saw the light when she travelled to the West Bank, Baltzer's pretense to being an authentic voice does not give her the right to appear on major television shows to incite hatred of Israel.

In a rare occurrence, there was some outspoken negative audience reaction. A member shouted out "liar!" in response to Barghouti accusing Israel of "segregation." Later another disruption took place in reponse to Baltzer denying that Israeli measures were taken in self-defense.