Van Jones, a CNN commentator, recently sparked controversy when he made a joke about Gaza during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. The joke, which mocked the suffering of Palestinian children by likening it to celebrity scandals, was met with laughter from the audience and has been criticized for trivializing Palestinian pain. This incident highlights a deeper problem in American commentary on Palestine: a tendency to distrust evidence of Palestinian suffering unless it is filtered through Western validation.
The media’s response to this issue is not just about tone but also substance. Many commentators, including Jones, reach for the well-worn inversion that recasts truth as propaganda, which trivializes atrocity and dehumanizes Palestinians. This phenomenon is rooted in a hierarchy that divides the grievable from the disposable, the innocent from the suspect.
In this context, Jones’s joke was not just a careless remark but a window into the media culture that has infected American commentary on Palestine. The laughter in Maher’s studio revealed a desensitized audience that could chuckle at the invocation of dead children because those children belonged to the wrong geography. This double standard is a symptom of a broader moral disease: empathy rationed by passport.
The task is not to police what people say about Gaza but to compel them to see Gaza: to see the mass graves, the skeletal survivors, the bombed schools, and the hospitals reduced to ash. To see is to know, and to know is to judge. The media’s refusal to confront this reality behind the fog of “disinformation” is a refusal to see.
Until the US media can name and confront suffering without qualification, its moral authority will remain threadbare. The children of Gaza are not dying from disinformation; they are dying from Israeli bombs, and from the US’s wilful blindness.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/10/8/van-jones-and-the-moral-vacancy-of-american-commentary-on-gaza