CNN/PBS host Christiane Amanpour and her ex-husband Jamie Rubin are among the top media personalities whose Israel-Iran hot takes look especially silly after President Trump announced a ceasefire on Monday. On their The Ex Files podcast recorded earlier that day, Rubin would claim “extremists” in the U.S. and Israel use Iran’s “death to America” sloganeering to justify a hard line towards Tehran while claiming Israel has no way of getting off the course it has set for itself despite the fact it would do just that later in the day.
Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat, began with a sensible point, “But what we shouldn't forget and what's worth mentioning here as the United States faces war with Iran, and Israel is at war with Iran, is that the Iranian chickens regionally are coming home to roost. Remember this is a regime that backed Assad in Syria, who killed 500,000 Sunnis, who were trying to simply have their freedom, and Iran enabled Assad to stay in power. They have undermined the Lebanese government, they've undermined the Iraqi government, and they have been provoking the world since the day they started chanting ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel.’”
Despite giving several examples of the Iranian threat, Rubin claimed that only “extremists” take such eliminationist rhetoric, “Remember these extremists play off each other, so when Iran's regime promotes the idea of death to America, death to America, death to Israel, then the extremists in Israel and the United States take, pick that up, and say, ‘Look, they want to kill us all.’”
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