Clown show:
10 Mar 2025, 2:12 pm Updated at 3:19 pm
US hostage envoy Adam Boehler in a CNN interview on March 9, 2025. (CNN screenshot)
Meet Adam Boehler, US President Donald Trump’s envoy for hostages.
Hamas already has, in one or more recent negotiating sessions (Boehler won’t say how many).
And on Sunday, Israelis got to see him at length too, in a veritable flood of television interviews — at least two to American networks, and at least four to Israeli outlets.
There may have been more. It got hard to keep up. It was harder still to make sense of what he was saying.
1. He calls Palestinian security prisoners “hostages”
Boehler, who also worked for Trump in the first administration, sometimes refers to Palestinian security prisoners, who include mass-murdering terrorists, as hostages. “They are exchanging massive amounts of hostages for one person,” he said, for example, in one of his Israeli interviews, with Channel 13.
2. He calls Israeli hostages “prisoners”
Boehler also sometimes refers to the (mostly civilian) Israeli hostages — who were abducted by Hamas and other terrorist groups during the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and whose release he has been charged with helping to expedite — as prisoners. “I think there is a deal where they can get all of the prisoners out, not just the Americans,” he told CNN for instance. The purpose of his direct talks with Hamas, he told Israel’s Channel 12 a few hours later, “was to lead and to really enter into broader talks on all of the prisoners because the President made very clear that we’re focused on not just Americans here, American-Israelis, but Israelis overall…”
Many of us make little errors of language when we speak, but those two words “hostages” and “prisoners” are among the basic building blocks of his actual job. You’d think he’d know and take care to keep track of the difference between the two.
Not incidentally, Boehler on Sunday also twice misnamed the only living hostage with American citizenship, Edan Alexander, referring to him as “Adi.” (That’s Edan’s father’s name.)
3. He tries to ‘identify with the human elements’ of the Hamas leaders he meets
Boehler told CNN that his strategy in negotiating with the Hamas representatives — the leaders, that is, of an organization avowedly committed to destroying Israel, who massacred 1,200 people in southern Israel, burning people in their homes, raping and brutalizing, and have vowed to do so again if given the chance — is “to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from there.”
Asked by interviewer Jake Tapper what it was like for him, as a Jewish American, to sit down with “antisemitic murderers,” he allowed that when “you know what they’ve done, it’s hard not to think of it.” But the “most productive” approach, he went on, “is to realize that every piece of a person is a human.”
Meet Adam Boehler, Trump’s complacent, confused and dangerously naive hostage envoy
Hamas leaders must be laughing in disbelief after their interactions with a man who says he tries to identify their ‘human elements’; nobody’s laughing in Israel, least of all the families of the hostages
By DAVID HOROVITZ10 Mar 2025, 2:12 pm Updated at 3:19 pm
US hostage envoy Adam Boehler in a CNN interview on March 9, 2025. (CNN screenshot)
Meet Adam Boehler, US President Donald Trump’s envoy for hostages.
Hamas already has, in one or more recent negotiating sessions (Boehler won’t say how many).
And on Sunday, Israelis got to see him at length too, in a veritable flood of television interviews — at least two to American networks, and at least four to Israeli outlets.
There may have been more. It got hard to keep up. It was harder still to make sense of what he was saying.
1. He calls Palestinian security prisoners “hostages”
Boehler, who also worked for Trump in the first administration, sometimes refers to Palestinian security prisoners, who include mass-murdering terrorists, as hostages. “They are exchanging massive amounts of hostages for one person,” he said, for example, in one of his Israeli interviews, with Channel 13.
2. He calls Israeli hostages “prisoners”
Boehler also sometimes refers to the (mostly civilian) Israeli hostages — who were abducted by Hamas and other terrorist groups during the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and whose release he has been charged with helping to expedite — as prisoners. “I think there is a deal where they can get all of the prisoners out, not just the Americans,” he told CNN for instance. The purpose of his direct talks with Hamas, he told Israel’s Channel 12 a few hours later, “was to lead and to really enter into broader talks on all of the prisoners because the President made very clear that we’re focused on not just Americans here, American-Israelis, but Israelis overall…”
Many of us make little errors of language when we speak, but those two words “hostages” and “prisoners” are among the basic building blocks of his actual job. You’d think he’d know and take care to keep track of the difference between the two.
Not incidentally, Boehler on Sunday also twice misnamed the only living hostage with American citizenship, Edan Alexander, referring to him as “Adi.” (That’s Edan’s father’s name.)
3. He tries to ‘identify with the human elements’ of the Hamas leaders he meets
Boehler told CNN that his strategy in negotiating with the Hamas representatives — the leaders, that is, of an organization avowedly committed to destroying Israel, who massacred 1,200 people in southern Israel, burning people in their homes, raping and brutalizing, and have vowed to do so again if given the chance — is “to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from there.”
Asked by interviewer Jake Tapper what it was like for him, as a Jewish American, to sit down with “antisemitic murderers,” he allowed that when “you know what they’ve done, it’s hard not to think of it.” But the “most productive” approach, he went on, “is to realize that every piece of a person is a human.”
