Ayman Mohyeldin’s op-ed featured prominently on the top right side of MS NOW’s website on the morning of Oct. 7, 2026, on the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre. (screenshot)
October 7 should be a day to remember that Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered people in their homes and at a music festival for the crime of being Israeli, Jewish, or simply present where the terrorists struck.
Instead, on the third anniversary of that heinous attack, MS NOW featured an op-ed by reporter Ayman Mohyeldin prominently at the top of its website titled, “Gaza became a stress test for Western democracy. And the West is failing.”
While Mohyeldin is entitled to his opinions, more egregious was MS NOW’s editorial decision that this would be the only op-ed related to the October 7 massacre it published on its website that day. Especially since Mohyeldin has peddled antisemitic conspiracies and tropes in past reporting.
Of Mohyeldin’s 1,281 words, just ten addressed the Israeli victims of October 7. In an op-ed published on the massacre’s third anniversary, Israelis received less than one percent of the space.
He spent the rest of the op-ed falsely accusing Israel of genocide and of targeting journalists, aid workers and hospitals while accusing Western democracies of hypocrisy for restricting speech, press freedom and academic freedom when it came to Palestinians.
He did so while ignoring the reality that since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, Jews everywhere live in a more hostile world. In the US alone, from October 2023 to December 2025, the FBI recorded 4,501 anti-Jewish hate crimes. In comparison, in the same period, the US agency recorded 564 anti-Muslim hate crimes.
In its reports on hate crimes, the ADL has commented that the past three years have seen the highest number of antisemitic incidents since it began recording in 1979. Additionally, albeit more difficult to analyze, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which seeks to destroy Israel, has targeted Jewish businesses, artists, authors, academics, and performers across the world.
Mohyeldin Betrays Worldview that Excludes Israelis
Contrary to the implications of commentators like Mohyeldin, Israeli hardship did not begin and end on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet Mohyeldin’s op-ed ignored Israeli civilians entirely, mentioning Israel only through its institutions and leaders, such as the Israel Defense Forces, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and former defense minister Gallant, in connection with International Criminal Court warrants. By also excluding Hamas’s leadership in Gaza, Mohyeldin betrays a selective worldview: one that sees Palestinians as a people, but Israelis merely as an institution.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, 1,318 members of Israel’s security forces, including IDF soldiers, police officers, Shin Bet personnel, firefighters, security coordinators and local response-team members, have died across multiple fronts, including Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Israeli authorities have recorded that more than 7,150 bereaved family members, including parents, siblings, widows and orphans. Over the same three-year period, more than 250 civilians were killed in Israel in attacks attributed to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis and Palestinian terrorist groups.
Though Mohyeldin mentioned the hostages in connection with the October 7 massacre, he did not convey what captivity actually involved. Former hostages have described confinement in underground tunnels, starvation, torture, and sexual abuse. Those experiences, and the suffering of the families who waited for their return, were entirely absent from his account.
Of the Israeli voices Mohyeldin has interviewed since the war began – including Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov on The Weekend: Primetime on July 20, 2025; Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, in a segment circulating by June 17, 2024; and journalist Yuval Abraham, in early December 2023 – only Abraham lived in Israel at the time of the interview (he has since moved abroad indefinitely). All have propagated the genocide libel.
Those bookings do not put Israeli public debate on air. Instead, they put Israeli credentials on a charge most Israelis reject. In an August 2025 Israel Democracy Institute poll, 78 percent of Jewish Israelis and 22.5 percent of Arab Israelis said that Israel is making efforts to avoid causing suffering to the Palestinian population there. A public that believes Israel is trying to limit Palestinian suffering is not a public that believes Israel is committing genocide. Viewers of Mohyeldin’s program have never heard from that majority.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Mohyeldin has also not interviewed a former hostage, or a family member of a hostage or of an Israeli killed in the war. If Mohyeldin’s bias is toward peace, surely he would want to give a platform to all victims of the conflict.
Ultimately, the issue is not simply that he offered a one-sided account of the war. It is that MS NOW chose to feature that account prominently as its sole op-ed commemorating the third anniversary of October 7.
On a day meant to remember the people Hamas murdered, the hostages it abducted and the families whose lives were shattered, the network gave almost no attention to the Israelis most directly affected by the massacre and its aftermath. Instead, it placed an argument about the West’s democratic failures at the center of its coverage, leaving the people whose suffering gave the day its significance forgotten.