Ali Velshi spent much of his Sunday morning weaving a narrative of an evil Jewish state, threading together outright lies with material omissions to tell his false tale of a brutal, undemocratic apartheid state.
Both Mehdi Hasan and Fatima Mohammed are entitled to their opinions and their free expression. It would just be nice if their speech came with a little less anti-Jewish demagoguery and with a lot more factual accuracy.
Ayman Mohyeldin’s own history makes it clear that the last person who should be lecturing anyone about not telling the whole story is Mohyeldin himself.
By bringing on someone with such a record of outlandish lies, and by refusing to either push back with the facts or bring on an opposing perspective that could have countered Diana Buttu’s falsehoods and calls to ethnically cleanse the land of Jews a second time, MSNBC once again shows contempt for credibility and accuracy.
While coming from different starting points, two journalistic misdeeds— drawing a false moral equivalency and applying a double standard — end up with the same reprehensible result: minimizing and obscuring Palestinian terrorism. Coverage of the deadly Palestinian terror attack outside a Jerusalem synagogue versus a fatal Israeli arrest raid in Jenin provide a case in point.
On the same day the Anti-Defamation League reported that disturbingly high levels of Americans believe in anti-Jewish tropes, MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace brazenly broadcasted one such trope on Deadline: White House.
Is xenophobia okay if one really dislikes the policies of a country and takes it out on individuals with that nationality? That’s what MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin implied in a new column.
Hasan’s lame attempts to cast Omar’s repeated employment of classic antisemitic tropes as merely “criticism of Israel,” alongside his constant efforts to politicize antisemitism, serve as a reminder that bigotry, including antisemitism, must be combatted because it is morally reprehensible, not because it is politically convenient.