As CAMERA members surely know, last night the US bombed three nuclear sites inside Iran at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, dropping bunker-busting bombs called GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators. MSNBC wasted no time deploying antisemitic tropes in its coverage of US actions. In an appearance beginning at 9:43 PM, Ayman Mohyeldin delivered the following diatribe that passed for analysis of the situation:
And I think Donald Trump tonight, by going into this war, and there are questions about the legality of it, and there’s even questions about whether he knew that this was going to happen. And I’ll say this really quickly about that. There were questions as to whether or not Israel dog walked the … Israeli Prime Minister dog walked President Trump into this war. And what I mean by that is, President Trump campaigned that he was not going to get involved in war. He talked just the day or two before this war began, about how he wanted to give diplomacy a chance. And if you take a step back and see what really happened here, Donald Trump was either in on this ruse by the Prime Minister, meaning he was going to go along with what was happening with an attack on Iran, but he was lying to the American people by coming out saying, hey, I want to give diplomacy a chance, I campaigned on not starting a war. And at the same time, he was completely unaware of what Israel was going to do, and that the Israeli prime minister potentially was running circles around him because he saw, hey, this is a President of the United States that was either incompetent or weak or indecisive. I’m going to launch this war against Iran, knowing that at some point, the political pressure domestically among Republicans, supporters of Israel and their base are going to put this pressure on the President to get involved on behalf of Israel. So in either way you look at it, President Donald Trump either was lying to the American public when he was telling us directly he wanted to give diplomacy a chance. So he was part of the deception of what Israel was going to do, or he didn’t know what Israel was going to do and was ultimately being goaded and dog walked by the Prime Minister of Israel into this war.
In reality, President Trump said dozens of times during his campaign, during his transition, and during the first months of this presidency that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. From June 24, 2023 when he said, “You cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. You cannot let it happen because bad things will happen if that happens,” to June 11, 2025 when he said, “They can’t have a nuclear weapon. Very simple. They can’t have a nuclear weapon. We’re not going to allow that,” President Trump’s message has been consistent.
The idea that the Prime Minister of Israel could manipulate or “dog-walk” any President of the US is based on nothing more than antisemitic tropes about Jewish power.
The widely-accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism specifies “manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” The examples of contemporary antisemitism include “making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”
Mohyeldin’s commentary that the Israeli Prime Minister may be “dog-walking” the American President fits squarely within this.