MSNBC’s coverage of the terrorist attacks in Israel reached peak tone-deaf yesterday. Andrea Mitchell, host of Andrea Mitchell Reports, asked an incredible question of an Israeli mother whose two sons were abducted by Hamas: “What are your feelings about the attacks against Gaza right now?”
The mother — whose name remained anonymous — has two boys, ages twelve and 16. She was on the phone with them trying to calm them down when her boys heard Arabic-speaking voices outside their home. Hamas broke in. Still on the phone, the last thing the mother heard was her youngest cry out: “I’m too young, don’t take me!”
“You’re looking first for a symmetrical situation,” the mother told Mitchell. “And I must say, it isn’t! If you were dealing with a war who is between two countries, countries don’t take children hostages. I’m sorry. It’s against the laws of war. It’s against humanity. It’s against anything that we all believe in. Every time we had missiles shot at us, I used to say to my children that they should be sympathetic towards the children of Gaza because they suffer a lot more than they do. I’m not sure I still believe in it now. And I must say the only worry I have now from the bombings in Gaza is the fact that my children are there.”
To ask the mother how she feels about attacks against Gaza — where her boys are likely being held, or tortured, or used as human shields — and in fact to ask the nation of Israel how it feels about attacks against Gaza is despicable.
“I can’t be sympathetic anymore,” she continued. “I can’t be sympathetic to animal human beings — well, they’re not really human beings — who came into my house, broke everything, stole everything, took my children from their bedrooms and took them to the Gaza Strip. Israel never done that, and it will never do. So there is no symmetry. I’m sorry.”
We reported on some of MSNBC’s other egregious segments this weekend:
MSNBC hosts spent the weekend justifying Hamas violence as the inevitable result of Israeli aggression. Host Ayman Mohyeldin said that Hamas terrorism is “ultimately the end result” of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu “ignoring” Palestinians, adding that the attacks are “very deadly consequences of failed policies.”
“Hamas is saying, ‘Well, if nobody is able to defend what is happening for Palestinians in the West Bank, or in East Jerusalem, with the home demolitions, the arrests, the children being killed, the desecration of holy sites . . . then we only have the ability to do it with military might and crude weapons,’” Mohyeldin said.
On his Saturday show, host Ali Velshi called on U.S. politicians to bash “Israel’s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation.”
Next to [ADL CEO Jonathan] Greenblatt on Monday’s Morning Joe panel was MSNBC host, Al Sharpton, whose anti-Semitic rhetoric contributed to inciting both the Crown Heights riots in 1991, and the 1995 firebombing of a Jewish-owned store in Harlem.
That the entirety of America — its media apparatus, its government officials, its youth — has not renounced unprovoked Hamas brutality as terrorism is still shocking. MSNBC and CNN’s foreign correspondents who have witnessed the carnage in Israel have no problem condemning Hamas terrorism. Reporters on the ground can see the blood-spattered walls in children’s rooms, the body bags lining Israel’s streets, and the burned bodies of civilians; I doubt they’d ask a mother, whose child’s fate is unknown, to draw parallels between Hamas’s senseless attack and Israel’s obligatory defense.