Media outlets including MSNBC legitimize barbarism by calling Hamas terrorists “militants” or “fighters,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League said during a Monday appearance on Morning Joe.
“I am angry with a world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas,” Greenblatt said. “I must say, I love this show, and I love this network, but I’ve got to ask: Who’s writing the scripts? Hamas — the people who did this — they are not fighters, they are not militants, and I’m looking right at the camera. They are terrorists.”
ADL’s @JGreenblattADL blasts MSNBC for calling Hamas “fighters” & rationalizing terror attacks: “Who’s writing the scripts?” pic.twitter.com/2QHGdrKvcu
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 9, 2023
In the most fatal attack against Jewish people since the Holocaust, Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday morning during the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Terrorists have since murdered more than 800 Israelis, wounded thousands of people, and kidnapped hundreds of hostages. Nine Americans so far have been killed in Hamas’s attacks.
Pro-Palestinian media filmed and flaunted videos of terrorists raping, murdering, and torturing Israeli citizens over the weekend.
“It is a barbarian who rapes and brutalizes women, who kills children in front of their parents, and then brings them over to Gaza,” Greenblatt said. “These aren’t just reports — these [attacks] were filmed gleefully by the barbarians who committed these grotesque crimes. They filmed, for example, an elderly woman in her home, in one of these towns. They burned her alive in her house because she was too infirm to take out.”
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 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.
MSNBC also invited many commentators on its network this weekend to discuss attacks on Israel. Andrew Mitchell, MSNBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, blamed Israel’s “most aggressive encroachment into the West Bank by this far-right coalition government, of any that we’ve seen,” for Hamas terrorism. The network aired Palestinian Oussama Jammal’s interview, in which he said that “provocations day after day, time after time,” were to blame for Hamas attacks, adding that, “the Netanyahu government is not willing to bring any peace to the region.” Another interviewee asked MCNBC, “what other choice did [Hamas] have?”
Other outlets, including CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the BBC, and the Associated Press refer to Hamas terrorists as “militants,” “fighters,” “gunmen,” part of a “militant organization,” or “the largest Palestinian militant group.” Many U.S. politicians have decried Hamas attacks as terrorism, leaving Greenblatt and others to question media coverage of the war.
President Joe Biden on Sunday “pledged his full support for the Government and people of Israel in the face of an unprecedented and appalling assault by Hamas terrorists.” Vice President Kamala Harris offered her prayers on Sunday “for the victims of the heinous Hamas terrorist attacks.” U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Michele Taylor told the council on Monday that, “the United States unequivocally condemns these heinous acts of terrorism,” and called the “attacks carried out by Hamas terrorists on Israeli civilians” horrific.
“This was a massacre that was pre-planned. This was not destined to happen. It is not normal to shoot teenagers in the back — hundreds of them,” Greenblatt said. “Get the story right . . . Please talk to the Israeli mothers and fathers who lost their children. Talk to the grandchildren whose grandparents were seized as hostages. And please, stop calling this a retaliation. This is a defensive measure against an organization that is committed to one thing: Killing Jews.”
The terrorist organization, whose formal name is the Islamic Resistance Movement, was chartered in 1988 and is dedicated explicitly to the destruction of Israel. America, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Israel have all designated Hamas a terrorist group.