False Equivalence: MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Compares Israel to China, Assad’s Syria & the Taliban’s Afghanistan
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by Rachel O'Donoghue
A man walks past a building destroyed by shelling, amid Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, in Chernihiv, Ukraine April 9, 2022. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
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In his final piece to camera after spending five weeks in Ukraine covering the military invasion by Russia, MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi offered his analysis on the wider implications of the ongoing conflict in an appearance on the primetime “Rachel Maddow Show.”
Describing the “lesson” that he learned reporting from the besieged country, Velshi opined that the “growing atrocities against innocent civilians” were a sign that “the world needs to do better,” particularly because, in his view, “democracy and freedom are in peril.”
He further explained:
If it’s tough for NATO and the UN to prevent one country from actually invading another and subverting its population, imagine the struggle our world order has with those countries in which portions of the population are persecuted by their own governments. Afghanistan, Syria, China, Myanmar, Israel, India, to name just a few. And there are many more. And we, meaning the media, have to do better at covering vulnerable populations.” [emphasis added]
While the veteran reporter does not bother to elaborate further on his point, he appears to be suggesting that Israel is guilty of persecuting “vulnerable” Palestinians.
As HonestReporting has detailed on numerous occasions at length, claims that Israel is oppressing any civilians are baseless. Often referred to as the “apartheid libel,” the unfounded accusation ignores several salient points.
First, since the Oslo Accords were signed in the 1990s, the vast majority of Palestinians live under the complete governance of either the Palestinian Authority(PA) in the West Bank or the US-designated terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Second, when the PA was created, Palestinian leaders consented to the division of the West Bank, provided they were given full civil and security control in areas that include all major Palestinian population centers. As agreed, Israel maintains security control in what is known as Area C of the disputed territory, for safety reasons.
Third, Israel’s Arab citizens have full civil rights under the law and are thus treated as equals. Israeli Arabs serve in the ruling Knesset coalition, the Supreme Court, and in every facet of private and public life.
Furthermore, comparing Israel to any of the countries that Velshi lists is simply dishonest.
For example, he suggests that Israel is similar to Afghanistan, which under the Taliban, has seen strict laws imposed that strip women of their human rights; ban political opposition, and establish a morality police to enforce a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
He also suggests Israel is similar to China, which has been accused of interning its Uyghur Muslim population in camps and committing atrocities against them.
Yet, this is not the first time that Velshi has used his large platform to unfairly demonize the Jewish state.
In May 2021, at the height of the Hamas-initiated conflict with Israel, in which thousands of rockets were fired indiscriminately at Israeli cities and towns, Velshi attempted to justify the actions of the Gaza-based terrorist group.
“Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. That’s an indisputable fact. But so do Palestinians. And that’s a fact that is often ignored. Palestinians are, at best, third class citizens in the nation of their birth,” Velshi posted on Twitter.
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Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. That’s an indisputable fact. But so do Palestinians. And that’s a fact that is often ignored. Palestinians are, at best, third class citizens in the nation of their birth. #velshi— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) May 15, 2021
In 15 follow-up tweets, he also described Hamas as merely a “political party” and appeared to downplay its explicit call for the destruction of Israel: “What the U.S. also shares with Israel is the belief that Hamas, the political party that governs Gaza, is a terrorist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel. And yes, Hamas is supported by the majority of Palestinians in Gaza.”
This, despite the fact that the Palestinian terror group was quite literally founded on a charter that explicitly sets out one of its primary aims as the annihilation of the Jewish state.
Just last month, he was rebuked on social media after failing to challenge a guest who effectively erased crimes committed by Nazi Germany against its own citizens, including almost 200,000 German Jews.
In a segment about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Stanford University Professor Michael McFaul falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler didn’t kill any “ethnic Germans and German-speaking people.”
Velshi failed to call out McFaul, and instead moved swiftly onto the next question, and the show he was hosting disseminated McFaul’s incorrect claims without any attribution.
