The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling for MSNBC to ban Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt from its airwaves over recent comments he made about college students protesting against the war in Gaza.
During an appearance last Friday on Morning Joe, Greenblatt railed against the pro-Palestinian protests raging at Columbia University and other college campuses, describing them as antisemitic and threatening to Jewish students. He also took a shot at the two main organizations behind the demonstrations—the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
“Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups like SJP and JVP,” he declared.
In a statement on Thursday, CAIR Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell claimed that Greenblatt was defaming the groups and urged the network to stop booking Greenblatt.
“Falsely claiming that Jewish and Palestinian student organizations are literal proxies of the Iranian government is a dangerous and defamatory slander that has no place on MSNBC or any other television network,” Mitchell stated.
“No civil rights leader would ever equate Jewish and Palestinian college students with Hezbollah, analogize the Nazi swastika to the Palestinian keffiyeh or question whether Hamas sympathizers were writing MSNBC scripts,” he added. “Mr. Greenblatt’s increasingly unhinged and outrageous comments must be condemned, and MSNBC should no longer give him a platform to peddle his hate speech.”
CAIR claims that this is at least the third time that Greenblatt has made inflammatory remarks on MSNBC’s airwaves without being challenged by the network’s hosts.
Shortly after the October 7 attacks that sparked the war, Greenblatt appeared on Morning Joe and blasted the channel’s reporting on the conflict and wondered if the network’s scripts were written by Hamas sympathizers. (MSNBC featured three Muslim anchors during that weekend’s coverage of the attacks on Israel.)
Earlier this month, dozens of Muslim and Arab civil rights groups—including CAIR—condemned the ADL after Greenblatt seemingly compared the Palestinian keffiyeh to a swastika, urging the organization to fire him.
“This pattern of behavior must end,” the joint statement read. “The ADL should terminate Mr. Greenblatt, apologize for its history of bad-faith attacks on various communities, and stop attempting to defame, silence and endanger those who express support for Palestinian human rights. Until then, it is no ally in the fight against hate.”
MSNBC and the ADL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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