WATCH: MSNBC host says anti-Israel student protesters are ‘advocating for peace’ – roll the tape

The host neglected the anti-Israel agitators’ destructive and violent protests and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

By Meghan Blonder and Thaleigha Rampersad, The Washington Free Beacon

MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin said anti-Israel student activists, who have threatened and accosted Israelis, stormed university buildings, and caused millions of dollars in damage, are “advocating for peace.”

Mohyeldin said the Trump administration’s “abduction” of foreign students “is being done on the false premise that their speech is both a threat to American foreign policy, which we have said many times on this show is a laughable claim and that their protests are anti-Semitic and a threat to the safety of Jewish students.”

“But that’s a dangerous and, quite honestly, a dishonest smear,” he added during a Saturday episode of Ayman Mohyeldin Reports. “We have heard the words of [Mohsen] Mahdawi and their allies and partners in their protest movements are, in fact, Jewish students, many of them advocating for peace.”

Mohyeldin, who in February was demoted from a primetime slot to cohosting a weekend show, didn’t mention that Mahdawi said he “can empathize” with Hamas and honored terrorists ahead of his arrest by ICE officials earlier this month.

Mohyeldin also neglected anti-Israel agitators’ destructive and violent protests and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Two Harvard University students, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo and Ibrahim Bharmal, for example, faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an October 2023 anti-Israel “die-in” protest.

Just days after Mohyeldin’s comments, a judge ordered the pair to participate in an in-person anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service as part of a pretrial diversion program.

And in perhaps the most notorious example, Columbia University students stormed a school building in April 2024, smashing windows, barricading the entrance, and accosting some who attempted to impede the takeover or film the chaos, including a Washington Free Beacon reporter.

That was after agitators set up illegal encampments and terrorized the campus for two weeks.

More recently, anti-Israel radicals again stormed two buildings, this time at Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school. During the March incidents, agitators hospitalized a security guard and distributed Hamas propaganda, including a flyer that said, “BURN ZIONISM TO THE GROUND.”

University officials across the nation have also repeatedly had their property vandalized. In February, for example, students imprinted red handprints on the outside walls of UCLA regent and Hollywood talent agent Jay Sures’s house and plastered fliers on his garage door.

Anti-Israel radicals also regularly advocate for violence and paint upside-down triangles—a symbol Hamas uses to denote military targets—such as earlier this month on a Northwestern University building that houses the school’s Holocaust center.

A year earlier, a keffiyeh-clad individual on Columbia’s campus held a sign pointed at a group of Jewish students with the caption “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets,” a reference to Hamas’s military wing that was behind the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Student protesters routinely call for intifada—the First and Second Intifadas were violent Palestinian uprisings that targeted Jewish civilians in terror attacks, killing over 1,000 Israelis in the 1990s and early 2000s.