The mayhem in Baltimore provoked many responses from many people. Perhaps most outrageous, however, is MSNBC’s Joy Reid's claim that a man on the street compared the situation to Israel and the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. When asked by Andrea Mitchell about the conditions on the ground, Reid produced this incredible story:
JOY REID: I talked to a young man today who said that when he hears people calling the young people in this community thugs, he's offended by it because he's saying look around at what these young people are trying to work with. When they see their parents being roughed up by police on top of the issues of unemployment and poverty that are already piled on top of them, he essentially likened it in a sense almost to Gaza, that you have young people who are acting out of the frustration that they're taking in generationally from their families.
While there is no proof the that Reid is making up this civilian’s Gaza comparison of oppression, there is reason to doubt its authenticity.
First, if this city’s population is as oppressed, impoverished, and unemployed as the media would have people believe, it seems highly unlikely that its citizens can point to Gaza on the map, much less be familiar enough with its political conditions to draw parallels to their own.
Second, this isn’t the first time Reid has invoked a Gaza comparison–in 2014 she said the causalities in Israel’s war against Hamas was equal to “a hundred 9/11s.”
So either Reid found the most Middle East-conscious citizen in Baltimore, or she is doing a terrible job of restraining her pro-Palestinian bias.
