MSNBC’s Joy Reid demonstrated on Wednesday’s edition of The ReidOut that she doesn’t know the difference between intellectual laziness and nuance. Despite all the evidence pointing to a PIJ rocket, Reid claimed not just Hamas to be untrustworthy, but also the IDF and the United States because President Biden “fanned even more flames” by repeating the claim that Hamas beheaded babies.
During a conversation with former Obama State Department adviser Nayyera Haq, Reid claimed:
The challenge is enormous because the anger and the rage about this bombing of this hospital, however, whoever did it, isn't one of the challenges here is that there isn’t really a trusted voice who can answer the question who did it. No one wants to take Hamas's word for it certainly. The IDF and the Israeli military has had issues. There was an American journalist, a Palestinian-American journalist who was killed. What they said about it initially turned out not to be true. And there have been bombings of U.N.-related schools, et cetera, in the past. So they're not being believed either.
Attacking Biden from the left, she added, “And then the U.S. repeated, including President Biden, that story about 40 beheaded babies that then the IDF could not confirm and was unconfirmed but he said it in a speech out loud and that fanned even more flames. So the challenge here is who are people going to listen to?”
Two things need to be said in response to Reid. The first is that babies were murdered, if you’re quibbling over how the babies were murdered then you’ve completely lost the plot.
Second, Reid is simply being lazy. We photos of the aftermath of the explosion showing the lack of a bomb crater and intercepted communications. If Reid has a problem with those bits of evidence, she should say why and not just lament she can't trust anyone.
For her part, Haq agreed, “Well, in this information environment, the first piece of information you get in any intelligence assessment is often wrong. You have to wait 24 hours, 48 hours to get-- dig in, literally in some cases, dig into the rubble and get answers on who did what, where, what, when, why, how. But we expect answers immediately, and we expect them in our phones and that's what the communicators and the president are responding to. The challenge is that the United States has always been a strong ally of Israel.”
Haq then wandered off into unrelated matters, “And that has been defined as a strong ally of whichever government is there. So you could have 75 percent of Israelis upset with Netanyahu and not agreeing with his decisions, but the United States is in a position where it defends the government that exists. And so, that created a challenge of outside actors not looking at the United States as impartial on human rights or even domestically now people not looking to the president or the State Department as impartial.”
That doesn’t make any sense. Seventy-five percent of Israelis do not blame the IDF for the hospital explosion and it is the American government’s job to work with “the government that exists.”
Here is a transcript for the October 18 show:
MSNBC The ReidOut
10/18/2023
7:24 PM ET
JOY REID: Joining me is Nayyera Haq, a former senior State Department adviser and former White House senior director under President Obama. Nayyera, my friend, thank you for being here. The challenge is enormous because the anger and the rage about this bombing of this hospital, however, whoever did it, isn't one of the challenges here is that there isn’t really a trusted voice who can answer the question who did it. No one wants to take Hamas's word for it certainly. The IDF and the Israeli military has had issues. There was an American journalist, a Palestinian-American journalist who was killed. What they said about it initially turned out not to be true. And there have been bombings of U.N.-related schools, et cetera, in the past. So they're not being believed either.
And then the U.S. repeated, including President Biden, that story about 40 beheaded babies that then the IDF could not confirm and was unconfirmed but he said it in a speech out loud and that fanned even more flames. So the challenge here is who are people going to listen to?
NAYYERA HAQ: Well, in this information environment, the first piece of information you get in any intelligence assessment is often wrong. You have to wait 24 hours, 48 hours to get-- dig in, literally in some cases, dig into the rubble and get answers on who did what, where, what, when, why, how. But we expect answers immediately, and we expect them in our phones and that's what the communicators and the president are responding to. The challenge is that the United States has always been a strong ally of Israel.
And that has been defined as a strong ally of whichever government is there. So you could have 75 percent of Israelis upset with Netanyahu and not agreeing with his decisions, but the United States is in a position where it defends the government that exists.
And so, that created a challenge of outside actors not looking at the United States as impartial--
REID: Yeah.
HAQ: -- on human rights or even domestically now people not looking to the president or the State Department as impartial.
