In the wake of the Hamas massacre and Israel’s new bombing campaign in Gaza, a prelude to a pending ground war, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic violence is flaring up all over the world. The situation resembles the days and weeks after 9/11. On Saturday, police in Chicago arrested 71-year-old landlord Joseph Czuba for allegedly stabbing to death a 6-year-old Palestinian America boy as well as stabbing the boy’s 32-year-old mother. According to CBS News, “investigators were able to determine he targeted the victims because they are Muslim, due to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.”

While public officials like President Joe Biden have rightly condemned anti-Semitic exploitation of the conflict, the political elite has been more muted on the dangers of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. The major exceptions to this are among more progressive lawmakers such as Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York—who for their trouble have been attacked as weak on terrorism.

As war fever rages, the need to stand up to racism and bigotry in any form is paramount. Unfortunately, a major media outlet that is putatively liberal, the cable news network, MSNBC, cowered for a few days in the face of Islamophobia.

On Friday in Semafor, Max Tani reported,

MSNBC has quietly taken three of its Muslim broadcasters out of the anchor’s chair since Hamas’s attack on Israel last Saturday amid America’s wave of sympathy for Israeli terror victims.The network did not air a scheduled Thursday night episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show on the streaming platform Peacock. MSNBC also reversed a plan for Ayman Mohyeldin to fill in this week on the network for host Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. show on Thursday and Friday. Mohyeldin, an Egyptian-American journalist and veteran NBC News correspondent covered the conflict from Gaza for two years…. Two network sources with knowledge of the plans told Semafor that the network also plans to have Alicia Menendez fill in this upcoming weekend for Ali Velshi, a third Muslim-American host who on Sunday interviewed a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.

Alicia Menendez is daughter of scandal-plagued New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez.

Tani added, “Some staff at MSNBC have been concerned by the moves, feeling all three hosts have some of the deepest knowledge of the conflict. NBC says the shifts are coincidental, and the three continue to appear on air to report and provide analysis.” Tani also documented intense debate, sometimes including incendiary accusations that reporters who called for contextual reporting were guilty of being terrorist apologists, on MSNBC’s internal Slack channel.

In their vehement rejoinder to Tani’s report, MSNBC claimed that the three Muslim-American hosts were removed only for logistical reasons and that their religion had nothing to do with the decision. One complexity of the story is that the three employees continued to appear on MSNBC as reporters and analysts even as they were sidelined as hosts.

But the hosting position is an important one. A host is the public face of the network and not just one contending voice among many. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that in removing these Muslim Americans from hosting duties for a week, MSNBC was sending a signal that their religious identity made them ill-suited to be representatives of the network. This may be a subtle form of bigotry, but it is still bigotry.

Anyone familiar with the history of MSNBC would hesitate to give the network the benefit of the doubt on this issue. In February 2003, in the prelude to the American invasion of Iraq, MSNBC fired Phil Donahue—at the time the highest-rated host of any show on the network. In an internal memo, a staffer noted that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” because, while “our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity,” Donahue “seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.”

As Eric Alterman noted in his book What Liberal Media? (2004), “To replace Donahue, the station hired in his stead former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and the radio talk show host Michael Savage.” The aptly self-named Savage (the nom de plume of the equally apposite Michael Alan Weiner) was known for complaining that the United States had been taken over by “the freaks, the cripples, the perverts and the mental defectives.” Arguing with a gay caller on MSNBC, Savage said, “Oh, you’re one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig.” This riposte earned Savage a firing, but was a much more serious offense than Donahue’s anti-war commentary.

In recent years, NBC has a pattern of losing prominent Black journalists who either quit or are fired. Karen Attiah of The Washington Post reported in 2022,