NBC foreign affairs reporter Ayman Mohyeldin made the suggestion Thursday on Morning Joe that Chris Kyle, late subject of the hit movie "American Sniper" and credited as the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, had "racist tendencies" toward Iraqis and Muslims and "went on killing sprees in Iraq on assignment."
"American Sniper" has given a lot of Americans an inside look at what actually happened over in Iraq during the war. It has also raised a national discussion on post-traumatic stress disorder, addressing the personal issues veterans face when they come home.
Mohyeldin's commentary left host Joe Scarborough dumbfounded.
"Killing sprees?" Scarborough asked incredulously. "Chris Kyle was going on killing sprees?"
"When he was involved in his -- on assignments in terms of what he was doing, a lot of the description that has come out from his book and some of the terminology that he has used, people have described as racist in his personal attitudes about what he was doing overseas when he was on assignment," Mohyeldin sputtered.
Scarborough later joked that Mohyeldin was next going to kick around Santa Claus.
Mohyeldin's attitude towards Kyle should come as no surprise given his history of biased reporting on the Middle East. Formerly at Qatar-based Al Jazeera, Mohyeldin consistently reported an anti-Israeli viewpoint during the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas. Examples included taping entire segments about the fighting without once mentioning Hamas, a designated terrorist group with the charter goal of killing Jews. Mohyeldin also falsely reported an Israeli drone attacked a United Nations facility that killed more than a dozen Gaza civilians, when in fact it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had fallen short of its Israeli target.
In another Morning Joe hit, Mohyeldin was unable to answer a question about whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian extremism posed the greatest threat to the world.