A longtime MSNBC host last month attended an anti-Israel gathering alongside a long list of Hamas cheerleaders, social media posts reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.
Ayman Mohyeldin, an Egyptian-born MSNBC personality, appeared in an Instagram post at the London "Together for Palestine" music festival with British actor Khalid Abdalla. Also at the festival were a former spokeswoman for a designated terrorist organization, a United Nations official currently under U.S. sanctions, and disgraced former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
Between musical numbers, the audience heard from people like Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization spokeswoman, who has spent more than a decade defending Hamas. She described the Oct. 7, 2023, attack as the "natural consequence, unfortunately, of 56 years of military occupation and the denial of freedom."
On the day of the massacre, Buttu said, "When you punch your abuser in the face, it feels good. The first reaction was elation—we saw that both in Gaza and in the West Bank."
She has also praised Hamas as a "movement for freedom, for liberation," and lauded its former leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed in an IDF operation in October 2024.
"The Israelis will never understand what it means to die a hero," she said.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, who has been under U.S. sanctions since July, also spoke at the festival.
"For nearly a century, the Palestinian people have lived under the weight of a brutal settler colonial project, a perpetual occupation justified as security—security of whom?—and enforced through apartheid," Albanese said.
The Trump administration sanctioned Albanese over the series of letters "riddled with inflammatory rhetoric and false accusations" she sent to a long list of companies in an effort to pressure them against doing business in Israel. The State Department also noted that Albanese claims to be an "international lawyer" despite never having been licensed to practice law.
Former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan delivered a fiery sermon on behalf of Palestinian "journalists," many of whom have collaborated with Hamas.
MSNBC canceled Hasan’s show in November 2023 after the former host spent the weeks after Oct. 7 defending terrorism. He notably pushed the discredited idea that Israel bombed al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, an explosion that turned out to have been caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. Hasan has compared non-Muslims to "cattle" and blamed Hamas’s attack on Israel as well, and has previously been accused of plagiarizing a column he wrote in defense of spanking children.
The festival also featured an interview with Arab Barghouti, son of convicted terrorist Marwan, whose father has spent the past 23 years in an Israeli prison after killing five people in 2002.
Mohyeldin, for his part, has a history of excusing Hamas violence. He said on Oct. 7 that the attack was "ultimately the end result" of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu "ignoring" Palestinians, calling the massacres "very deadly consequences of failed policies."
Mohyeldin in 2024 moderated several panels at a Georgetown University conference that featured known leaders of terrorist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He fumed over Israel’s successful June 2024 operation to rescue hostages in Gaza, parroting the Hamas line that the IDF had killed more than 200 civilians in the mission, and claimed that the violent pro-Hamas activists on college campuses were simply "advocating for peace" with their calls for "intifada."
Mohyeldin’s record of distorting the truth to bash Israel stretches back at least a decade. He said in 2015 that a terrorist Israel had eliminated "did not look to be particularly armed," a statement contradicted by MSNBC’s own video showing the terrorist holding a knife.
MSNBC canceled Mohyeldin’s solo show, Ayman, in February, demoting him to a spot as a weekend cohost. Ratings for that program, The Weekend: Primetime, have lagged behind the competition. According to Nielsen data reviewed by the Free Beacon, his show drew an average of 374,000 viewers, and 31,000 between the ages of 25 and 54, during the third quarter of 2025.
In comparison, Fox News’s programming in the same time slot averaged 1.5 million viewers, 126,000 of whom were between the ages of 25 and 54, over that same period.
MSNBC requested that the Free Beacon note that Mohyeldin attended the festival in his own capacity and was not a featured speaker. The network declined to comment further.
