Democrats Throw Israel Under the Bus, Kill Bipartisanship
As published in Newsmax.
May 29, 2021.
After assaulting Israeli civilians with more than 4000 rockets over eleven days and incurring massive damage to its internationally financed military infrastructure, Hamas was eager for a ceasefire.
This latest aggression by the genocidal Palestinians in Gaza has exposed a Democratic Party now hostile to Israel. The center of gravity in the party has clearly shifted to embrace a progressive ideology that views Israel as evil and uses anti-Semitic language to demonize Jews as "white supremacists" and Israel, the Jewish collective, as an "apartheid" state of "white colonialist oppressors."
In fashionable intersectional jargon, it draws an absurd equivalence between U.S. racial minorities and Palestinian Arabs.
During the war, radical Democratic members of "the squad" took to the U.S. House floor, social media, and the airwaves to slander and delegitimize the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people, where Arabs and Jews stand equal before the law and where the military is described as "the most moral army in the world."
They were quick to claim that Palestinian lives matter, while totally ignoring Jewish lives.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., attacked Israel for systemic racism.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., racialized the conflict, demanding that Israel stop brutalizing and murdering "black and brown bodies."
Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted, "The fight for black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected. We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression." Referring to Israel, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., declared, "Apartheid states aren’t democracies" — an insidious way of siding with those who favor the destruction of the Jewish state.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., gave President Biden a tongue lashing on the tarmac in Detroit, having earlier demanded that he "get out of the way of the U.N. Security Council and join other countries" in forcing a quick ceasefire.
She referred to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "apartheid-in-chief" and accused him of "war crimes." Biden praised her as a "fighter" with "intellect" and "passion" during a speech later that day.
He knows who’s calling the shots now.
Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., sponsored a resolution to block a $735 million sale of precision-guided weapons (Joint Direct Attack Munitions made by Boeing) to Israel. Ocasio-Cortez claimed that America has been selling billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel for decades "without ever requiring them to respect basic Palestinian rights."
This resolution is still pending in the House.
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders threatens to eliminate nearly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel under the pretense of Israeli human rights violations.
Twenty-eight Senate Democrats, a majority of their caucus, pushed for an immediate ceasefire before Israel had time to sufficiently degrade the Hamas military infrastructure to deter future attacks.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Senate Democrat in leadership, signed off on the effort.
It wasn’t only the House radicals who were siding with Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. House Democrats voted 218-209 against a Republican measure to provide Israel with emergency funding for its Iron Dome missile defense system, which has saved countless Israeli civilian lives.
Without the Iron Dome technology, Israel’s citizens are vulnerable to missile attacks not only from Hamas, but also from Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.
Next, House Democrats voted 217-209 to oppose legislation that would have cut off Hamas’s funding sources. Similar legislation passed the House unanimously in 2019. Not today.
Remarkably, House Democrats appeared on Sunday morning talk shows claiming that they support Israel. Votes from only five Democrats is all that would have been needed to pass these important resolutions.
As the radicals in his party voiced a calumny against the Jewish state and refused to condemn Hamas, where was U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a man who has spent his career boasting that he is a protector of Israel?
Silent.
Public expressions of solidarity with Israel’s plight have not escaped from Schumer’s lips.
And then there is Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., previously an unshakable friend of Israel who even defied President Obama by opposing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, but now voicing concern over Israeli attacks against terror targets and equivocating over Israel’s right to defend itself.
While Republicans stood united in solidarity with Israel and vigorously placed the blame for the fighting squarely where it belonged — on Hamas — too many Democrats publicly criticized the Jewish state, describing its defensive operations as terrorist acts, drawing equivalence between Hamas, the terrorist aggressor, and Israel, the sovereign nation defending its citizenry. The past staunch defenders of Israel, recognizing the new reality in their party, capitulated so quickly that it’s hard to keep track.
Those who are concerned about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the party were forewarned when, in 2019, Democratic leadership could not even muster a vote condemning the infamous reference to the "Benjamins, baby" by Rep. Ilan Omar, D-Minn.
It took the recent attack by Hamas thugs to fully expose the realities in the Democratic Party. The most radical elements in the party, claiming to speak for the base, are now empowered to delegitimize and demonize the only Jewish state in the world, openly siding with those who favor its destruction. For the first time in the relationship between America and its most faithful ally, U.S. bipartisanship is dead.
