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We smile, but we have to face facts: Biden boycotted Netanyahu's speech in Congress, Kamala's chief of staff said AIPAC was racist. Op-ed.
Joe Biden Kamala Harris Edward Davis
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Reuters
The pattern is consistent--and troubling.
In 2015, in his role as president of the Senate, Vice President Joe Biden boycotted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to a joint session of Congress regarding the Iranian nuclear threat.
Joining him were a mere 8 out of 100 senators who, like Borat—the movie character who can't bear to be in the same room as a Jew—avoided being in the presence of the world's one Jewish head of state, an insult they almost certainly never accorded any other world leader.
The overwhelming majority of Democratic senators and members of Congress did not skip the speech. Would it be fair to label this snub by Biden and fellow members of the “Borat Caucus” as an anti-Israel boycott, even an anti-Jewish boycott? It depends on the answer to this question: In his near-five-decade career of dealing with foreign leaders, has Biden ever treated any non-Jewish heads of state the same way?
Even the leaders of the most murderous regimes don't seem to offend Biden. In 2018, he boasted about setting a record for the number of private meetings with Communist China's dictator: “I’ve spent a lot of time—apparently, I was told by the folks at State—I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader. I have 25 hours of private dinners with him, just he and I, and one interpreter.” That same year, rights groups informed the UN that China had rounded up perhaps as many as 1 million Muslims to undergo “re-education” in concentration camps.
The same Biden double standard was dramatically on display in 2010, during his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. On behalf of President Barack Obama, who was reportedly livid over Israel's announcement of the planned construction of 1,600 housing units in east Jerusalem, Biden snubbed the prime minister by arriving 90 minutes late for dinner. Though Israel said it was a routine announcement, and despite the Interior Minister's profuse apology for “the distress caused” by it, what allegedly offended Obama and Biden's sensibilities was the timing of it.
What went virtually unreported was that Biden's meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on the same trip was timed to coincide with the PA's celebration of the most horrific attack in the terror organization's history, the Coastal Road massacre. Female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi led the bus-hijacking attack that killed 38 innocent Israeli civilians, including 13 children, and wounded 71 people, before she was killed.
The celebration of the mass murder was a multi-day event.
On March 9, Secretary-General of the Presidency, Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim praised Mughrabi and other terrorists who “turned their blood into a bridge over which we pass on the way to our freedom, independence and national liberation from the burden of the occupation,” Palestinian Media Watch reported.
On March 10, Biden met with Abbas in Ramallah, and complained to him about the Israeli government's insensitivity. In a story headlined “Biden, Abbas Take Aim at Israel Decision,” United Press International reported the vice president told Abbas that Israel's insultingly timed decision to build housing units in its capital could “inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome” of peace talks.
On March 11, the Palestinian Authority named a square after Mughrabi. A large banner was held up which read: “On the anniversary of the Coastal Road Operation we renew our commitment and our oath that we uphold the charge and that we will not stray from the path of the shahids.”
Shortly before leaving office, Biden helped facilitate the notorious anti-Israel UN Resolution 2334 by pressuring Ukraine to vote against Israel. The resolution he helped orchestrate essentially labeled hundreds of thousands of Jews living in their indigenous homeland as illegal aliens, but not the kind deserving of amnesty. The Obama-Biden “parting shot” at the Jewish state topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of worst anti-Semitic/anti-Israel incidents of 2016.
In July, he addressed the Million Muslim Votes Summit, where his fellow speakers included Linda Sarsour, Rep. Ilhan Omar, CAIR's Hamas-supporting founder/executive director Nihad Awad, and Muslim Public Affairs Council founder Salam Al-Marayati.
The Zionist Organization of America noted that Al-Marayati “... praised the terror organization Hezbollah (which openly calls for Israel’s destruction) as 'only fighting for freedom' and praised Hezbollah’s activities as 'honorable'; opposes Israel’s very existence and called Israel’s re-establishment in 1948 a 'crime' and 'unjust' and called for “working to overturn this injustice (meaning calling for Israel’s total destruction); justified the Palestinian-Arab bombing of the Sbarro pizza store (in which 15 innocent Jews were murdered and over 100 were injured) as the fruit of Israeli policy; called Israel 'the apartheid brutal state of Israel,' 'butchers,' and 'racist.'”
The Borat mentality appeared to be systemic in the Biden campaign, as reflected in the Israel-snubbing views of senior campaign adviser Karine Jean-Pierre, who also serves as Kamala Harris' chief of staff. In an article for Newsweek in 2019, Jean-Pierre congratulated Democratic presidential candidates who boycotted the annual conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee:
"You cannot call yourself a progressive while continuing to associate yourself with an organization like AIPAC that has often been the antithesis of what it means to be progressive.
"In 2015, AIPAC spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat the Iran nuclear deal crafted by President Obama. The deal was historic in its attempt to create and maintain peace..."
She went on to blast AIPAC for inviting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in her opinion, might be guilty of war crimes. As for AIPAC, she claimed, without supplying evidence:
"It's severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric has proven just as alarming. The organization has become known for trafficking in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric..."
"Some Democratic members of Congress did just the opposite: they attended the conference and proceeded to bash the freshmen congresswomen who paved the way in identifying AIPAC as the obstacle to progress that it is."
Jean-Pierre's astonishing depiction of AIPAC as a hate group—and her glorification of Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar--can be traced to her own background as the head of the far-left, anti-Israel organization MoveOn, which took part in a 2015 conference call in which President Obama vilified the pro-Israel lobby. The Times of Israel reported that in the conference call, “Obama warned that Congress might be swayed by the '20 million dollars of advertising paid for by lobbyists'—a monetary figure he repeated throughout the conversation. The figure is identical to the amount that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was believed to be prepared to devote to its effort to oppose the deal...”
“When you have a bunch of folks who are big check writers to political campaigns, and billionaires who give to super PACS… this opportunity could slip away,” Obama warned.
This emphasis and re-emphasis on the big money threatening to undermine him sounded a lot like what Rep. Omar would later tweet about the Jews and their money negatively influencing US policy. And the $20 million figure Obama repeatedly invoked to his anti-Israel allies was dwarfed by the $150 billion he released to the terrorist regime of Iran, plus the additional billion-plus in cash he showered them with afterwards.
That MoveOn worked closely with Obama on a deal that brought terror-sponsoring Iran closer to possessing nuclear weapons, and that the Biden campaign appointed the far-left organization's chief to a powerful role, is troubling evidence that Biden may bring back the most radical and dangerous aspects of the Obama Administration.
This is a mere glimpse of the anti-Israel animus that has hijacked the Democratic Party, with Biden's approval and participation, as the media stays silent.
Linda Sarsour—campaign surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders, ally of Rev. Louis Farrakhan, admirer of convicted terrorist double-murderer Rasmea Odeh, and speaker at the 2020 Democratic Convention—recently said, “The Democratic Party isn't perfect, but it's our party now.”