“Israel is Off the Hook Again?” State Department Reporter asks Heather Nauert

In the following video an unnamed State Department reporter is heard harrassing Heather Nauert over the administration’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself.




Nauert rebuffs the reporter, but he inists on questioning the adminstration’s defense of Israel’s actions on the Gaza border.

“How is it not justification for killing, for Israel killing, when you say ‘Israel has a right to defend itself?’” the reporter asked. “Israel has a right to defend itself and there are no Israeli casualties and there are literally tens of thou-, over ten thousand Palestinian casualties and a hundred deaths.”

The above questioning uses the often made equalization statement, which makes it all about body count.  Of course that is offensive and border line anti-semitic as it inisists that the only time Israel has the right to defend itself is if Jews are killed first and of course in equal amounts to enemy numbers.

This is of course ridiculous.  If the IDF had not opened fire, hundreds and potentially thousands of Israelis would be killed from the hoardes of people carrying grenades, guns, and molotov cocktails.

The reporter also made a comparison between border patrols on the US-Mexico border to Israel-Gaza border.  “The U.S. isn’t mowing down people along the U.S.-Mexican border, isn’t that accurate?” the reporter said.

As bad as the border situation is on the US-Mexico border, Mexico is ruled by a terrorist entity willing to pay tens of thousands of people to ram the border fence, fly burning kites in US territory, and throw grenades and rocks at US soldiers.

This sort of thinking is what is driving leftists like Bernie Sanders to make statements like the following: “Instead of applauding Israel for its actions, Israel should be condemned. Israel has a right to security, but shooting unarmed protesters is not what it is about.”

The David-Goliath trope running through the left is what is driving their perception of reality disconnected from the real world. Then again this is the same group that doesn’t believe in national borders.

BERNIE SANDERS GETS ADVISER FROM ANTI-SEMITIC THINK TANK

Support for the terrorists and sanctions on Israel.

Matt Duss had once compared Israel’s blockade of Hamas to “segregation in the American South.”

After the murder of the Henkin family in front of their children, the stabbing of a two-year-old and his mother in Jerusalem, Duss wrote, “it shouldn’t shock anyone that Israel’s harsh occupation and abuse provokes Palestinians.” He blamed the “rising violence” on Israel and not the PLO terrorists.

“Israel does need to start facing some costs and consequences for an occupation,” Matt Duss had told Al Jazeera. “The BDS movement has helped to elevate a debate that was long overdue.”

Matt Duss had traveled to Gaza to meet with Hamas members. He then whitewashed the Islamic terror group as a moderate organization willing to accept a two-state solution and stop killing Jews.

When Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Jewish teens, one of them American, Duss whined that Israel had “turned a police matter into a war” and launched a “crackdown on Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank under the pretext of searching for the missing boys”.

He described the Hamas terrorists as “Palestinian activists” and claimed that despite the brutal murders, “Hamas had largely held to the terms of the cease-fire.”

“A better option for dealing with stone-throwing Palestinian protesters might be to stop stealing their land,” Duss had once tweeted.

“One can recognize that anti-Semitism is a particularly pernicious bigotry among bigotries, however, while still questioning whether holding such views makes any leader ‘irrational'”, Duss wrote when defending the Iran nuke sellout.

Now he’s formulating foreign policy for Senator Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders had previously invited Duss to testify before the Democratic Platform Committee in a push for an anti-Israel platform. Duss had urged the Dems to call for an end to the Hamas blockade.

Before becoming a foreign policy advisor to Senator Sanders, Duss headed up the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Despite its misleading name, FMEP is a fixture of the anti-Israel lobby. It was founded by Merle Thorpe: Jr, a wealthy Washington D.C. lawyer who was the sugar daddy for anti-Israel causes.

The Foundation for Middle East Peace funds anti-Israel groups that directly or indirectly promote BDS.

Before that, Duss was at the center of a major anti-Semitic scandal when he headed up Middle East Progress for the Center for American Progress. CAP bloggers had escalated their attacks on the Jewish State by accusing Jews of “dual loyalty” and of being “Israel Firsters”.

Faiz Shakir, the editor-in-chief at ThinkProgress, had admitted that the hateful attacks by at least one CAP blogger used “terrible anti-Semitic language.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the ADL and even the White House’s Jewish liaison, during the Obama era, all criticized the hatred at the Center for American Progress. The Wiesenthal Center had reportedly described CAP as “infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.” And CAP tried to smear the Wiesenthal Center, an organization founded by a Nazi-hunter, as “the far-right Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The White House’s liaison called the CAP situation “troubling” and emphasized that this attitude did not represent the administration.

But apparently it does represent a prospective Bernie Sanders administration. That’s not surprising.

Senator Bernie Sanders has used his ethnic origins to mask the ugly anti-Semitism of his political allies, including Keith Ellison, the former Nation of Islam member whose virulent bigotry was, according to the Minnesota Daily opinion editor, “a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people.”

When a bigot demanded to know Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the “Jewish community” while claiming that the “Zionist Jews” were “running the Federal Reserve”, “running Wall Street” and “running everything”, the Senator from Vermont responded by disavowing and bashing Israel.

“I may be Jewish, but you’re not going to find any candidate running for president, for example, to talk about Zionism and the Middle East,” Bernie groveled.

Like Ellison, Jesse Jackson and the Sandinistas, whom Sanders had defended despite their ugly anti-Semitism, Duss benefits from the Bernie protection racket for bigots. If you work for a man whose parents were Jewish, then you can’t possibly be accused of anti-Semitism.

What sort of foreign policy could Matt Duss be drawing up for Bernie Sanders?

Two years ago, Duss had called for using “sticks” on Israel and compared Jewish families living in Jerusalem to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He suggested that political pressure could prevent “Israeli voters” from voting in the pro-Israel and anti-terrorist candidates whom he disapproves of.

“Voters currently see no costs or consequences to the occupation,” Matt Duss had complained. “By beginning to make those costs clear, as floating the possibility of sanctions does, the EU could play an important role in sharpening the choice before Israeli voters.”

Duss suggested that pressuring “millions of voters” in Israel was “worth a try.”

And who better to roll out sanctions on Israel than President Bernie Sanders?

When Bernie brought on Cornel West and James Zogby to push for an anti-Israel platform, a message was sent. When you bring in a 9/11 Truther and BDS activist who calls Israel an “apartheid state” and describes efforts to fight Hamas as “Jewish racism”, that says it all.

So does bringing in Matt Duss to work on “foreign policy”.

Bernie’s foreign policy has been very consistent. He supported the anti-Semitic Sandinistas who ethnically cleansed Jews from Nicaragua. He honeymooned in the USSR which persecuted Jews.

“No guns for Israel,” Sanders declared before the Yom Kippur War, which nearly destroyed the Jewish State. In 1990, he said that he “would like to see the US put more pressure on Israel.”

When Bernie Sanders reached out for perspective on the Middle East during his campaign, he contacted James Zogby, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and Lawrence Wilkerson, who had accused Jewish officials of dual loyalty and suggested that Israel was behind Assad’s chemical weapons attacks.

Matt Duss fits perfectly with the rest of the sad, twisted freaks in the anti-Israel lobby.

And he’s valuable because he’s smoother than lunatics like Cornel West, a 9/11 Truther, or Lawrence Wilkerson, who accused Israel of “false flag” WMD attacks in Syria.

Extremists always need someone like Matt Duss to make their ugly views seem palatable.

We already know what Bernie’s real foreign policy on Israel will be.

He wants to end military aid and divert money from Israel to Hamas. He’ll attempt to end the non-profit status of Jewish schools in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists. He’ll demand the ethnic cleansing of parts of Israel. And those demands will be backed by economic and political pressure.

That’s what Bernie wants. It’s what the radical extremists he panders to want him to do.

Duss is on board to make this ugliness presentable. And to help Bernie avoid tactical blunders like his lie that Israel had killed “10,000 innocent people” in Gaza.

When Bernie Sanders starts delivering his incoherent speeches attacking Israel, it will be based on the work of bigots and haters who have found a human shield with a Brooklyn accent for their agenda.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

THE DEMOCRATS ARE A PARTY OF ANTI-SEMITIC COWARDS

In the end there will be only two types of Democrats: anti-Semites and cowards.

The Democrats care about anti-Semitism.

They care so much that they had a presidential candidate and convention speaker who led an anti-Semitic riot through a Jewish neighborhood. “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house,” he had taunted his victims.

He became a close presidential adviser whose endorsement is sought after by every Democrat running for the White House.

They care so much that they had a presidential candidate and speaker at two conventions who had used racial slurs against Jews and declared, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.”

They care so much that the new deputy DNC chair, who had also spoken at a convention, has a long history with anti-Semitic hate groups.

From Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson to Keith Ellison, there’s a safe space for anti-Semitism on the left.

Keith Ellison’s people are blaming the Jews for his defeat. They aren’t blaming themselves for having put forward a “progressive” candidate with a long history of anti-Semitism which continued to come out during the campaign forcing even the ADL and other liberal Jewish groups to back away from his hatred.

It’s not Keith Ellison’s 11 years in the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam hate group that they object to or his planned appearance at the MAS-ICNA Islamist convention in Chicago alongside an Islamist cleric who had called for killing all the Jews. Nor is it his ties to CAIR which has invited a Holocaust denier to its conferences and whose leader made anti-Semitic remarks.

It’s not Ellison’s anti-Semitism that they object to. They object to the Jews for objecting to it.

There’s a long proud history of that sort of thing on the left. Cynthia McKinney’s backers blamed her setbacks on the same folks as Keith Ellison’s backers. As her father put it, “Jews have bought everybody. Jews. J-e-w-s.” If the Jews “bought everybody”, they didn’t get a good deal since McKinney was succeeded by Hank Johnson who compared Jews living in Israel to termites.

“You see one home after another being appropriated by Jewish people,” Johnson ranted. “…almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up.”

And so the left has decided to blame the “Jewish termites” for eating up Keith Ellison’s candidacy. But his anti-Semitism didn’t prevent him from becoming the leading candidate to head the DNC. Anti-Semitism is not a disqualifier on the left. If anything, it’s a qualifier.

Keith Ellison lost because Obama’s people campaigned against him. Ellison’s backers, most of whom are white leftists, can’t say a bad thing about Obama. But blaming the Jews is always a safe bet.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the Democrats aren’t just bigots, they’re cowards. Take Bernie Sanders, the son of a Polish immigrant, who panders to anti-Semites and refuses to stand up to them.

In an address to the anti-Israel hate group, J Street, which has hosted BDS supporters, Bernie Sanders blamed President Trump for anti-Semitism and complained that he hadn’t condemned it enough.

No one is a bigger coward when it comes to condemning anti-Semitism than Bernie Sanders.

When an audience member at one of his own events began ranting about “Zionist Jews” running the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, Bernie responded by launching into an attack on Israel.

When NPR’s Diane Rehm accused him of having dual citizenship in Israel based on a “list” from some anti-Semitic site, he mumbled his way through a response. Instead of condemning this bigotry, he praised her as a “good interviewer”.

What good interviewer, with a background of hating Israel, doesn’t accuse a Jewish candidate of dual loyalty? What good progressive leftist whose Jewishness is limited to his accent doesn’t praise her for it?

Bernie Sanders shrilled that it was “imperative” that Trump and members of his administration “be loud and clear in condemning anti-Semitism”.

Where was Bernie’s condemnation when his Sandinista comrades were chanting, “Death to the Jews”, when a synagogue was firebombed and in an echo of Hitler’s Germany, its president was forced to scrub the streets? Instead his voice was raised loudly in support of the Marxist regime that wiped out the Jewish community of Nicaragua.

While Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the USSR, Soviet Jews were being oppressed by the leftist regime. The same year that Bernie Sanders was touring the USSR, Soviet Jewish protests were being broken up by the KGB and Josef Begun, a prominent refusenik, met with President Reagan.

Reagan was vocal in condemning the abuse of Jews by the USSR and the Sandanistas. But where was Bernie’s “loud and clear” condemnation?

It was nowhere to be heard.

Bernie Sanders supported Jesse Jackson despite his “Hymietown” slur. He refused to directly condemn his anti-Semitism when he was asked about it.

But why blame Bernie Sanders for being a miserable coward? The left is an anti-Semitic movement. To be a part of it, you either have to be anti-Semitic or very good at not hearing certain things.

Bernie Sanders is very good at not hearing certain things about Jews running the banks or being dirty ‘Hymies’. But he’s hardly alone. Senator Schumer was very good at not hearing the things that Keith Ellison was saying even when they were on tape. But that’s what you have to do if you want to be Jewish and get ahead in a party overrun by anti-Semites who are very concerned about anti-Semitism.

As the Democrats become a radical left-wing party, there will be room only for anti-Semites and those who pretend not to see them. And that will become harder and harder to do.

But there will always be lefties with Jewish last names who find it lucrative or fulfilling to pander to anti-Semitic bigots. Bernie Sanders rode his selective blindness to the leadership of the left. The old Bernie used his unemployment benefits to buy a dilapidated maple sugar shack with a dirt floor. The new one can afford a $600,000 summer home. The old Bernie used to fly coach. The new Bernie took to flying around in a private 767 jet with lamb loin, crab salad and lobster sliders on the menu.

Chuck Schumer was pressured into standing up to the Iran deal once by his Jewish constituents. And the left threatened his career. So the new Senate majority leader went all in on Keith Ellison.

Bernie, Chuck and the rest of the gang have a good life. But the price of their careers is turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism. Meanwhile they will pretend to care a great deal about anti-Semitism as long as it doesn’t come from the left, from Iran, from the Palestinian Authority or any Islamic organization.

Because the Democrats care about anti-Semitism. They care so much that they insist on funding Islamic terrorists in the Palestinian Authority who get paid based on how many Jews they kill.

They care so much that they want money to keep flowing to Iran’s genocidal nuclear program and through it, to Hamas and Hezbollah, who have called for exterminating the Jews.

They care so much that they fought on behalf of Muslims convicted of terror plots against synagogues.

In the end there will be only two types of Democrats: anti-Semites and the cowards too afraid to stand up to them.

Originally published in FrontPageMag.

The Ellison Challenge

The Democratic Party stands at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.

Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.

They have two basic options.

They can move to the center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of the political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.

This is the sort of moderate posture that Bill Clinton led with. It is the sort of posture that Clinton tried but failed to convince his wife to adopt in this year’s campaign.

The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the party. Sanders’ supporters refer to this option as the populist course. It is being played out today on the ground by the anti-Trump protesters who refuse to come to terms with the Trump victory and insistently defame Trump as a Nazi or Hitler and his advisors as Goebbels.

For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.

It will also require them to become an anti-Semitic party.

Anti-Semitism, like hatred of police and Christians are necessary components of Democratic populism. This is true first and foremost because they will need scapegoats to blame for all the bad things you can’t solve by demonizing and silencing your political opponents.

Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, along with evangelical Christians and cops are the only groups that you are allowed to hate, discriminate against and scapegoat in the authoritarian PC universe.

From the party’s initial post-election moves, it appears that the Democrats have decided to take the latter path.

Congressman Keith Ellison from Minneapolis is now poised to be selected as the next leader of the Democratic National Committee. This position is a powerful one. The DNC chairman, like his Republican counterpart, is the party’s chief fundraiser. When a party is out of power, the party chairman is treated like its formal leader, and most active spokesman.

Ellison is the head of the Democrats’ Progressive caucus. His candidacy is supported by incoming Senate minority leader Senator Chuck Schumer and outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid. Obama has indicated his support for Ellison. Senator Bernie Sanders is enthusiastically supporting him.

Ellison made history in 2006 when he was elected to serve as the first Muslim member of Congress. As the representative of an overwhelmingly Democratic district, once he won the Democratic primary in 2006, he was all but guaranteed that he could serve in Congress for as long as he wishes.

As Scott Johnson, a prominent conservative writer who runs the popular Powerlineblog website reported extensively in 2006, Ellison is an anti-Semite. He also defends cop killers.

As Johnson reported, Ellison was a long standing member of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. During his 2006 Congressional campaign, the local media gave next to no coverage to this association. But when it did come up, Ellison soothed concerns of Minneapolis’s Jewish community by sending a letter to the local Jewish Community Relations Committee.

In the letter Ellison claimed that he had only been briefly associated with Louis Farrakhan’s outfit, that he was unfamiliar with its anti-Semitism, and that he had never personally expressed such views.

The local media and the Jewish community were happy to take him at his word.

But as Johnson documented, his was lying on all counts.

Ellison’s association with the Nation of Islam dated back at least since 1989 and stretched at least until 1998. During that period, he not only knew about the Nation of Islam’s Jew hatred, he engaged in it himself.

As Johnson noted, in 1998, Ellison appeared at a public forum as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was there to defend a woman who was under fire for allegedly referring to Jews as “among the most racist white people.”

Whereas the woman herself denied she had made the statement, Ellison defended and justified her alleged statement. Referring to her slander of Jews he said, “We stand by the truth contained in [the woman’s] remarks…Also it is absolutely true that merchants in Black areas generally treat Black customers badly.”

As Johnson reported, aside from engaging in anti-Jewish propaganda and actively promoting anti-Semitic messages and leaders, decades before the Black Lives Matter was formed, Ellison was a prominent defender of murderers of policemen.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Ellison likened the attacks to the Reichstag fire in 1933, intimating that the al Qaeda strike was an inside job. He then agreed with an audience member who said that “the Jews” gained the most from the attacks.

As a member of Congress, Ellison has been among the most hostile US lawmakers towards Israel. He has close relations with Muslim Brotherhood related groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Islamic Society of North America. Both groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, implicated in funding Hamas and al Qaida.

And now, Sens. Schumer, Sanders and Reid and President Obama along with the Democratic grassroots activists and other party leaders are supporting Ellison’s bid to serve as chairman of the DNC.

As Ellison’s statement about “merchants” makes clear, the Democrats’ Jew hatred may not be of the “Jews are the sons of apes and pigs,” variety. In all likelihood, it will be propagated through angry rhetoric about “bankers” and “financiers,” and “the rich.”

Ellison, a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, has libeled Israel by likening the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa. Under his leadership, we can expect for Democratic politicians to veer even further away from Israel and to embrace the slander that Zionism is racism.

The populist Sanders’ route seems more attractive to the Democrats than Bill Clinton’s moderate path because the notion is taking hold that Sanders would have been a stronger candidate in the general election than Clinton was.

This view is hard to accept. Most Americans reject socialism, and populist or not, it is difficult to see how Sanders would have sold his radical positions to an uninterested public.

The other problem with the “Sanders would have won,” argument is that it misses the distinction between Trump’s populism and Democratic populism.

Trump’s populism stemmed from his willingness to say things that other politicians and authority figures more generally wouldn’t dare to say. Trump’s allegation that the political system is rigged, for instance, empowered Americans who feel threatened by the authoritarianism of the politically correct Left.

Trump’s opponents insist that his populism empowered white power bigots. But that was a bug in his ointment. It wasn’t the ointment itself. Trump’s willingness to seemingly say anything, and certainly to say things that were beyond the narrow confines of the politically correct discourse, empowered tens of millions of voters. It also empowered white bigots at the fringes of the Right.

Whereas empowering white bigots was a side effect of Trump’s populism, empowering bigots is a central feature of leftist populism. And this is where it gets dicey for Jews.

As Obama – and Ellison – have shown, when Democrats channel populism, they use it to demonize their opponents as evil. They are “fat cats on Wall Street.” They are “racists,” and other deplorables.

There are scattered voices on the Left that are calling for their fellow leftists to revisit their authoritarian practice of labelling everyone who doesn’t walk lockstep behind them as racists and otherwise unacceptable. But for the most part, the populists are winning the argument by essentially demanding more ideological radicalism and more rigidity.

This policy is completely irrational from a political perspective. It’s hard to see the constituencies that will be swayed to support an angry, hateful party.

But this brings us to the Jews, who voted 3:1 for the Democrats, and to the American Jewish leadership whose support for Clinton was near unanimous.

When anti-Semitic, populist voices like Ellison’s began taking over Britain’s Labour Party, British Jews began heading for the exits. When push came to shove they preferred their individual rights and their communal rights as Jews above their partisan loyalties.

So far, this doesn’t appear to be the case among Jewish Democrats.

Consider the Anti-Defamation League’s unhinged onslaught against Trump’s chief strategist, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon.

While ignoring Ellison’s record of anti-Semitism and support for Israel’s enemies, as well as his ties to unindicted co-conspirators in funding Hamas, the ADL launched a scathing assault on Bannon accusing him of being an anti-Semite.

The ADL’s assault on Bannon follows its absurd claim in the final days of the campaign that Trump’s ad criticizing George Soros was anti-Semitic. It also follows the group’s bizarre condemnation of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent video clip in which he stated the plain fact that the Palestinian demand that Jews be ethnically cleansed from the territory they wish to take control over is an anti-Semitic demand.

As many prominent US Jews on both sides of the partisan divide have made clear, the accusation that Bannon, whose Breitbart website is one of the most pro-Israel websites in the US, is anti-Semitic is appalling on its face. The allegation is simply unsubstantiated.

So why do it? Why allege that a friend of the Jews is a Jew hater while ignoring the actual anti-Semitism of another man?

The answer is depressingly easy to discern.

The ADL appears to be trying to give cover to the rising forces of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. By falsely accusing Bannon and through him Trump of anti-Semitism, the ADL defuses the real problem of Democratic anti-Semitism. And if the ADL doesn’t think there is a problem with Ellison taking over the DNC, but alleges that Republicans hate them, then rank in file Jews will stay put.

The ADL of course isn’t alone in sending this message.

Following the election, Conservative and Reform congregations in major cities throughout the US organized communal “shivas,” to mourn Clinton’s defeat as if it was a death in the family. Such actions, along with characterizations of Trump and his advisors as Nazis or Hitler or white supremacists work to bind Jews to a party that is inhospitable to their communal interests while blinding them to the fact that Republicans do not hate Jews or the Jewish state.

For decades, American Jews have been at the forefront of every major social movement on in the US. But the Democratic Party’s move towards anti-Semitism, a move made apparent through Ellison’s rise, is one movement the Jews mustn’t lead.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

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