Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Mar. 12, 2024
“… his agenda was to lend assistance to the Biden administration’s tilt away from Israel to curry favor with the Democratic Party’s left-wing Israel-haters.”
In a city packed with cynical opportunists, few people in Washington can match the cynicism and opportunism that are on display when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks. He’s been in public office continuously since the age of 25, and the 73-year-old Senate Majority Leader has spent his adult life grandstanding for the cameras and the press while always seeking some momentary political advantage as he schemed, back-stabbed and bloviated his way to the top of his profession.
Yet in a career replete with disingenuous rhetoric and Machiavellian maneuvering, nothing Schumer had done before was ever quite as loathsome as his most recent speech on the floor of the Senate. In it, he demanded a change in the government of the State of Israel and for the Jewish state to change its policies on the war against Hamas. He also pushed for post-war policies that the people of Israel adamantly oppose.
That’s not just because the substance of his remarks was deeply misleading in terms of his claims about what the obstacles to peace in the Middle East are, as well as highly inappropriate, especially when you consider how much we Americans resent foreigners interfering in our own political life.
Appeasing the Israel-haters
This was a disgraceful performance because, despite Schumer’s much-ballyhooed stance as Israel’s guardian in Congress, the point of the effort was not to bolster its alliance with the United States or to lend support at a time of unique peril to the Jewish state and a surge in antisemitism in America. To the contrary, his agenda was to lend assistance to the Biden administration’s tilt away from Israel to curry favor with the Democratic Party’s left-wing Israel-haters.
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