Eli Lake
Tablet, Aug. 21, 2024
“Perhaps the president can dispatch one of his aides to ask the river-to-the-sea crowd whether it would protest the embassy of Qatar, a country that has been one of the most important patrons of Hamas in recent years, instead of Israel’s consulate in Chicago.”
President Joe Biden, in his Chicago swan song, offered a sop to the forces that seek to spoil the Democratic National Convention. In a section of his speech calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden said, “Those protesters out on the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
Really? Maybe some protesters are genuinely concerned with the toll the Gaza war has taken on both Israelis and Palestinians. But the leaders of the organizations trying to cause trouble this week are concerned only with the casualties on the Palestinian side. We know this because the groups behind the agitations since October 7 have praised the bloody massacre that kicked off the war.
To take one of dozens of examples, just peruse a letter sent to Columbia University’s administration on October 9 from its chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. It said, “Yesterday was an unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza, who tore through the wall that has been suffocating them in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth for the past 16 years.”
That’s certainly one take. But most American voters after October 7 felt nothing but contempt and scorn for the perpetrators of the mass murder of 1,200 people in Israel that day. In this respect, it’s just wrong to say the masked troublemakers screaming about “genocide” in Gaza are anti-war. They are not. They want Hamas to win. … [To read the full article, click here]
