Last week, Kamala Harris spoke to students at George Mason University, where a “part-Yemeni, part-Iranian” student challenged her with the false claims that Israel commits “genocide” and that money is being taken from providing health care to Americans to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.
These two intertwined smears, that Israel’s self-defense against actual genocide is genocidal, and that the Jewish state is taking money from “public healthcare … affordable housing” and that “all this money ends up going to inflaming Israel,” is a classic anti-Semitic trope.
Harris could have dissented from these claims in even a small way; instead she treated the student’s anti-Semitic rant as if she were the victim of some sort of oppression. She even added a third anti-Semitic trope, one the student haven’t even really introduced.
“This is about the fact that your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth should not be suppressed and it must be heard, right?” Kamala argued. “The point that you are making about policy that relates to Middle East policy, foreign policy, we still have healthy debates in our country about what is the right path, and nobody’s voice should be suppressed on that.”
Except whose voice is being suppressed?
The student complained that despite anti-Israel rallies, funding for Israeli missile defense went ahead. Kamala escalated that into suggestions that anti-Israel voices were being “suppressed.”
This reminds me of the time that Sen. Bernie Sanders was ordered to explain his relationship “with your Jewish community” and responded by declaring his opposition to Israel.
Kamala’s people have played defense by essentially telling everyone to ignore what she said at GMU and pay attention instead to what she said when addressing Jewish groups. Jewish Dems, whose head, Halie Soifer, had worked as Kamala’s national security adviser, responded by dismissing the incident.
“Vice President Kamala Harris recently spoke to a political science class at George Mason University about democracy and voting rights. When a young woman questioned the use of taxpayer money to support Israel, the Vice President told the student that her ‘voice, perspective, experience, truth should not be suppressed.’ This response was consistent with the Vice President’s overall message—that democracy means ensuring all voices are heard,” she said.
All voices? Really? Those of Klansmen, too? If Kamala had been asked a similar leading question by a student involving another race or ethnic group, the response would not have been a sympathetic “your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth should not be suppressed” affirmation.
Kamala’s response demonstrated that while she’s not ready to clearly endorse anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel the way radicals like Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the “Squad” have done, like Cory Booker and other Democrat lefties she wants to at least be able to play for both sides. And Jewish Dems, as usual, won’t hold her accountable, and will defend her affirmation of anti-Semitism by arguing that we should pay attention to when she tells Jews what they want to hear, not when she tells Islamist anti-Semites what they want to hear.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.