President Joe Biden is missed already. As bad as he was, Vice President Kamala Harris is a hundred times worse. One of her first official acts as nominee for president was to make sure not to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, even though she is the President of the Senate and it is more than just customary for her to do so.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “It is outrageous to me and inexcusable that ... Kamala Harris is boycotting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech.”
Would Harris have declined to attend Winston Churchill’s speech to Congress on Dec. 26, 1941?
Israel is America’s only real and reliable ally in the Middle East. It was brutally and savagely attacked on Oct. 7. It has been and continues to be bombarded by missiles from Hezbollah. Twelve children were just killed in their latest bombing. Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles, drones and UAVs on April 13.
Israelis are deeply concerned that their very existence is at stake. Britain felt the same way during World War II. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his address, Biden visited Israel soon after Oct. 7 to lend support because he was aware of the gravity of the situation. It was a war against evil.
Winston Churchill devoted most of his speech to Congress to ultimate victory over the Axis powers. He quipped about his American-born mother, “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own. In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.”
He went on to say, “We both of us have much to learn in the cruel art of war. We have therefore, without doubt, a time of tribulation before us.”
Churchill was warmly received on both sides of the aisle. He understood war and its consequences. No one tiptoed around the evil that the Axis powers had unleashed. No one, including the “isolationists” who opposed U.S. involvement in the war, boycotted the event.
Ironically, Netanyahu has addressed Congress four times while Churchill did so only three times. Although Harris might think that the situations are different, this is not an excuse. Israel is facing a multi-front war and is preventing that war from spreading to U.S. shores.
Harris has already encouraged campus protests against Israel by stating that “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”
Her quick call for a ceasefire as early as March only hardened the hearts of Hamas, prolonging the war. Harris’s moral equivalence on the conflict will only make a hostage deal even more difficult.
As one Israeli official said after Netanyahu and Harris met, “When our enemies see the U.S. and Israel are aligned it increases the chances for a hostage deal and decreases the chances for a regional escalation. When there is such daylight it pushes the deal further away and brings a regional escalation closer.”
Thus, Harris has only made the situation worse.
