Bernie’s Foreign Sympathies He assails Americans who support Israel and calls Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘racist.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernies-foreign-sympathies-11582763907?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Bernie Sanders wants Americans to believe he’s a garden variety “democratic socialist,” with the emphasis on democratic. But as media scrutiny of the Democratic presidential front-runner increases, we’re learning more about where his political sympathies lie, and they’re revealing about what a Sanders foreign policy would look like.
The latest example came this week when Mr. Sanders rejected an invitation to speak at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee summit in Washington next week. The conference is a campaign staple for candidates of both parties, though there is no obligation to attend.
But Mr. Sanders didn’t merely reply with a polite “sorry I’m busy.” The Senator took to Twitter on Sunday to say that “I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason I will not attend their conference.”
Bigotry? America’s pro-Israel lobby that includes more than 100,000 members nurtures racial hatred?
Apparently Mr. Sanders meant what he said because in the Charleston debate Tuesday night he was asked about the tweet and whether he would move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem. President Trump moved the Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 after many years of bipartisan Congressional support for doing so that included Joe Biden.
“Let me just—the answer is, it’s something that we would take into consideration,” Mr. Sanders replied about the Embassy. Then he loaded up for the kicker: “I am very proud of being Jewish. I actually lived in Israel for some months. But what I happen to believe is that, right now, sadly, tragically, in Israel, through Bibi Netanyahu, you have a reactionary racist who is now running that country.”
Wow. The man who could be the next U.S. President calls the 14-year Prime Minister of America’s closest Middle East ally a racist. It’s true that Mr. Sanders is a profligate user of the “racist” label against people he dislikes, including Mr. Trump. But this was still what our friends at the New York Sun called “a breathtaking moment.” All the more so because none of the other Democratic candidates on stage spoke up to disagree.
Mr. Sanders also promised to protect “the independence and security of Israel,” but it’s clear from these public statements that he sees Israel as the main obstacle to a stable peace with the Palestinians. This ignores decades of Palestinian rejection of extraordinary Israel peace offers, notably midwifed by American Presidents, including Bill Clinton in 2000 and George W. Bush in 2008.
Mr. Sanders condemns Mr. Netanyahu, who was democratically elected, but he says nothing about Hamas’s dictatorial control of Gaza and missile assaults on Israeli civilians. A U.S. President who is this hostile to Israel would have no chance of persuading Mr. Netanyahu, or any Israeli Prime Minister, to make sacrifices in return for supporting a Palestinian state.
These sympathies are part of Mr. Sanders’s long-time worldview, and he has collected advisers of similar mind. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is a Bernie backer known for her anti-Israel broadsides that caused House Democrats to rebuke her.
Matt Duss, a Sanders adviser who could run the National Security Council, has written that “Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination.” Mr. Duss scrapped with the American Jewish Committee, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League as a blogger for an affiliate of the left-wing Center for American Progress.
On Wednesday Bernie adviser David Sirota tweeted that “I love that Politico’s newsletter for military-industrial complex lobbyists this morning warns that out of all the candidates running, @BernieSanders represents an ‘unprecedented threat to the status quo.’” Mr. Duss retweeted with a “Sounds good.”
Mr. Sirota, a likely aide in a Sanders White House, praised Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez upon his death in 2013 for having “racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.” This is a crowd that, like Mr. Sanders, looks for the “bright side of the Castro regime” in Cuba, as Pete Buttigieg put it Tuesday night.
Mr. Sanders is careful these days to say he opposes “authoritarians” of all stripes, left and right. And Michael Bloomberg was unfair to imply he supports Communism. But every now and then the mask of soft democratic socialism slips from Mr. Sanders, and the face of hard leftist international solidarity emerges.
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