Democrats Continue to Mislead Americans about the Israel-Hamas Conflict By Brittany Bernstein & Isaac Schorr
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week we have a rundown of Democrats’ equivocations and lies about Israel, the not-so-curious case of Chris Cuomo, and more media misses.
“Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism”
Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement last week after a flare-up of hostilities caused by rocket attacks from the latter on the former. Ostensibly, Hamas is inspired by the cause of Palestinian statehood broadly and the court-ordered eviction of a small number of Arabs from a neighborhood in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood — a local, still-ongoing legal fight — in this specific instance.
In truth, Hamas is using this narrow dispute as an excuse to target Israeli civilians, an ever-present objective of the terror group. Hamas’s original charter reads, “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”
And yet, many in the Democratic Party appear to be falling hook, line, and sinker for the ramshackle propaganda of a genocidal cult. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example — she who, when asked to expand upon what she meant by the “occupation of Palestine,” backpedaled into admitting that she was “not the expert on geopolitics on this situation” — tweeted that “apartheid states aren’t democracies.” Lucky for her, no one asked for an elucidation this time. Unlucky for her, Rich Lowry took a knife to the non-expert’s implication.
But the falsehoods aren’t limited to young show horses. Senator Bernie Sanders condemned the evictions, saying that “the United States must speak out strongly against the violence by government-allied Israeli extremists.” Senator Elizabeth Warren — once a denizen of Harvard Law School — called the evictions “abhorrent and unacceptable” without addressing the legal issues driving the controversy, falsely lending credence to the idea that the situation in Sheikh Jarrah is driven primarily by divisions over ethnicity, or even politics.
As Erielle Davidson explained for us last week, “there is intellectual laziness, and then there is shameless misinformation.” Check out her piece for a substantive dive into the issue that you won’t find from progressive politicians who see the world’s only Jewish state as a political football, not one of the United States’ allies.
Many in the media too are of course guilty of shamelessly misinforming their readers, viewers, and listeners. Not only have some members of the press perpetuated the lies about Sheikh Jarrah, they’ve suggested that Iron Dome — the missile-defense system preventing Hamas’s rockets from landing in Israeli population centers — has exacerbated the conflict, implied that Israel did not have evidence of Hamas’s presence in the office building rented out by The Associated Press in Gaza (even though it has been known for years that the AP cooperates with the terror group for reasons of convenience), and failed to distinguish between the inadvertent civilian casualties caused by Israel’s response and Hamas’s initial campaign of intentional terror.
Democrats’ confusion about the state of the conflict — and which groups bear moral responsibility for it — is apparently shared by thugs residing in a number of American and European cities.
Across the West, Jews are being sought out and beaten for the crime of being Jewish: In Los Angeles at a sushi bar, in Manhattan’s Diamond District where explosive devices are being lobbed at them, and in London where anti-semitic incidents have increased by 500 percent over the past few weeks.
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