Could this Israel-Hamas war split the Democratic Party?
Hugo Gurdon
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Left-wing Democrats held a Capitol Hill press conference this week to demand a ceasefire in the Israel–Hamas war. The usual suspects from the “Squad,” extremist defenders of Hamas who itch with every fiber of their being — like the terrorists they support — to see Israel wiped off the map, now want peace.
A telling exchange took place shortly before the press conference, not by coincidence, ended when a reporter asked about a double standard that pressed Israel to agree to a ceasefire instead of destroying terrorists who murdered 1,400 Jews on Oct. 7. The congresswomen wouldn’t expect the United States to cease hostilities if it had been similarly attacked.
NO AID FOR EGYPT UNTIL IT TAKES GAZA REFUGEES
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) sidestepped the sharp inquiry by responding blandly, “Vengeance is not a foreign policy doctrine. We are here to save lives — Israelis, Palestinians, Americans.” Goodness, that’s interesting! Suddenly, it seems, all lives matter, an opinion that got people into a lot of trouble if they hinted at it three years ago during the Black Lives Matter riots.
But that 180-degree U-turn is a side issue. The central point, surely, is that no one can possibly believe that the Squaddies are principally interested in saving lives. If they were, they would not support Hamas, which murders and tortures Israelis and murders and tortures its own people. What the left-wing Democrats want, like the other stomach-turning radicals in leafy campuses bellowing their support for genocide, is for Hamas to get away with the worst pogrom against Jews in 75 years.
A ceasefire now would be an unambiguous win for Hamas, for it would demonstrate that they could remain in power to kill again even after perpetrating enormities that sickened all decent people. Calling for a ceasefire now is, as the Babylon Bee joked, as if Emperor Hirohito suggested an end to fighting the day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Absurd and insulting.
There followed, however, an even more telling exchange at the press conference. After Pressley sought vapidly to seek “a question from anyone else” as though she’d answered the one already asked, the same reporter demanded, “Why don’t you want Israelis to go after the terrorists that burned, tortured, and killed their babies and children and still have them hostage?”
That’s difficult to answer, for an honest response would be, “Because I’m on Hamas’s side and I don’t want Israel to win.” So Pressley stared blankly into space. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) jumped in and demanded of the reporter, “How many more killings is enough for you?” Was it 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000? How many would make the reporter happy?”
This too was an evasion. It is Hamas who keeps Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel warns everyone to get out and has fulfilled all its obligations under the rules of war. It’s not reporters or Israel that is happy with mass death; it is Hamas. Its leaders don’t deny it. They boast of it.
Omar was just getting into high gear and, with her tires screeching, skidded into a hit-and-run against one of her colleagues, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), telling the reporter, “Maybe that’s the question you should ask Ritchie.”
Omar can’t stand that a fellow Democrat takes the civilized view, as he did again later on CNN, that “the war was imposed upon Israel by the barbaric terrorism of Hamas” and, having had war thrust upon it, is entitled to prosecute it. He noted that Omar and other militant Squaddies vote against the United States supplying Israel with the defensive anti-missile Iron Dome system.
Omar and her buddies try to increase death and injury when the casualties will be Jews and only start bleating that all lives matter when the killers are being hunted down and are in danger of annihilation by wholly justified defensive and strategic retributive Israeli action.
Torres’s retort, more significantly, may suggest that more reasonable members of the Democratic Party have finally decided that the extremists are intolerable. The Omars and Pressleys, with the pro-genocide Left on campuses, have perhaps finally shown they cannot be accepted by a party that asks civilized people to give it their votes.
It is too early, but nevertheless, one hopes that centrist Democrats have at last been pushed too far by the moral depravity of those to their left on the progressive half of the ideological spectrum. Can Democratic centrists have a “Sister Souljah moment,” repudiating terrorist apologists in their midst, as candidate Bill Clinton did (for electoral purposes) when he denounced a rap singer in 1992 for advocating the killing of white people?
It’s long past time for the Democratic Party to scrape off the radical flakes who have encrusted it and erode its claim on the support of ordinary Americans. If so, then some good will have come from the clarifying horrors perpetrated this month by the barbarian nihilists pursuing evil in the Holy Land.