by Jonathan S. Tobin
Whether or not the vice president becomes the Democratic nominee, any attempt to portray her as a friend of the Jews is undermined by her praise for pro-Hamas mobs.
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| U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff
arrive for a State Dinner at the White House for Kenyan President
William Ruto and his wife, Rachel Ruto, the first such by a leader from
an African country since 2008. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images. |
One of the inevitable results of President
Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month and subsequent
refusal to drop out of the 2024 presidential race in November is the
increasing attention being paid to his running mate. Vice President
Kamala Harris has been something of a punch line since she assumed her
current office. But now that most Democratic officeholders and pundits
have realized that the president is unlikely to win re-election, she
has, for a number of compelling reasons, become the most likely
replacement for him should he be prevailed upon to drop out. That means
that even though she has fared poorly during her time in office, many of
the same biased corporate media hacks that spent years covering up the
growing evidence of Biden’s lack of mental acuity are now taking up the
task of convincing the country that the generally accepted opinion of
Harris as someone whose talents have not kept pace with her ambition is
mistaken.
One major front in the battle to
reintroduce Harris to the public relates to her stance on the war waged
by Israel against Hamas in Gaza after the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7.
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, has been the figurehead for the
administration’s toothless “U.S. National Strategy
to Counter Antisemitism.” The vice president reminded the left-wing
base of the party that she hopes to lead—either this year or in the
future—that this is the one issue about which she’s been willing to
signal her disagreement with her boss, dubbed “Genocide Joe” by
pro-Palestinian protesters for his on-again/off-again backing for
Israel. In an interview with the leftist magazine The Nation,
Harris lauded the mobs who have demanded that the terrorists be allowed
to survive, as well as backing their calls for Israel’s destruction and
terrorism against Jews.
She did throw in some weasel words to
distance herself from what the Israel-haters who took over campuses, and
blocked streets and bridges, in addition to demonstrating outside
Jewish businesses and synagogues, have been saying. But much like what
Biden and other Democrats falsely
assert that former President Donald Trump said about neo-Nazis in
Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, Harris seems to think that those chanting
“from the river to the sea” and engaging in open acts of antisemitism
are very fine people.
Sympathy for antisemites
“They are showing exactly what the human
emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” said Harris about protesters
who have, in some cases, been paid by Amnesty International or even Iran.
“There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely
reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have
to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
There’s nothing new about Harris embracing
those who libel Israel. In September 2021 during an appearance at
George Mason University in Virginia, a student given the opportunity to
ask the vice president a question launched into a tirade in which she
claimed Israel’s existence was an act of “ethnic genocide” and condemned
U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system that
prevents its people from being slaughtered by Palestinian terrorist
rockets. In response,
Harris didn’t challenge these antisemitic libels, instead responding
with a lecture about pluralism and the need for activism. “Your voice,
your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed, and
it must be heard,” Harris told the student.
When asked about the three college
presidents who wouldn’t declare that advocacy for the genocide of Jews
was against their schools’ rules, Emhoff said
the trio “lacked moral clarity.” The same might be said of his wife,
who seems to think that a movement that has mainstreamed hatred for Jews
should be judged by its supposed good intentions.
That might be the sort of answer that the
intersectional wing of the Democrats that despises Israel is looking
for. Still, it poses a difficult question for Jewish Democrats, who are
clinging to the dubious notion that she and her Jewish husband would be
allies of a Jewish community facing a post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism,
let alone a friend of Israel.
I have never believed
that Biden would leave the race voluntarily and have pointed out to
those who assume that some shadowy group of Democratic kingmakers could
force him to do so that they are mistaken. Over the course of the last
60 years, American political parties have been hollowed out in the name
of democracy, and there are no bosses or machines that can decide
presidential nominations. Whether referring to congressional leaders,
Hollywood Democrats like George Clooney or the editorial board of The New York Times,
there is no “they” that can make Biden do anything he doesn’t want to
do. Everything we know about his arrogance, contempt for critics and the
single-minded lust for power that defines both him and his wife argue
that Biden will never concede defeat or be persuaded to withdraw. Short
of Divine Providence intervening in the election in some manner (or as
the president told George Stephanopoulos, “the Lord Almighty” personally
telling him to drop out), Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee.
The only plausible alternative
If he were to drop out, anyone who assumes
that Harris could be bypassed for the Democratic nomination is
dreaming. Only she can access the money that has been raised for Biden’s
campaign. It’s just as true that dumping a black woman from the ticket
is something that the Democratic Party can’t contemplate. They are
fixated on identity politics and the woke catechism of diversity, equity
and inclusion (DEI) that can be viewed as mandating Biden’s choice of
Harris in 2020. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that female
African-Americans are the Democrats’ most loyal voters.
Equally important, if Biden is able to
defy the pollsters and the widespread perception of his decline and
defeat former President Donald Trump in November, the odds that he would
be able to serve out a second term are steep, leaving many to assume
that Harris, who is already a heartbeat away from the presidency, would
replace him at some point in the next four years.
That makes it even more imperative that Harris undergo far more scrutiny than she has already received.
To be fair to her, few who have occupied
the office of vice president have thrived in it. As John Adams, the
first vice president put it, it is, “The most insignificant office that
ever the invention of man contrived, or his imagination conceived.”
Unless and until they were elevated to the top job by the death of the
president, virtually every vice president prior to the last half-century
was not just left out of major policy decisions, but ignored. In George
Gershwin’s classic 1931 Broadway musical “Of Thee I Sing,” the vice
president is only able to get into the White House by paying for a tour
like a common tourist. And the office was the butt of the old joke about
there being two brothers: One went to sea, the other became vice
president, and neither was ever heard from again.
That changed in recent decades as vice
presidents like Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, and
especially Dick Cheney, were given serious responsibilities and power.
But not all have measured up to that standard, and the respective staffs
of the president and vice president have often clashed. That was
certainly true when Biden was vice president and reports of the Obama
inner circle mocking him were given even more credence when he was
pushed aside in favor of Hillary Clinton during the lead-up to the 2016
presidential election.
The same pattern repeated itself since January 2021.
A troubled vice presidency
Biden did give Harris the job of dealing
with one of the country’s most important problems—the massive increase
in illegal immigration at America’s southern border. Not wishing to
offend her party’s left-wing base by actually trying to stop what can
only be termed an invasion of several million migrants entering the
country without permission, she did nothing. Indeed, she didn’t even
visit the border for several months after being named the “border czar”
and then only briefly.
Since then, the White House has made it
clear that the president has little confidence in her and so has given
Harris as little to do as possible with Biden’s staff not taking much
care to conceal their contempt. As a result, she is now mainly known for
speeches widely mocked as incomprehensible word salads and her
trademark laugh that might better be described as a cackle. Indeed, one
of the main arguments that underpinned Biden’s determination to run for a
second term and to stay in the race has been the fact that Harris’s
general election prospects are even worse than the president’s. While in
the wake of Biden’s infirmity being exposed at the debate some polls
have shown her doing better than him, the RealClearPolitics average of
all polls has her trailing Trump by a larger margin than that of Biden.
Whether she gets the chance to run this
year or succeeds Biden at some point in the next four years, the one
thing you can say about Harris is that she is clearly interested in
appealing to the Democrats’ anti-Israel left wing. She has been careful
to mix in some pro forma comments about supporting the Jewish state’s
right to exist and defend itself, as well as hosting a White House
showing of a film about the use of rape as a weapon of war against Jews.
Yet she has also cultivated a reputation as this administration’s
resident Israel-basher. Indeed, while speaking at length to The Nation about
her worries over whether Palestinian women have a reliable supply of
feminine hygiene products, she rarely speaks about Israeli hostages and
has gone out of her way to buttress false claims about Palestinian
casualties and a mythical famine in Gaza.
A transitional figure
So, while not an all-out opponent of
Israel in the manner of her friends in the left-wing congressional
“Squad” who traffic in antisemitism, Harris can be seen as a
transitional figure for the Democrats on this issue as they complete
their journey from a pro-Israel party to one that is hostile to it. She
not only lacks the record but the instinct to pretend to be a supporter
of Zionism, as Biden has done. She also makes a greater effort than the
president to show the younger generation of Democrats who have been
indoctrinated in toxic ideas like critical race theory and
intersectionality, which falsely label Israel and the Jews as “white”
oppressors, that she is on their side.
Nor should anyone look to Emhoff as
someone who can be a credible voice on antisemitism or Israel. The first
man to hold the title of “second gentleman” spent his life
demonstrating zero interest in Judaism or Israel until it became
politically important for his wife’s career to do so. He’s
representative of a large segment of people whose ties to Jewish life
are largely cultural and therefore ephemeral. His daughter, Ella, a
fashion model, not only spurns the title of a Jewish influencer but has raised money
for the viciously anti-Israel U.N. Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) that has
ties to Hamas terrorism and has helped perpetuate the century-old war
on the Jewish state. Those who are relying on him to advocate
effectively against antisemitism are fooling themselves.
When placed beside a president whose
physical and mental decline is obvious, Harris—a healthy and vigorous
59-year-old—seems like a credible alternative, as well as a DEI choice
who might hold together the Democratic coalition. However, the prospect
of her elevation to the presidency ought to worry anyone who cares about
Israel and the imperative to roll back the woke tide that is fueling a
surge in antisemitism in the United States and worldwide. Her husband’s
origins and any pandering to the community notwithstanding, if she winds
up leading the Democrats, the case for the party as a home for Jewish
voters will become even weaker than it already is.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
Source: https://www.jns.org/kamala-harris-thinks-campus-antisemites-are-very-fine-people/
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