By David Harsanyi
Monday, May 09,
2022
I don’t know much about the new White
House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, but if this embarrassing
2019 essay for Newsweek, urging
Democrats to skip the AIPAC conference, is any indication of her expertise,
she’ll be perfect for the job. Though Jean-Pierre doesn’t openly contend that
Israel shouldn’t exist, her regurgitation of BDS talking points says just as
much. The stilted piece, written when she was with MoveOn, is crammed with
tautological gems like: “You cannot call yourself a progressive while
continuing to associate yourself with an organization like AIPAC that has often
been the antithesis of what it means to be progressive.”
Jean-Pierre claims that the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee fails to uphold “progressive values” by inviting a prime
minister from the only nation in the Middle East where Muslim votes count. The
future press secretary notes that Benjamin Netanyahu had been accused of war
crimes by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, then as now, was led by the
world’s greatest authoritarians.
But there is more:
Unfortunately,
AIPAC’s policy and conference speaker choices aren’t its only problems. Its
severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric has proven just as alarming. The
organization has become known for trafficking in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab
rhetoric while lifting up Islamophobic voices and attitudes.
Jean-Pierre, a bit of a
conspiracy theorist, doesn’t offer a single quote or
hyperlink substantiating the contention that AIPAC spreads anti-Muslim and
anti-Arab, much less racist, rhetoric. She can’t. One of the most milquetoast
organizations in D.C., AIPAC attempts to placate every political faction and
make the rudimentary, apolitical case for the existence of a Jewish state.
Before anti-Jewish progs got their hooks into the Democratic Party, virtually
every major elected official showed up at its events — including Barack Obama,
the most unfriendly president in Israel’s history. The organization is so
sensitive to partisan criticism that it supported a trip to Israel for antisemites Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Why would the administration elevate
someone like Jean-Pierre, who insinuates that mere opposition to Obama’s Iran
deal — “historic in its attempt to create and maintain peace,” says she — is
Islamophobic? Does that go for Chuck Schumer? Democratic House members? Does she know that Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and every major
Israeli party and political leader, Right and Left, also opposed the Iran deal,
which they believe enriches and empowers the terror state and its proxies?
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