National Review Online
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock is trying to
run away from his radical left-wing record in his campaign to persuade Georgia
voters to elect him and hand Democrats unified control of Congress and the
White House. But no one should be fooled.
In a November
9 interview, Warnock dodged questions about whether he would vote for
legislation increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court and vote for
legislation adding two new states (and likely four new Democrats to the U.S.
Senate). That Warnock continues to dodge the question even after the issue of
Court-packing may have cost
Democrats Senate seats on November 3 is telling.
A more troubling sign of Warnock’s radicalism is his
clear record of anti-Israeli rhetoric. Warnock, a Baptist pastor in Atlanta,
issued a joint statement
with other religious leaders in 2019 likening America’s ally Israel to
“apartheid South Africa” and Communist East Germany. “We saw the patterns that
seem to have been borrowed and perfected from other previous oppressive
regimes,” read the statement signed by Warnock and others following a trip to
Israel. “The ever-present physical walls that wall in Palestinians in a
political wall reminiscent of the Berlin Wall. . . . The heavy militarization
of the West Bank, reminiscent of the military occupation of Namibia by
apartheid South Africa.”
Now that he’s running for the U.S. Senate, Warnock has
issued a new statement
asserting he does not believe Israel is an apartheid state, but the new
statement doesn’t offer any explanation for signing his name to a statement
that plainly said Israel borrows practices from “oppressive regimes” such as
apartheid South Africa.
“Without reservation, you can count on me to stand with
the Jewish community and Israel in the U.S. Senate,” Warnock says in his 2020
statement.
The Democratic candidate’s 2020 campaign promise is
impossible to reconcile with his anti-Israeli rhetoric that goes beyond the
2019 letter. “We saw the government of Israel shoot down unarmed Palestinian
sisters and brothers like birds of prey,” Warnock said in a 2018 sermon. “It is
wrong to shoot down God’s children like they don’t matter at all.” Warnock
issued that denunciation of Israel after Hamas led a mass incursion of the
Israeli border, and the Israeli military responded with the justifiable use of
lethal force. But in Warnock’s telling, Israelis are “birds of prey” who
viciously kill innocent Palestinians, who are “brothers and sisters.”
Combine Warnock’s dehumanizing rhetoric that compares
Israelis to animals with his praise of the notoriously anti-Semitic and
anti-American pastor Jeremiah Wright and an even more troubling picture begins
to emerge.
The name Jeremiah Wright might ring a bell: A former
pastor to Barack Obama, Wright was at the center of the biggest controversy of
the 2008 Democratic presidential primary after video of the pastor’s infamous
2003 “God Damn America” sermon surfaced. Obama said he hadn’t heard that
particular sermon and condemned it; weeks later, Obama severed ties with Wright
and Wright’s church. In 2009, Wright complained that “them Jews” wouldn’t let
Obama speak to Wright.
But in 2014, Warnock was still defending Wright and
praising Wright’s “God Damn America” sermon. “You ought to go back and see if
you can find and read, as I have, the entire sermon. It was a very fine
sermon,” Warnock said in a 2014
speech.
Very fine? The sermon
in question was chock-full of anti-American rhetoric and conspiracy
theories.
In the 2003 “God Damn America” sermon that Warnock called
“very fine,” Wright likened America to al-Qaeda: “We cannot see how what we are
doing is the same thing that al-Qaeda is doing under a different color flag —
calling on the name of a different God to sanction and approve our murder and
our mayhem!”
In the sermon that Warnock called “very fine,” Wright
suggested the U.S. government distributed illegal drugs in America’s cities:
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a
three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ Naw, naw, naw.
Not God Bless America. God Damn America!”
In the sermon that Warnock called “very fine,” Wright
claimed that the U.S. government was guilty of “inventing the HIV virus as a
means of genocide against people of color.”
Warnock’s Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler, isn’t in
the best position to criticize conspiracy theories, having welcomed the support
of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly elected Georgia congresswoman notorious
for promoting QAnon lunacy, but Warnock’s conspiracy-tinged radicalism should
be a bridge too far for Georgia voters.
If he’s a moderate and friend of Israel, as he insists,
so is Jeremiah Wright — and words have no meaning.
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