Bernie Sanders Can’t Stop Lying About Israel
Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to embarrass himself by making uninformed, fact-less anti-Israel statements that seem to parrot radical left, BDS-esque, Palestinian propaganda talking points.
In many cases, Sanders’s objectionable comments work to expose his illiteracy on foreign policy, especially regarding Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
Here are Sanders’s top five most ignorant statements about Israel, in no particular order.
- Israel killed “over 10,000 innocent people” during the 2014 Gaza War.
The politician made this comment during an interview with the New York Daily News last week ahead of the New York primaries scheduled for April 19. “I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza,” Sanders told the paper’s editorial board.
Sanders’ figures are actually even more mendacious that Hamas’s. Israel says 1,408 of 2,203 Palestinians killed in the war were militants. Hamas claimed more than half were civilians.
When discussing civilian casualties, let’s remember that Palestinian militants use civilians as human shields and house their terrorist infrastructures in densely populated civilian areas. Still, Israel goes beyond what many other countries do to protect civilians.
- Israel’s response during the Gazan War wasa “disproportionate.”
“Was Israel’s response disproportionate? I think it was,” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a pre-taped interview that aired Sunday on the network’s “State of the Union” program.
Firstly, let’s not forget why the Gaza War was launched in the first place. Hamas repeatedly violated a truce by firing scores of rockets from Gaza into Israeli civilian population zones. In one day alone, on July 8, Hamas launched 40 rockets into Israel, prompting Israeli retaliation and the start of the conflict.
Which nation on earth would allow a terrorist army to amass a rocket infrastructure in a neighboring territory and use that land – which Israel evacuated in hopes of peace – as a staging ground for constant terrorist rocket attacks?
And by calling Israel’s self-defense “disproportionate,” what exactly is Sanders advocating? That instead of acting to minimize the terrorist threat against its civilians, Israel should respond to every act of Palestinian terrorism with an equivalent act? So if Hamas fires a rocket into a Jewish city, Israel should therefore respond by indiscriminately launching a terror rocket into a Palestinian city with the intent of killing civilians? That the next time a Palestinian stabs an Israeli, the Jewish state should send one of its own into Ramallah to stab a Palestinian civilian?
Sanders statement is preposterous, nonsensical, and leaves no room for Israel to defend itself and degrade terrorist military zones.
In his CNN interview on Sunday, Sanders further exposed his own ignorance when he conceded he was not aware that Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., criticized him last week over his views of the Gaza war as expressed in the Daily News interview. Embarrassingly, Sanders did not even know who Oren was.
- Israel’s leadership resembles the Palestinian leadership.
This gem was made in the speech he would have delivered had he attended last month’s annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The Sanders campaign released the text of the speech.
Sanders, the first Jewish politician to ever win a presidential primary, was also the only presidential candidate not to speak at the recent AIPAC conference.
“The truth is there are good people on both sides who want peace. And the other truth is there are despots and liars on both sides who benefit from continued antagonism,” reads Sanders’s remarks.
Which “despots” exactly exist on the Israeli side? Is he really comparing some members of the democratically-elected, human rights supporting Israeli government to actual despots on the Palestinian side?