{Originally posted to FrontPage Mag website}
The Point has discussed Bernie Sanders’ troubling past with Israel, including his call to deny Israel weapons some years before the Yom Kippur War and his call for the US to “pressure Israel”.
Jewish and pro-Israel groups say they have had little to no contact with the Bernie Sanders campaign. But anti-Israel groups are another matter.
On Meet the Press, Bernie Sanders gave the following reply when asked about his plans for Secretary of Defense, “we talked to people like Jim Zogby, talked to the people on J Street, to get a broad perspective of the Middle East.”
J Street is a left-wing anti-Israel group whose campus affiliate J Street U, is headed by Amna Farooqi, a Muslim anti-Israel activist, pushing BDS for Jews living in ’67 Israel.
James Zogby is even worse. Much, much worse than even J Street and Amna Farooqi.
Characterizing Hamas-perpetrated terrorism against Israelis as an understandable part of “a cycle” of violence, Zogby has stressed the importance of trying “to understand why the [Hamas] perpetrators acted as they did or why there are people whose anger and despair bring them to support this or that crime.”
Zogby also has respectfully described the Hezbollah terrorists of southern Lebanon as “the Lebanese armed resistance.”
By contrast, he has referred to Israelis as “Nazis,” and has portrayed Israel’s actions against a PLO insurgency during the 1982 War in Lebanon as “a Holocaust.”
At a 2007 Arab American Institute forum, Zogby was cited by then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama as his “good friend,” whose support it was “an honor to have.”
Zogby was also a featured writer for the Arab Voice at the time that paper was excerpting the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion
And this is who Bernie Sanders goes to for “a broad perspective of the Middle East.” It’s not as bad as Hillary Clinton getting her perspective on Israel from Max Blumenthal, a bigot who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. But it’s not that wide a gap.
When Bernie Sanders rejects working with pro-Israel groups, cheers “aggressive normalization” with Iran and uses Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street and Zogby as his advisers, the evidence of his views is clear.