‘Warped’: Ex-Israeli ambassador to U.S. rips Kamala’s ‘genocide’ claim as setting ‘very dangerous precedent’

JERUSALEM – Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, said on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris’ apparent siding with a protester who asked her a question at a campaign stop regarding Israel’s alleged “committing genocide” required the White House to make an “immediate and unequivocal denial” of such claims.

A very dangerous precedent. I was disturbed to view the video in which Vice President Kamala Harris appears to confirm the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is the first time that the White House has been linked to a libel which threatens Israel’s legitimacy…

— Michael Oren (@DrMichaelOren) October 20, 2024

The former diplomat, who has taken the Biden-Harris administration to task on numerous occasions recently due to its positions and pronouncements on Israel, said he was “disturbed to view the video in which Vice President Kamala Harris appears to confirm the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

“This is the first time the White House has been linked to a defamation, which threatens the legitimacy and security of the State of Israel. I demand that the U.S. administration issue an immediate and unequivocal denial and make it clear in no uncertain terms that there is no place for such baseless accusations, which harm not only Israel but also the relationship between the two countries,” he added.

The precursor to Oren’s muscular statement was Democratic presidential nominee Harris’ unguarded comment at an event at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Thursday. Harris was harangued by a demonstrator, clearly a member of the jihaderti, bedecked as he was in a flowing keffiyeh, the black and white checkered symbol of virtue (although the choice of cloth is manufactured in China, quite possibly by indentured Uighurs), who effectively accused her of being “invested in genocide.”

“I know what you’re speaking of. I want the ceasefire. I want the war to end. And I respect your right to speak but I am speaking right now,” Harris said.

“But what about the genocide? What about the genocide though?” the protester yelled.

The man was then escorted out of the hall while yelling, “19,000 children are dead, and you won’t call it a genocide.”

In the silence that followed his exit, Harris turned back to the audience.

“Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real and I respect his voice,” Harris said.

This incident marked the first time anyone from the Biden-Harris administration has made such an unguarded public utterance, and is seemingly at odds with the government’s official position.

David M. Friedman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration was even more forthright, labeling Harris’ comments as “disqualifying for any public office, let alone the presidency!”

As I told @nypost , @VP ‘s validation of this ugly genocide charge is ignorant, malign and thoroughly disqualifying for any public office, let alone the presidency! Since Israel became a state, its Palestinian Arab population increased more than ten-fold!https://t.co/1TFZviFQXK

— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) October 20, 2024

“Many, including myself, always suspected that she held this warped, anti-Semitic view of Israel’s self-defense against Hamas barbarism. But the cat is now out of the bag,” he added, in an interview with the New York Post on Sunday.

A Harris campaign official responded to a Jerusalem Post reporter saying the Democratic nominee rejected the claim she supported the premise of the demonstrator’s comments: “That is not the view of the Biden administration or the vice president.”

It is possible to take the rejection of the claim at face value, however, is this merely another instance where Harris is using campaign staffers to walk back a statement, which really does signify what she thinks on a matter, not so dissimilar from her actual opinions on fracking, for example.

The imbroglio comes at an extremely sensitive time for the Harris campaign, which after being propelled in its earliest stages by the corporate media’s enforced projection of “joy” has seemed to come to a juddering halt. Harris has been hamstrung by the fact few people really knew who she was – not least because she was plucked from relative obscurity to become Biden’s running mate in 2019, after she had very publicly flamed out of the nominee race before she’d even managed to reach her home state of California.

Ironically, the more she has had to abandon a rerun of Biden’s 2020 basement campaign – and the more she has had to take to the airwaves – including in supposedly hostile territory such as Fox News – the less people have warmed to her – as many in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party clearly feared. Running a national campaign with such an unpopular and unimpressive candidate on the fly, clearly wasn’t part of any senior Democrat operative’s scheme.