Harris said what about genocide!?!
Vice President Harris was at a campaign event at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Saturday, Oct. 19. While she was addressing a group of students, a young man wearing a keffiyeh shawl loudly stated that Harris was “invested in genocide.”
A video of the incident is here; the following is a transcript I’ve produced of what Harris and the protester then said.
Harris: “I know what you’re speaking of, I want the ceasefire.”
Protester: “But what about the genocide? What about the genocide, though?”
Harris: “I want the war to end and I respect your right to speak, but I am speaking right now.”
The audience cheers. As he is being escorted by security out of the room, the protester continues to speak loudly.
Protester: “What about the genocide? Billions of dollars, 42,000 people dead, 19,000 children are dead, 19,000 children are dead and you won’t call it a genocide.”
After the protester has been escorted out of the room, Harris turns back to the audience and resumes speaking.
Harris: “So, listen, what he’s talking about, it’s, it’s, it’s real, and so that’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real, and I respect his voice.
The following day, after Harris had been criticized by some for apparently endorsing the claim of genocide as “real,” her campaign issued a statement:
“She made a general statement about the need to end the war, and expressed sympathy for the genuine feelings that the issue evokes in many people. However, she didn’t agree with defining the war as a genocide, and she has not expressed such a stance in the past, as this is not her position.”
So, after ruminating for a day over a response, the Harris campaign says that it’s “not her position” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
But is it her position that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza? To put it more forcefully, is it her position that those who claim that Israel is committing genocide are asserting something that is outrageously false?
The Harris campaign does not say; all it says is that it is not Harris’s position that Israel is committing genocide.
Jewish Americans who care deeply about the success and flourishing of Israel should, I respectfully submit, think very carefully about this incident before casting a vote for Harris in the presidential election.
There is a difference—in fact, a very big difference—between saying “Statement X is false” and “Statement X is not my position.” For example, most people would agree that there is a big difference between “It’s false to say that Trump won the 2020 election,” and “It’s not my position that Trump won the 2020 election.”
When Republican candidates for office assert the latter, the legacy media pounce on the difference between the two responses and insist that the first response is the only acceptable one. That is the same kind of difference that the Harris campaign is relying on in its response to the “genocide” controversy.
Harris says it’s not her position that Israel is committing genocide, but, after what must have been very careful consideration of the matter, she doesn’t say that it’s her position that Israel is not committing genocide. What are we to make of this?
It is clear that, having risen through the ranks in the progressive, far-left political structure of California—which has a Democratic governor, two Democratic US Senators, and Democratic super-majorities in both houses of the State legislature—all of Harris’s political instincts propel her to the left. In fact, her instincts are so strong that, even before a relatively small group of students in Milwaukee, she cannot bring herself to condemn the outrageous claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Would any voter reasonably believe that, if she were to be elected president, Harris’s political instinct, nurtured over decades in politics, would suddenly change? This most recent incident in Milwaukee tells us that such a change is extremely unlikely.
Harris thinks the genocide claim is “real,” and, even after careful thought, it’s not a claim that she will explicitly dismiss as false. Is this a person who, in the White House, would be concerned about the interests of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East? That is the question.