In an interview with Schmuley Boteach this week, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addressed the absurd claim being thrown around that Kennedy is antisemitic because he discussed a differing susceptibility to coronavirus generally for people of several different ethnicities, including ashkenazi.
Welcome to the club, Kennedy. Antisemitism allegations are routinely launched against political commentators, candidates, and office holders, including Donald Trump , who are perceived as threatening the DC gravy train, Indeed, people looking for a politician who is a threat to the expanding power of the US government at the expense of liberty and peace, may look to the presence of such attacks on an individual as an indication that he may be doing some good.
Before that discussion, Kennedy addressed in the interview his views in regard to the nation of Israel, making clear that he is a major Israel booster. Kennedy started off his comments in the interview by stating, “There’s nobody who’s running for president right now in either party who will be a better friend to Israel than me as president, and nobody who will articulate the moral case for Israel with the same erudition, the same persuasive power as me, because I believe it in my heart, it’s core to the values that I was raised with.” Later in his opening comment of the interview, Kennedy declared, “That friendship with Israel and making the moral case for Israel will be a key part of my presidency.”
Kennedy also declared in his opening comment of the interview that he will try as a candidate “to bring the Democratic Party back to its traditional support of Israel and to explain to my children’s generation the historical context and the moral case for Israel.” At least among the top Democratic Congress leaders — and the top Republican Congress leaders as well, though, devotion to the Israel government seems to be running very high already.
Further argued Kennedy in his opening comment, Israel expends great effort at the risk of its own soldiers to “avoid civilian casualties” in dealing with threats from its adversaries and is not an apartheid state. Later in the interview, Kennedy further asserted that a Palestinian has “much more rights in Israel than in any of the neighboring countries” and that “the best place” and “the safest place” in the Middle East for a Palestinian dissident to criticize his government is in Israel.
Piling more praise upon the Israel government, Kennedy stated that “The huge difference between the way Israel conducts itself, the civilized and moral case for Israel, is the way it conducts itself in wartime: always targeting military targets when it’s surrounded by enemies who have pledged themselves and who consistently target civilian targets as civilians — just people who happen to be jewish — as legitimate military targets.”
“Israel has steadfastly preserved itself as this oasis of democracy, of compassion, in the midst of a sea of totalitarianism and tyranny,” asserted Kennedy before the interview proceeded to other matters. Then, in his concluding remarks of the interview, Kennedy returned to discussion of his views regarding Israel, stating that “anybody who sees the history of Israel, who understands what really happened, knows that Israel has done everything that it possibly can to bring peace to that region, to bring peace and justice to the Palestinian people who live in Israel and along its borders, and is an absolute oasis of freedom.”
