Cracking Kamala Harris' doublespeak Israel code
Kamala Harris' Israel policy sounds reasonable but is carefully worded code for leftist and Islamist ears.
The Democratic Party’s brains trust has been busy turning vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris into a serious candidate with grown-up positions on everything from fracking and immigration to Middle East politics.
She is adopting more centrist positions to become more electable and is running on a platform of continuing President Joe Biden’s Israel policies.
In one sense, that is reassuring. There were fears she would be less supportive of Israel because she is more from her party’s Left than President Joe Biden. She has now said that Israel has a right to defend itself and that, as president, she would keep exporting weapons to Israel to ensure it has the means to do so.
Harris’ comrades in the liberal media are fawning over her stating her support for Israel, saying that she has dispelled fears that she would be less supportive of the Jewish state.
Yet, it has been her own actions and language that created these fears in the first place, such as her snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to US Congress, and her vowing not to “stay silent” about Palestinian suffering in Gaza.
What is less reassuring is that we do not know how committed she is to Israel’s security, especially as she changes policies like an octopus changes colors. Also, Biden’s policies, which she has vowed to continue, are confused, contradictory, and misguided. They are less policy and more a wish list of mutually incompatible ideas, based on flawed premises, which have failed, and will do so again.
Here are some of her quotes.
I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.
The first paragraph sounds reasonable, but recognizing Hamas’ evil and what Israel experienced on October 7 really should be a minimal requirement for anyone with even a rudimentary moral sextant.
It is the second paragraph that bears particular scrutiny. It has clearly been written to make her position appear “balanced” in a sop to her party’s more left-wing members and the anti-Israel kooks who inhabit much of the Democrat voter base.
Thinking of this second paragraph as balanced or nuanced would be a lazy reading. As a media strategist I have written many such dubious statements for people in my time, so I know coded phrasing when I see it.
Harris’ comments are written in a code, a dog whistle for those on the Far Left and their Islamist buddies who know what she is saying.
Let us break the code.
Code: “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”
Decoded meaning: This position is nowhere near as supportive of Israel as it sounds. As we have seen repeatedly, it means Israel can only shoot enemy missiles down to defend itself, but that it cannot fight back, or go on the offensive to do so. Israel can defend itself, but not win.
Code: “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.”
Decoded meaning: What is happening in Gaza is not something that is happening “at the same time”. It is something that is happening in response to Hamas’ October 7 butchery, which she acknowledges in her first paragraph. Her phrasing hints at some kind of equivalency, when there is none.
Code: “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
Decoded meaning: The blood libel that is the Hamas and Palestinian narrative. It ignores that statistically few lives have been lost relative to the combat conditions and other conflicts.
It also ignores that people are fleeing for their because Israel is warning them of pending attacks, so they know when and where to move to safety.
Her reference to them being “hungry” is designed to feed the blood libel and lie that Israeli is deliberately starving Gazans, and ignores the amount of food aid being sent into Gaza and that Hamas has stolen much of it.
Code: “President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.
Decoded meaning: This suggests that ending this war, the Israel-Hamas War, will bring security to Israel and peace to both peoples. An end to this war would not resolve the dispute, so would not bring peace to the 80-year conflict. It is deceitful to say it will.
As for Palestinians "realizing their right to dignity, security, and freedom,” these are matters that she ought to take up with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
Finally, her claims that they have a right to self-determination is banal. They do, but not at Israel’s expense, which is what they want and what Harris has conveniently overlooked.
Most concerning is how attached Harris is to the co-called “pro-Palestinian” narrative, which is nothing but lies so big that even Pinocchio would blush.
A distressing case in point is Hamas’ recent murder of six hostages in Rafah. Harris was a leading cheerleader against Israel in March when Israel was planning its Rafah offensive to destroy the four remaining Hamas brigades and free its hostages.
“We have been clear in multiple conversations [with Israel] and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said at the time. “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.” She warned Israel there would be “consequences”.
She was right. There were consequences - six murdered hostages who may have been freed if Israel had not delayed its attack on Rafah in response to pressure from the likes of Harris and the rest of the intellectually and ethically moribund international community.
Harris was not alone in this first-order disgrace. Others are Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has had a moral bypass operation, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has had a personality bypass procedure, and French President Emmanuel Macron, who appears to have had multiple such bypasses.
These leaders are apologists for terror and complicit in it. Shame on them.
Especially damning for Harris is that one of the murdered hostages was an American. There is nothing like the US government having your back in a crisis and Biden-Harris response was nothing like the US government having their hostage citizen’s back in a crisis.
The US abandoned its own people taken hostage. It is worth meditating on what citizenship means, especially for Israeli-American dual citizens.
Then there is Harris' long-standing support for appeasing the vile Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s primary terror sponsor that the international community, led by the US, has allowed to get to the brink of having nuclear weapons.
Given Iran’s stated aim is to destroy Israel, this appeasement is the most anti-Israel policy of all and must be called out as such.
It began under Appeaser-in-Chief President Barak Obama, who froze like a kangaroo in the headlights in 2012 when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called his bluff and crossed Obama’s imaginary “red line” and used chemical weapons on his own people.
Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, continued this abject weakness, from which US credibility in the region has yet to recover, by allowing billions of dollars in oil revenues to flow to Iran for minor nuclear concessions.
Kamala Harris fully supported Biden in this madness.
Iran is not only now on the cusp of having nuclear weapons, and the money has helped Iran fund and train its proxy armies in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas), Yemen (Houthis) Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinian territories, all of which are waging war on Israel. It is a foreign policy debacle for the ages.
Should Harris pursue this appeasement policy in power by resuming nuclear talks with Iran it would be the greatest foreign policy failure since UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler in Munich and proclaimed, “Peace in our time.”
If that sounds hyperbolic, respectfully, you have not been paying attention.
Why would you believe a single thing she says? Look at her record. You need not look any farther. Past is prologue. She is not a trustworthy person. Kamala is for whatever advances Kamala. And what advances Kamala has been the Left because DEI. She’s not going to confront the Cultural Marxists driving the Democrat agenda. The move to the center is just a transparently obvious election year con job.
She’s also brittle, weak, and not particularly bright. Not a good set of qualities in a leader.
When she was the border tsarina, she refused to come to the border. How bad is the Biden - Harris administration? The Democrat sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona , elected with George Soros money, Paul Penzone, resigned before this upcoming election, because he couldn’t stomach the Administration’s abdication of responsibilities vis a vis the drugs, human trafficking, crime, and overt invasion coming across the border. If Kamala does that to her own country, why would you think she would protect Israel? Israel needs to have a self sufficient arms industrial capacity and rely less, not more on America. Sadly, we’re not to be trusted.
Would’ve been very simple for Biden to say that the blame lies squarely with Hamas and that Netanyahu is doing everything he can. But due to either feeblemindedness or ignorance, he chose, in this horrible, yet morally clear, moment, to call out Netanyahu. Trump is deeply flawed on many levels. But as Jews we do not have the luxury to get hung up on these flaws. At this moment, in this perilous time, Trump’s utter contempt for all things progressive and Islamofascist, is really our only choice. Hold your nose and vote accordingly.