OPINION:
Do Democrats even know what racism is any more?
They’ve slung the term around so much it seems as if they’ve forgotten its real definition.
Beto O’Rourke, at a rally in Iowa, blasted Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “racist.” This certainly doesn’t bode well for a Democratic Party that just fended off accusations of anti-Semitism for failing to bluntly condemn the anti-Semitic remarks of one of its own (Muslim) congressional members. Now comes O’Rourke. Call this Reason Number Billion Not To Vote For Beto In 2020.
He also said Netanyahu is lousy at his job, doesn’t represent the “true will of the Israeli people” or the “best interests” of the Israeli-American relationship.
Come again, Beto?
“This is somebody who, in a previous election, warned Arabs were coming to the polls. It’s racism,” O’Rourke said.
He was referring to a warning Netanyahu gave to voters in 2015 that “droves of Arabs” were “coming to the polls” — which is not so much racism as it is a political rally cry. It’s akin to Democrats warning supporters they better get out and vote because if they don’t, the scores of Republicans headed to the ballot boxes will win the day.
Whatever. Democrats have tossed out the racism card so often they’ve lost sense of what actually constitutes racism.
O’Rourke continued his rant against Netanyahu this way: “This is somebody who now no longer subscribes to a two-state solution and has vowed to annex the West Bank which will make peace, in the long term, impossible.”
Others, of course, might say that it’s that whole Hamas-type call to eradicate the Jewish people — or, as one senior Hamas member put it in 2018, that “filth of the Jews” — that makes peace impossible. But potatoes, potahtoes.
“[Netanyahu] is someone who has joined far-right parties who are inherently racist in their speech and the way that they want to treat their fellow human beings in that part of the world,” O’Rourke said.
It’s Barack Obama, redux: blind diplomacy, concession at all costs.
And this is all American voters need to know about O’Rourke on foreign policy.
As Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted: “This is today’s Democratic Party: Viciously attacking the duly elected leader of Israel & falsely labeling him a racist for defending the Jewish people. There was a time when support for Israel was rightly bipartisan. But then the Dems began courting the anti-Semitic Left.”
Truly.
Israel, daily, faces attacks from those who don’t think the Jewish people should be allowed to live. Defending Jews from those forces is not racist.
It’s survival. And Netanyahu is its leader. In an O’Rourke world, a Democratic world, apparently, he just doesn’t have that right.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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