Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was criticized for hypocrisy over the Israel-Gaza conflict during an interview with German-based DW News, in which anchor Tim Sebastian told her, "You own this" because she and Congress voted to give aid to Israel.
The rebuke occurred when Pelosi blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for civilian casualties in Gaza.
“If you don’t like what Israel is doing, and the president has made it clear that some of what Israel is doing he doesn’t like, and you go on supplying them with hardware to do these things, you own this operation every bit as much as they do, don’t you?” Sebastian asked Pelosi.
She tried to deny it, of course.
In fact, as she so often did while Speaker of the House, Pelosi talked on both sides of her mouth.
“No, we don’t. We don’t,” she responded. “We have always supported Israel as our national security friend largely because it was in our interest to do so. We had shared values; [it’s] the only democracy in the region. The behavior of Netanyahu is, in my view, inexcusable in terms of how it has affected the … collateral damage of children and families and the rest, but nobody can take away the right of any country to defend itself that has been brutally attacked in that way.”
You can't have it both ways, Pelosi (and most Democrats). Which is it?
If you support Israel's right to defend itself against an utterly unprovoked attack that killed 1,200 of its citizens--a number equivalent to almost 47,000 U.S. citizens being killed if you look at it as a percentage of the population--then it is indeed hypocritical to also criticize them for actually fighting back.
No one dared to criticize the U.S. for fighting back after more than 3,000 of our citizens were killed on September 11, 2001. One of the resulting wars (Afghanistan) lasted 20 years, for all the good that did when Biden screwed up the pullout.
Israel has vowed to eradicate Hamas, and unfortunately Hamas terrorists have a bad habit of using civilians as human shields. This is not Israel's fault, and the international community should leave them alone to take care of things.
There is no evidence that Israel is committing atrocities like raping civilians or burning children in ovens as Hamas did to them.
In the absence of any atrocities like this or actual war crimes, the international community including the U.S. needs to leave Israel alone to fight back and do as they have promised.
All the hand-wringing by Democrats like Pelosi and Biden just makes them look hypocritical and frankly ridiculous.
A little bit of the courage of their convictions would go a long way right now.
