Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's CNN Newsroom to debate whether there is an equivalence between Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (MN) blaming Jewish donors for Congress's support of Israel, and past comments made by several Republicans, liberal CNN political commentator Peter Beinart smeared Israel by accusing the Jewish state of practicing "state-sponsored bigotry" against Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and "violating human rights."
At 2:08 p,m., after Rob Astorino of the Donald Trump reelection campaign defended the Republican response to Iowa Congressman Steve King's New York Times interview, host Brooke Baldwin turned to Beinart for his reaction.
The liberal contributing editor for The Atlantic defended Omar's views on Israel even if he objected to her choice of words on the matter. After complaining about her tweet (as he did on Monday), he then gave her cover as he added:
The larger issue here -- and this is what makes her so fundamentally different than Steve King -- is she's trying to talk about opposing a system of state-sponsored bigotry in the West Bank in which Jews and Palestinians who live side by side where Israeli Jews have full rights and Palestinians in the West Bank have virtually no rights. No free movement, no due process, no citizenship, no right to vote for the government that controls their lives.
He continued: "Her tweet was mistaken, but Ilhan Omar is focused on fighting for human rights, could not be more different from Steve King, kind of bigot around across the board."
A bit later, he added:
The reason Republicans are upset at Ilhan Omar and not Donald Trump -- even thought those statements by Donald Trump were worse than Ilhan Omar's and he hasn't apologized for any of them -- is because Ilhan Omar is a critic of Israeli policy which -- and I say this as a committed American Jew, someone who's been to Israel many, many, many times since I was a kid -- Israeli policy is violating human rights in a serious way. That's what Republicans don't want to talk about.
No one put into context that the reason Israel has a presence in the West Bank is because Palestinian terrorist groups have repeatedly attacked Israel over time, and did so even more forcefully after the Israeli military withdrew in the mid-1990s, but then had to return several years later during the Second Intifada revolt by Arabs.
