(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) In an apparent attempt to relate to Palestinians, President Joe Biden compared the plight of Irish Catholics living under British rule to modern Palestine.
“My background and the background of my family is Irish American, and we have a long history of not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people with Great Britain and their attitude to Irish Catholics over the years, for 400 years,” Biden said.
According to Washington Examiner, the president made the analogy while visiting the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem.
“It’s classically Irish, but it also could fit Palestinians,” Biden said. “It says: ’History [teaches us not to] hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime [that] longed-for tidal wave of justice [rises] up, and hope and history rhyme.’”
“‘Hope and history rhyme,’” the president said. “It is my prayer that we’re reaching one of those moments where hope and history rhyme.”
Biden continued, reading Seamus Heaney’s poem The Cure of Troy, and calling the network of hospitals the “backbone” of the Palestinian healthcare system.
Being the big spender he is, Brandon also committed $100 million in U.S. humanitarian aid to the network to “support the health and dignity to the Palestinian people.”
Biden did not specify whether or not that will include sex change surgeries and hormone replacement.
The warm and cozy anecdote comparing Palestinian and Irish Catholic histories came on the heels of Biden insulting Jews earlier this week, when he gaffed on the “honor of the Holocaust” and flubbed the name of Israel’s World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
Shortly after Biden’s colloquial Irish comparison, Palestinian militants bombed southern Israel with two rockets after the president had departed.
Biden lands in Israel and immediately says he is there to “keep alive the honor of the Holocaust.”
Then butchers the name of the Jerusalem Holocaust museum Yad Vashem.
Great start. pic.twitter.com/xS6FFOtf0x
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 13, 2022
Biden has been in the Middle East for several days, first stopping in Israel, then the West Bank, and finally Saudi Arabia.
The president raised the issue of settlements in the territories during a meeting with Israeli leaders; officials announced the conversation was “constructive.”
His meeting in Saudi Arabia was closely watched, as many suspect Biden to be meeting with prominent Saudis to request oil, despite previously saying he would make them “pariahs” on the national stage.
