(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) In a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the far-left Anti-Defamation League, called out the network’s partisan bias for its sympathetic stance on Hamas terrorists, the Daily Caller reported.
Saturday’s barbaric attack on Israel has led to an unlikely realignment in American politics.
Those on both the Left and Right have had to take inventory of their beliefs while weighing their support for the Jewish state of Israel and its conservative leader, Benjamin Netanyahu in its war against the Islamic forces, backed by Iran, that wish to see Israel’s territory reclaimed by Palestine and its Jewish residents gone.
For left-wing Jewish Americans, the burden of reconciling their political views with their loyalty to their spiritual and cultural identity is particularly challenging.
Greenblatt, for one, admitted that “these have been some of the hardest days of my adult life.”
In particular, he said he was outraged by media coverage that painted a false equivalency—or even sympathized with the plight of the terrorists
“I’ll be honest, I am angry,” he said. “I am angry with a world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas.”
It marked a dramatic departure for the ADL, which in recent years has become overtly political and anti-conservative, but now finds itself allied with those it so often seeks to persecute and silence.
Greenblatt praised MSNBC for its hard left journalism, but also condemned the network for not expressing sufficiently pro-Israel sentiments.
“I must say, I love this show and I love this network but I gotta ask, who is writing the scripts?” he asked host Jonathan Lemire.
“Hamas, the people who did this, they are not fighters, Jonathan,” Greenblatt continued. “They are not militants, and I am looking right at the camera: They are terrorists.”
Greenblatt said the Israelis were fighting for their very existence in a war between civilization and barbarism.
“It is a barbarian who rapes and brutalizes women, who kills children in front of their parents and then, brings them over to Gaza.”
He noted that the actions were not the result of a spontaneous uprising, but had been a stealth attack at least two years in the making as Hamas deceived Israel into thinking that it was not interested in fighting.
“This was a massacre that was pre-planned,” he said.
MSNBC, in his view, needs to “get the story right,” he added.
Greenblatt was responding to a talking point that has passed around recently which expressed skepticism about Israel as a nation state, and particularly America’s unabashed support of the middle eastern nation state.
For instance, Harvard, an elitist leftist institution in its own right, numerous student groups penned a letter blaming the Israelis for instigating the conflict over time.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement said.
“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.”
