Hillary Clinton Speaks Up on Israel

Kudos to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for appearing on Tuesday at the conference of the right-of-center newspaper Israel Hayom, owned by Miriam Adelson. Further plaudits are due the former first lady and senator for what she had the guts and common sense to say about the root of support for the Palestinian-Arab cause. Mrs. Clinton blames the rise of social media as enabling the turn away from Israel.The 2016 Democratic nominee for president reflected that “Smart, well-educated, young people from our own country, from around the world, where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok.” She added “that is where they were learning about what happened on October 7, what happened in the days, weeks, and months to follow.” It’s “a serious problem,” she said,“for our young people.”Mrs. Clinton declared that she has tried to “engage in some kind of reasonable discussion” with younger Americans but that it’s “very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.” Then, stunningly, she shared that “it’s not just the usual suspects. It’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand.”Brava. Behind Mrs. Clinton’s diagnosis — she reckons that some videos out of Gaza are “totally made up”— is the position that the facts, meaning reality, are on Israel’s side. That begins with the parroting in Western press of statistics from, say, Gaza’s Ministry of Health. That is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hamas. For an indication of trustworthiness look no farther than the blizzard of corrections that have been wrenched out of the BBC.Mrs. Clinton’s diagnosis of the epistemic warping with respect to Israel has occasioned outrage on X from all the usual suspects who themselves concoct the propaganda that is directed in torrents against the Jewish state. A rhyming point was made last week by a former speechwriter, Sarah Hurwitz, in the Obama White House. She said at a Jewish Federation summit earlier this month that “You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long.”Our intention is not to blame TikTok as it is to endorse the telling of truth in respect of Israel’s war with Hamas. And to welcome a Democrat to the fight. The lies that Israel committed “genocide” or imposed a “famine” on Gaza are not easily retracted. In 2016, Mrs. Clinton’s husband told a heckler that he “killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza.”More broadly, that fact, along with countless others, is edited out of the worldview of, say, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the “young Jewish-Americans” who support him. Mrs. Clinton is correct to confront rather than coddle those who are possessed by obsessive and manufactured antagonism toward Israel. Her voice in support of the Jewish state is a welcome one. Where is the new generation of Democrats who are willing to do the same?

Hillary Clinton Speaks Up on Israel

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