In the Bernie Sanders Fight <br>This Scribe Is With ‘Her’ —<br>Debbie Wasserman Schultz

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The New York Sun

In the great Bernie Sanders battle, I’m with her. Not Hillary Clinton, though I’m not a Hillary hater. In the fight that’s ripping the Democratic Party down the middle, the “her” I’m with is Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

That might seem surprising from a right-wing newspaper editor. But, as I’ve written before, I’m sorry to see Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz forced from the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

Mrs. Wasserman Schultz might be light-years to the left of the GOP, but she is far better than the rest of her party on Israel. She’s not perfect, not by any means — but she’s one of the few remaining Democrats with an emotional attachment to Zion.

This was evident in her 2015 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on President Obama’s Iran appeasement. In the course of the exchange, Mrs. Wasserman Schultz announced that she had decided to back the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Mr. Tapper reminded her that there were a lot of constituents of hers, a lot of Jews who were going to say, “You sold out Israel.” It was a stunning moment. “What are you going to say to them?” Mr. Tapper asked.

Mrs. Wasserman Schultz started to say that she was the first Jewish woman to represent Florida in Congress and that she was a Jewish mother. Then, attempting to speak of her “Jewish heart,” the congresswoman began to weep.

It’s hard to think of many television moments quite like it. And what a powerful campaign commercial the Trump campaign could do with that video, highlighting what the Iran deal has done to party loyalists.

It was clear was that Mrs. Wasserman Schultz grasped that she would go down in history on the wrong side of the most fateful vote of her career. It was also clear that she was plainly devastated by her own error.

Who’s going to bring this kind of passion to the Israel debate within the Democratic Party after Debbie Wasserman Schultz is gone? Hillary Clinton herself swung behind the Iran perfidy with cold-blooded calculation, nary a tear for Israel. Mrs. Clinton has even tried essentially to take credit for the deal itself.

The victor in the leaked e-mail drama, Senator Sanders, has made it his business to move the party away from Israel. His nominees to the DNC platform committee included professor Cornel West and pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby — two of the most committed anti-Israel activists in the party.

No wonder aides to Mrs. Wasserman Schultz at the Democratic National Committee were trying to rig the primaries against Sanders. And no wonder Julian Assange of WikiLeaks piped up from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he’s been hiding from the law, to express glee over the ouster of Mrs. Wasserman Schultz.

He did that in an interview with the Marxist Web site Democracy Now. Anchor Amy Goodman asked him whether the Russians were the source of the leak, and Mr. Assange gave a rambling non-denial denial.

The Democrats are now trying to spin the e-mail scandal as a Russian plot to help Donald Trump. No less a figure than Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, went on CNN’s “State of the Union” to attribute it to Russian “state actors.”

President Putin is issuing his own non-denial denial (suggesting the Americans are “paranoid”). Mr. Mook went so far as to suggest that Donald Trump’s campaign had tweaked the GOP platform to make it more “pro-Russian.”

That, though, is going to be a hard row to hoe for an ex-secretary of state who herself tried and failed to “reset” relations with Mr. Putin. And who served in an administration bent on downsizing our military amid a retreat from Europe and the Middle East.

Which gets back to Bernie Sanders’ victory over Mrs. Wasserman Schultz. It looks more and more like Mrs. Wasserman Schultz (and Mrs. Clinton) were right to fight against the socialist’s attempts to take over the party.

But wrong to try to appease them at the platform committee and convention. The net is that this campaign looks destined to be the one in which the Democrats complete their long goodbye to the principles of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy. and Bill Clinton.

The Bernard Sanders, Elizabeth Warren hard-core leftists are, in league with Julian Assange, exacting their price. Which is why I spare a thought for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who wept for Israel.

This column originally appeared in the New York Post.


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