Just days after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump picked Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to be the GOP vice-presidential nominee.
Vance is a strong supporter of Israel, and, like many U.S. Zionists, he attributes the allegiance to his Christianity.
“If we are going to support Israel, as I think that we should, we have to articulate a reason why it’s in our best interest,” said Vance in a speech at the Quincy Institute. “A big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian-majority country in the world, which means that a majority of citizens of this country think that their Savior, and I count myself a Christian, was born and died and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory on the Mediterranean. The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous.”
Vance has criticized U.S. support Israel’s anti-Netanyahu protests. He also claimed that the October 7 Hamas attack was somehow connected to Biden’s Iran policy. “I wish our friends well, but most of all I wish they weren’t fighting against weapons bought with our money,” he tweeted at the time.
Vance is predictably hawkish on Iran. “A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran, but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance said. “The most important part of the Trump doctrine of foreign policy is you don’t commit America’s troops unless you really have to, but when you do, you punch and you punch hard.”
In November Vance joined Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Rick Scott (R-FL) in urging the Biden administration against implementing special immigration protections for Palestinians.
“We cannot discern that any benefit would come from granting TPS or DED to a foreign population that includes a sizable number of terrorist sympathizers,” read the group’s letter to Biden. “And neither can neighboring countries, like Egypt and Jordan, which have already rejected the possibility of taking in new Palestinian refugees. We do, however, already have ample evidence of the dangers that granting such designations to Palestinian migrants would entail. And those dangers would be borne heavily by Jewish Americans …In our humble opinion, we should be finding ways to reduce the number of terrorist sympathizers in America, not increase them.”
In May Vance introduced the Encampments or Endowments Act to block schools from receiving federal assistance unless they shut down the Gaza solidarity encampments at their school.
“We cannot allow people who hate our country to turn campuses into garbage dumps,” said Vance. “My legislation will force colleges to follow the law, protect their students, and shut these encampments down. If they refuse, they’ll pay a hefty price. It’s time to end this national embarrassment.”
Biden Interview
In an interview with Complex this week Joe Biden made a number of notable statements regarding Palestine and Israel.
The President once again repeated his assertion that all Jewish people would be unsafe if Israel didn’t exist. “If there weren’t an Israel, every Jew in the world would be at risk,” said Biden. “And so there’s a need for it to be strong.
“You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and a Zionist is about whether or not Israel is a safe haven for Jews because of their history of how they’ve been persecuted,” he added.
Biden also claimed that he has done more for the Palestinian community than anyone else, despite supporting Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza.
“By the way, I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure that – I got the Egyptians to open the border to let goods through, medicine, and food,” said Biden. “I have been very supportive of the Palestinians, but Hamas, they’re a bunch of thugs.”
A recent report from The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll in Gaza could be more than 186,000. So far.
Par for the course with the American political class. Whether they be R or D they almost all support Israel no matter what horrors it commits
Re: The President once again repeated his assertion that all Jewish people would be unsafe if Israel didn’t exist. “If there weren’t an Israel, every Jew in the world would be at risk,” said Biden. “And so there’s a need for it to be strong.
Maybe Biden should concentrate more on making the Palestinian homeland safe for them? Like all the early Zionists, Ben-Gurion published a book that acknowledged the Palestinians were descended from the ancient Jews. See “Ben-Gurion and the Bible: The Forging of an Historical Narrative?” Anita Shapira, Middle Eastern Studies 33, no. 4 (1997): 645–74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4283903.
If Vance or Biden were actual Christians, then the Jewish thing to do would be to kill them both as Idolaters once there’s a Sanhedrin again. Based on their actual behavior, I doubt they have a lot to worry about on that score. Otherwise they would have done something to help the persecuted brethren of the Kairos Palestine Christian community a long time ago.
In any event, the majority of people descended from Jews living in the world today would still be quite safe and sound, even if all of the ones living in Israel suddenly vanished. I’m much safer in Kansas. No one has ever massacred 1,200 Jewish people here in one day and there was never a Masada.
As any population geneticist could tell them, by the time you go back about 30 generations you’d need a billion unique ancestors to avoid in-breeding. By the time you go all the way back to the days of biblical or mythical Jacob, you’ need more ancestors than have ever lived on planet Earth. That means everyone is descended from Jacob by now, even if they didn’t inherit any DNA from him. The Canaanite DNA study revealed that the average Ashkenazi Jew in Israel today has inherited 41 percent of their DNA from European sources and more than 50 percent from the Canaanites that the Lord promised to drive out of the Promised Land. The statistical odds are that everyone on the planet has one or more ancestors from those groups too. See:
https://theconversation.com/dna-says-youre-related-to-a-viking-a-medieval-german-jew-or-a-1700s-enslaved-african-what-a-genetic-match-really-means-222833
https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/genetics-and-gathering-the-house-of-israel/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/jews-and-arabs-descended-from-canaanites/
“The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous.”
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Advocates for resistance by “any means” undermined the well-being of the Palestinian people.