To the pondering Jew

(JNS) — On his nightly program recently, long-running HBO news pundit Bill Maher, in reference to one of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s dire misassessments of Hamas’s nefarious intent, demanded that she just “shut up” already.

Coming from a lifelong liberal, Maher’s acerbic reprimand should cause pondering Jews to sit up and take note.

Maher’s negative assessment of Harris’s grasp on the true nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is further reinforced by the vice president’s completely out-of-touch cheerleading during the presidential debate on Sept. 10 when she emphatically proclaimed not once, but twice, that “we must have a two-state solution” and that the “violence must stop” with an immediate ceasefire.

But the two-state solution had, even before Oct. 7, lost all diplomatic relevance. After the barbaric atrocities of Oct. 7, it has been irrevocably relegated to the dustbin of bad ideas.

At a moment, when the world clamored for the reimposition of moral clarity, a ceasefire would have awarded Hamas a victory in the face of the grimiest butchery and barbarity since the Holocaust.

The question of why Harris’s judgment has been so consistently upside down can be understood from within the context of a photo taken in April 2023. In the photo, marking the end of Ramadan, Harris stands on the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., smiling proudly with 100 staffers, whom she refers to as the administration’s “Muslim team.” Among those “team” members are:

• Nasrina Bargzie, Harris’s liaison to the Muslim community, who Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said tilts the campaign in an “anti-Israel direction.”

• Mazen Basrawi, director of partnerships and global engagement at the National Security Council, and Muslim-American liaison in the White House Office of Public Engagement. Basrawi appeared in 2010 at a conference hosted by the Islamic Association of North America, where Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a possible unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was honored. ISNA was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and is alleged by federal prosecutors in a nationwide scheme to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas, a designated terrorist entity. 

• Brenda Abdelall, who has accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, is a senior counselor to the Department of Homeland Security.

• Yousra Fazili, chief of staff to the comptroller and chief financial officer of the Pentagon, years ago attended the U.N. Economic and Social Council on behalf of the Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, which is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

• Maher Bitar, a senior official inside the National Security Council who, some suggest, may be appointed as a deputy director of the NSC in a Harris administration as deputy director of the NSC, was a leader of the antisemitic, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Students for Justice in Palestine.  

With 90 percent of the shipping through the Red Sea on hold due to Iranian-supported terror by the Houthis, one would presume that this crushing impact on global trade would motivate the administration to reimpose Iranian sanctions and abandon Obama-era appeasement. Harris, however, intends to follow the Obama-Biden Mideast blueprint as evidenced by her appointment of Ilan Goldenberg as liaison to the Jewish community and Phillip Gordon as her national security adviser.

Gordon has a track record of Iranian appeasement, including documented ties to individuals close to Tehran who helped draw up the disastrous 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. He also opposed the killing of top Iranian terror thug and commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Qassem Soleimani. Goldenberg backed the Iran deal and has been a vocal opponent of Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria.

There are no guarantees that a candidate’s platform before an election will become official policy or that their inner circle will remain so after an election. Concerns about those Harris has surrounded herself with raising red flags regardless of partisan concerns. “Pondering Jews” should do some serious soul-searching about what all this will mean for the future of the Jewish state.