The U.S. House of Representatives said Tuesday it believes Israel is neither a racist nor an apartheid state and that the United States will always be a staunch partner of the country, and it went so far as to reject antisemitism and xenophobia.
A Sunday, but Democratic leaders put out their own statement in support of Israel, and 43 of Jayapal’s Democratic colleagues issued their own separate statement distancing themselves from Jayapal’s original remark.
And in an irony that could only happen in Washington, House Republicans left themselves open to charges of antisemitism with the disclosure that a high-profile witness for a hearing Thursday, presidential candidate and noted anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had made antisemitic remarks at a New York City dinner recently.
Kennedy told other dinner guests in a video posted by the New York Post that he believed COVID-19 had been “ethnically targeted” to affect some populations, such as white people and African Americans, but not others, such as Ashkenazi Jews and people of Chinese descent.
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said Kennedy’s remarks “perpetuated harmful and debunked stereotypes.”
McCarthy said again Monday that he disagreed with “everything he says” but also said Kennedy’s remarks should not affect whether he testifies at the Thursday hearing.
“The hearing that we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think [censoring] somebody is actually the answer here,” he said.
“I think if you’re going to look at censorship in America, your first action to [censor] him probably plays into some of the problems that we have.”
And though the resolution may have passed overwhelmingly, as expected, the fight over the optics isn’t done yet.
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Asked Friday about a group of Democrats who planned to skip Herzog’s speech and whether he believed merely not attending was antisemitic, McCarthy answered simply, “Yes.”
