Yesterday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held confirmation hearings for David Friedman, President Trump’s nominee for Ambassador to Israel. Friedman received considerable opposition from liberal Jewish organizations for his comments on the “two-state solution” and organizations like J Street. These organizations started a vicious campaign calling on US Senators to reject his confirmation, claiming that he is unfit for the role.
Enter Senator Marco Rubio.
Rubio opened his first round of questions to Friedman by referring to the confirmation process as “unreal” due to the amount of scrutiny Friedman is facing for prior statements. He then directed his attention to J Street.
Let me begin by saying I find this whole process to be unreal. This sort of ordeal you’re being put through to account for all the words, in particular given some of the groups that have been ratcheting all this up. This group J Street, that, for example, a few years ago invited the chief Palestinian negotiator Erekat to address their conference, a person who has justified the murder of Jews as self-defense, as a person as they invited to speak at the conference.
Rubio is absolutely correct. J Street, a Soros-funded anti-Israel group masquerading as the home for “pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” invited Erekat to their 2015 conference. Not long after attending their conference, Erekat called on the Palestinian Authority to support lone-wolf Palestinian-Arab terrorist attacks against Jews, called for rejecting a future Jewish state, and called for cooperating with genocidal terrorist organizations like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Rubio continued to target J Street:
This is a group who has routinely attacked people who hold my views, with content that I find to be a smear and a mischaracterization of our views.
This is also correct. J Street’s Alan Elsner attacked Rubio during his candidacy for the Republican nomination last year, saying that Rubio could not be taken seriously as a potential Commander-in-Chief for wanting to “casually erode and eventually overthrow almost five decades of US bipartisan policy opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.” In the same article, Elsner justified a comparison between Rubio and the BDS movement, claiming that Rubio’s policy positions “leave no room for a political stance of supporting Israel while opposing settlement and occupation.”
J Street’s President Jeremy Ben-Ami once referred to the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Federations, and the Jewish Community Relations Council as a “multi-headed hydra” that needed to be cut down to make room for J Street’s radical, anti-Israel views.
J Street has a long history of anti-Israel polemics. Following the savage murder of two Israeli parents nearly two years ago, J Street wrote a statement insinuating that Jews living in Judea and Samaria were the reason for Palestinian-Arabs murdering them in cold blood. The organization was also an outspoken supporter of the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, which gave the world’s leading sponsor of terror $150 billion dollars as a reward for not continuing their nuclear proliferation for ten years.
“This group J Street, that, for example, a few years ago invited the chief Palestinian negotiator Erekat to address their conference, a person who has justified the murder of Jews as self-defense, as a person as they invited to speak at the conference.”
Marco Rubio
Watch Rubio’s comments here:
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