Former President Donald Trump used his closing statement at the first presidential debate of the 2024 general election on CNN on Thursday evening to attack President Joe Biden over the ongoing wave of antisemitic riots.
Earlier in the evening, Biden had brought up the “fine people hoax,” the hoax that Trump referred to neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 as “very fine people.” (Trump said they should be “condemned totally.”)
Trump, however, said that there had been “100 times Charlottesville, 1000 times Charlottesville” under Biden. He reiterated that the Hamas terror attack against Israel on October 7 would never have happened on his own watch.
The country has, indeed, seen an explosion of antisemitic protests and violence since October, not just on college campuses but also in the streets of major cities. On Sunday, dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters blocked entry to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles; it was the second synagogue they had targeted in less than a week.
The Biden Department of Justice has been silent about the antisemitism; its Civil Rights Division has done nothing to investigate the groups and donors behind the protests.
Even Democrats have raised alarms about the administration’s inaction on antisemitism: on Thursday, Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Dan Goldman (D-NY) criticized the White House for omitting the Hamas rapes of Israeli women from its “fact sheet” on sexual violence in conflict zones.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.