CNN’s Tapper: ‘Animus Towards Israel’ Keeps ‘A Lot of Progressives’ from Showing ‘Any Sympathy’ for Israelis 

On Tuesday’s “CNN Newsnight,” CNN host Jake Tapper stated that “a lot of progressives have a difficult time expressing any sympathy for anything that Israel or Israelis went through” during the October 7 attack because there is “a lot of animus towards Israel,” “they feel that they are then somehow complicit in whatever Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, is doing in retaliation for the terrorist attack.”

Tapper said, “I think, first of all, a lot of progressives have a difficult time expressing any sympathy for anything that Israel or Israelis went through because it then puts them in a position where they feel that they are then somehow complicit in whatever Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, is doing in retaliation for the terrorist attack. Obviously, that’s not the case. Obviously, there are Israelis who were victims of what happened on October 7 who might be in disagreement with what Netanyahu and the IDF are doing, that doesn’t make them any less victims of October 7. And when Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, really put rape as a weapon of war on the map during the wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo, there really wasn’t a lot of pushback about well, does that mean that you are therefore taking the side of this faction in the war, or that faction of the war? But because there is, unfortunately, a lot of animus towards Israel, this does come up, unfortunately.”

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