Vice President Kamala Harris attended the inauguration in Honduras Thursday of socialist President Xiomara Castro, whose husband, Manuel Zelaya, has a history of antisemitic statements and also attempted to rig a referendum in 2009.
Zelaya scapegoated Jews for his removal from power in 2009, claiming that he was targeted by “Israeli mercenaries.” His statements were condemned by the Anti-Defamation League at the time, though Democrats embraced the left-wing leader.
President-elect Xiomara Castro arrives with her husband, former President Manuel Zelaya who was ousted by a military coup, for Castro’s inauguration as the first female president in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Thursday, Nov. 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
As Breitbart News recounted in 2013:
In June 2009, then-President Manuel Zelaya was removed from office by the Honduran military in accord with the Honduran constitution after he attempted to rig a constitutional referendum. Democrats, including then-Senator (now Secretary of State) John Kerry and Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, charged that the radical, antisemitic Zelaya had been removed in a coup, and supported his efforts to return to power.
The Obama administration embraced Zelaya (literally), attempting to intervene and punishing Hondurans by suspending visa services. President Obama supported Zelaya volubly, declaring: “We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not,” and also that “it would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections.”
And yet all of the evidence indicated that Zelaya’s removal had been legal and proper. When the Law Library of Congress issued a finding that Zelaya’s removal had been constitutional, Kerry tried to have that finding reversed. Kerry also tried to block a fact-finding mission to Honduras by then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).
Thursday happens to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as recognized in 2005 by the United Nations.
Harris tweeted about the Holocaust, vowing “to combat antisemitism and hate wherever it [sic] exists.”
She then tweeted, without irony, about her visit to Honduras, failing to mention Zelaya’s history of antisemitism:
Honduras is one of the Central American states from which migrants to the U.S. are coming in droves. Harris has been tasked with dealing with the “root causes” of migration, though critics note she has not achieved much on the issue.
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, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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