The Democrats are nervous about Michigan, and properly so: Kamala Harris likely can’t win if she doesn’t carry Michigan, and there are lots of pro-Hamas Muslims there. So for the Democrats, the state represents a balancing act. Enter Tim Walz, who has been campaigning in Michigan and gave an interview to a local NPR station:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, told a Michigan NPR affiliate on Thursday that anti-Israel protesters in Michigan “are speaking out for all the right reasons.”
What might those reasons be? Walz didn’t elaborate. Presumably he wouldn’t say that a desire to kill all the Jews is a “right reason,” but that is what is going on.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis. It can’t stand the way it is, and we need to find a way that people can live together in this,” Walz said in an interview with WCMU, a public radio station serving central and northern Michigan.
A humanitarian crisis? I wouldn’t put it that way. I would say that the massacres that Gaza perpetrated on October 7 were a humanitarian crisis, and what is happening now in Gaza is the natural result of starting a genocidal war, and losing it. Especially when the losing government cares nothing about its own people, and uses them as human shields.
In his answer, Walz did not mention Hamas. Nor did he refer to the six hostages, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who were murdered over the weekend.
“We can’t allow what’s happened in Gaza to happen,” Walz continued. “The Palestinian people have every right to life and liberty themselves.
Not if they start a war, they don’t.
We need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on to make sure we move towards a two-state solution.”
There isn’t going to be a two-state solution. The U.S. State Department and shameless political hacks like Walz and Kamala Harris are the only ones still playing this tired tune.
Then, Walz clarified where, in his view, the U.S. should exert leverage: on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I think we’re at a critical point right now. We need the Netanyahu government to start moving in that direction,” said Walz. “We’ve said it and continue to say it, getting a cease-fire with the return of the hostages, and then moving towards a sustainable, two-state solution is the only way forward.”
That is the Democratic Party’s, and Kamala Harris’s and Tim Walz’s position: achieve peace in the region by pressuring Israel to stand down, so that Hamas will continue to be viable and to rule Gaza, and Gazans will conclude that they won the war. A more contemptible policy is hard to imagine. It would be contemptible if directed against a neutral party, let alone against one of our principal allies.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s government, rightly or wrongly, has gone along with one cease fire proposal after another. It is the Gazans who are obdurate. So Israel should pursue its defensive war to its logical conclusion–the complete destruction of Hamas and all of Hamas’s fighters, and a reconstruction of the most perverse society on Earth.
