In his speech before the DNC on Monday, 8/19, President Biden said of the pro-Hamas protestors, “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” He also once again condemned former President Trump for his comments on the Charlottesville demonstrations in 2017, wherein a right-wing radical drove a car into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators demanding the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, and thereby murdered one of the demonstrators while injuring many others. Biden said, “When the president was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, ‘There were very fine people on both sides.’ My god. That’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant.” But what “point” were the pro-Hamas protestors trying to make in the first place? And what did Trump really say about whom at Charlottesville anyway?
These questions were first raised in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/opinion/biden-sees-a-very-fine-point-on-both-sides-dnc-antisemites-protest-israel-59630d75?mod=commentary_more_article_pos22) by attorney Alan Dershowitz, who quoted some of the “points” being made by the pro-Hamas protestors:
- “We will be marching in our tens of thousands to make our demands clear—that the Democrats must immediately end the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, let all humanitarian aid into Gaza, stop arming Israel, and stop all aid to the racist settler-colonial terrorist state of Israel.”
- Israel is conducting “a genocide executed by the criminal Zionist government with the full diplomatic cover and financial support from the U. S. imperialist government.”
- “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
So, one may wonder, which of these points relates to “innocent people …being killed on both sides?” These remarks may be more one-sided than Joe thought. A more balanced approach might have included mention of the kidnappings, rapes, murders, and abductions with which Hamas launched its war against Israel last October, and that the fact that “a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides” is Hamas’s fault for starting the war in the first place.
And what about those remarks Trump allegedly made about the Charlottesville fiasco in 2017? Biden has always attached special importance to what he thought Trump said. In fact, he used those remarks—or at least his interpretation of those remarks—to justify his decision to run for President in 2020 after President Biden shunted him aside to allow Hillary Clinton to run for President in 2016.
Trump’s remarks about “very fine people on both sides” referred to those who were involved in a dispute over whether a statue of Robert E. Lee should be removed. He also questioned whether this meant that the statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were slave owners, should be removed as well. But he was not attempting to exonerate the anti-Semitic neo-Nazis marching with their tiki torches and chanting “The Jews will not replace us.” To the contrary, as the Snopes fact-checking website pointed out, Trump actually said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” As Dershowitz noted, Trump’s condemnation of “neo-Nazis and the white nationalists” was far more harsh than Biden’s remarks about pro-Hamas demonstrators. So, according to Snopes, the claim that “then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ‘very fine people’” is “FALSE.” (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/
Of course, basic fairness requires that any consideration of Biden’s policy on Israel must acknowledge that despite his remarks about the pro-Hamas demonstrators, he has been resolute in his support for Israel and that the Democratic Party’s platform, to its credit, says “ The U. S. strongly supports Israel in the fight against Hamas.” But by the same token, basic fairness requires that any consideration of Trump’s 2017 remarks about Charlottesville must acknowledge that far from finding “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis and other fomenters of violence and murder, he said, “they should be condemned totally.” Fair is fair, even if we don’t like those to whom we should be fair.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018 and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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