While Kamala Harris’s Husband Is Fighting Antisemitism, Her National Security Adviser Is Fueling It
While Kamala Harris’s Husband Is Fighting Antisemitism, Her National Security Adviser Is Fueling It
Plus: The New York Times covers Bari Weiss; attack in Crown Heights
The hottest fight in the presidential race may not be between Vice President Harris and Donald Trump, but between Harris’s husband and her national security adviser.
The second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, was in Paris Friday. The White House released his remarks as prepared for delivery at an event marking the 42nd anniversary of the August 9, 1982 terrorist attack at the Jo Goldenberg restaurant.
“There is a ferocious surge of antisemitism occurring around the world, including here in France,” Emhoff said. “It is a crisis. We are seeing it on our streets, our college campuses, in our places of worship, and online….when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism, and it must be condemned clearly, unequivocally.”
“The Vice President has spent her career fighting antisemitism and hate in all forms – and will always stand up against antisemitism whenever and wherever it occurs,” Emhoff said.
Just hours later, Harris’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, issued two tweets that read like a rebuttal to Emhoff. The first one accused Israel of “sexual violence.”
“As @VP has said, sexual violence anywhere is entirely unacceptable. Reports of abuse in Israeli prisons are deeply troubling and require swift and credible investigation. Perpetrators of sexual violence everywhere must be held to account,” Gordon’s social media post said.
The second post, which garnered a million views, said, “Deeply concerned about reports of civilian casualties in Gaza following strike by IDF on compound that included school. We know Hamas uses schools to gather and operate out of, but also have been clear: Israel must take measures to minimize civilian harm. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Today’s strike underscores the urgency of a ceasefire and hostage deal, which we continue to work tirelessly to achieve.”
Gordon’s posts were both issued on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath. That timing suggests they weren’t designed to be read by Israeli Jews, the Israeli government, or American Jews. Instead, the messages seem designed for consumption by Israel-haters in the American electorate, the ones who have been disrupting Harris’s campaign events with their protests.
What new developments on the “reports of abuse in Israeli prisons” front rise to the level of warranting a weekend social media offensive by the national security adviser to the vice president? Israel’s military police have reportedly detained some soldiers to investigate events at a detention facility. At least one Israeli doctor, the chairman of surgery at Hadassah Hospital, wrote a letter for the defense saying the prisoner’s injury might have been self-inflicted. Prisoners sometimes store contraband or weapons in body cavities. I watched the surveillance video that the Guardian describes as “what appeared to be Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a a Palestinian prisoner” and it did not appear to show that. I’m not saying all Israeli soldiers are always perfect, but if the vice president is looking for prison abuses to correct, Riker’s Island in New York City is closer at hand. In Harris’s own state of California, where she served as attorney general and then a U.S. senator, sexual abuse by correctional officers was so common at one prison that, according to an Associated Press investigation, the site earned a nickname: “the rape club.”
As for Gordon’s concern about the Israel Defense Forces strike on a “compound that included school,” Ambassador David Saranga, director of the digital diplomacy bureau of Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs, noted, “Israel has published names and photos of at least 19 confirmed Hamas terrorists, targeted in the strike. …Hamas revised number of deaths from Israeli strike from 100 to 40.”
The Israel Defense Forces spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said, “The IDF conducted a precision strike against the terrorists in one specific building of the compound—an area where according to our intelligence, no women and children were present.”
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has been launching ongoing attacks against northern Israel, without a peep of protest from Gordon. The selective demonization of Israel—based on phony or flimsy or nonexistent evidence, or jumping to conclusions before the full facts are in—is the stuff of the anti-Israel campus activists or fringe political protesters. It’s precisely what Emhoff was condemning in his Paris speech. Yet instead of calling it out or forcefully rejecting it, the vice president’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, was himself fueling such false accusations, arguably even spreading them.
In 2015, when Gordon joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a senior fellow, CFR’s then-president, Richard N. Haass, announced the appointment with the quote, “Phil Gordon is one of the premier scholar-practitioners of his generation. More than that, he is equally at home in Europe or the Middle East.” If Harris is to succeed as a president or a presidential candidate, she is going to need to find some foreign policy advisers who are at home in America. Maybe when Emhoff gets back from Paris, he can have a word with his wife.
If Harris is as on-board on the antisemitism issue as Emhoff claims, she’ll instruct Gordon, going forward, to leave the half-baked, ill-considered tweets to the Republican presidential campaign. If she doesn’t, and if the anti-Israel social media campaign from the vice president’s foreign-policy adviser persists, it’ll be clear that Harris is trying to run a big-tent presidential campaign that includes both the Jews and the antisemites. It’ll also be clear that Emhoff is prevaricating when he says, “The Vice President …will always stand up against antisemitism whenever and wherever it occurs.” It’s one thing for Emhoff to say that in Paris. Let him repeat it in Dearborn and in Ann Arbor, and in Phil Gordon’s office.
New York Times on Bari Weiss:
’s allies are all over social media denouncing the extensive New York Times Sunday business section piece on her and as a “hit piece.” I confess I read the Times article and thought it came out, on a net basis, fairly flattering and positive.I’ve been reading Kenneth Minogue’s 1973 book The Concept of a University. It has a short and harsh chapter on journalism that includes the shrewd observation that journalism “tends to oscillate between adulation and debunking.”
The Times piece seemed to me to fall more in the adulation than debunking category. Perhaps I’m just admiring of Weiss’s commercial success—more than 100,000 paying subscribers to the Free Press, six-figure speaking fees for appearances on college campuses, the Times reports, with a bit of careful hedging and attribution (“according to the Free Press,” “the requested rate has pushed six figures, according to four people with knowledge of it”).
The “hit piece” camp seems to think that discussion of money makes Weiss seem overly financially motivated or greedy. I don’t know about that—it’s the Times business section and she’s running a business. I’m glad she’s earning money. I guess if you come at it from a less capitalist point of view than my own, a piece that says someone is making money has a whiff of a hit piece. Some of the people complaining about the Times piece say they have already canceled their Times subscriptions, suggesting they either got a “gift link,” didn’t bother reading the article, or somehow figured out a way past the paywall.
Crown Heights stabbing: Multiple sources—the UJA-Federation of New York, the Anti-Defamation League, City Council Member Crystal Hudson, Yaacov Berhman—report that a Jew was stabbed in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at about 2 a.m. Saturday by a Black male who shouted “free Palestine.” If Trump and JD Vance are serious about competing for the Jewish vote in November—as Trump spoke about last week in his press conference—one of them should arrange to visit the stabbing victim, with cameras in tow, before the second gentleman thinks of it.
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