VIDEO: Examining Biden's Claim that Without Israel, No Jew in the World is Safe

It's not the First Amendment. It's Israel that's keeping Jews in the US safe. Really. Therefore, we must defend Israel at all costs....including ditching the First Amendment.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Interior Department staffer Lily Greenberg Call, who just resigned in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy, “pointed to comments by Biden, including at a White House Hanukkah event where he said ‘Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe’…”

Late last month, I asked about this repeatedly articulated preposterous notion from Biden. As others have noted, if anything, Israel makes Jews decidedly less safe. Hysterics in Congress aside about alleged massive threats to Jewish students on college campuses, Jews in Israel are almost certainly less safe than Jews anywhere else.

The response from State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, pretending that with my question I was “forgetting to take into account the deeply troubling and horrific history” and his talk about “historical context” exactly obscures the point: Jews in the US were safe well before there was a modern state calling itself “Israel”. Transcript of my exchange with him and a prior piece on this below.

The piece below gets into how rotten this notion is, but there are many layers to it. It's not the First Amendment. It's Israel that's keeping Jews in the US safe. Really. Therefore, we must defend Israel at all costs....including ditching, you guessed it, the First Amendment.

This issue was highlighted to me by Abba Solomon, author of The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel and The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech “The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews” in September of 2023 and I’d repeatedly tried to ask about it at the State Department beginning then, see video. “President Biden greeted Prime Minister Netanyahu in New York with, ‘I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure.’” [See video.]

I was using the quote provided in December by Melissa Weiss of Jewish Insider who quoted Biden “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe” (though, when writing this up, I realized Biden actually said “who was safe”) and commented on by Carnegie Endowment fellow Stephen Wertheim who said: “As a Jew in America, I resent the implication that Jews in America are unsafe and that they must rely upon a foreign government, rather than their own, to make them safe.”

Transcript via State Department — April 25, 2024:

HUSSEINI: Biden has recently said, and he’s said many times in the last year or so, quote, “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe.” Isn’t that both false and antithetical to the First Amendment? Jews, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, whoever, are safe in the United States because of the First Amendment, because of the nature of U.S. society. How can this administration stand behind a remark like that, particularly about a foreign power that itself stands accused of not only genocide but being an apartheid regime? Isn’t that statement – were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe – antithetical to the First Amendment and false?

PATEL: I don’t have – I’m not sure which – these comments from the President you’re referring to, but I have no issue or reason with the way that those – with how – with what the President said. And I think what we are talking about historically since the founding of the state of Israel as a Jewish state is, I’m sure, what the President was referring to. Of course, we have freedoms within our own country under the First Amendment, but I don’t have anything else to offer on that beyond that.

[motioning to another reporter] Goyal.

HUSSEINI: Well, I mean, he’s said this several times. It wasn’t a one-off. He said it when he met Netanyahu at the UN, I think last July or August, and he’s said it since then. I think he said it once he arrived in Israel.

PATEL: It’s —

HUSSEINI: But it says “in the world.” Jews are safe in the United States and have been safe in the United States way before Israel existed; isn’t that correct?

PATEL: That is true, but you’re also – I think your comments are essentially forgetting to take into account the deeply troubling and horrific history that the —

HUSSEINI: Excuse me? Excuse me?

PATEL: I’m talking about this in the context of the historical.

HUSSEINI: My comments are doing what?

PATEL: I’m not – Sam, what I am saying is that you are – you are taking the President’s comments out of context, and when it is clear he is speaking about it in a historical context given the very horrific and troubling and terrible history that there has been of the Holocaust.

HUSSEINI: He said it over and over again.

PATEL: Goyal, go ahead. Go ahead, Goyal.