OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Barack Obama appeared to equate Hamas’ surprise attack against Israel in October, which was reportedly rife with brutal violence against innocent civilians and children, with the Jewish state’s military response in Gaza, where Hamas rules.
In an interview on Saturday with some of his former staffers for the Pod Save America podcast, Obama said, “All of us are complicit to some degree” with Israel’s subsequent “occupation” of Gaza, Breitbart News reported.
In reality, Israel has not ‘occupied’ Gaza since 2005, when the country withdrew all soldiers and civilians in a “disengagement” that sought to reduce violence in the region. “Hamas responded by launching thousands of rockets at Israel and starting several wars,” Breitbart reported further.
According to the podcast, Obama’s complete remarks were as follows:
If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively, to do something, it will require an admission of complexity. And maintaining, what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas — that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it; and what is also true is that the occupation [sic] and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable. [Applause]
And what is also true is that there is a history of the Jewish people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents, or your great-grandparents, or your uncle, or your aunt tell you stories about the madness of antisemitism. And what is true is that there are people right now who are dying who have nothing to do with what Hamas did. And what is true, right — I mean, we can go on for a while.
And the problem with the social media, and trying to — TikTok activism, and trying to debate this, on that, is you can’t speak the truth. You can pretend to speak the truth. You can speak one side of the truth, and in some cases, you can try to maintain your moral innocence, but that won’t solve the problem. And so if you want to solve the problem, you have to take in the whole truth, and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.
I look at this, and I think back, “What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward” — as hard as I tried, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, well, “Was there something else I could have done?” That’s the conversation we should be having. Not just looking backwards, but looking forward. And that can’t happen if we are confining ourselves to our outrage.
I would rather see you out there talking to people, including people who you disagree with. If you genuinely want to change things, then you’ve got to figure out how to speak to somebody on the other side, and listen to them, and understand what they are talking about, and not dismiss it. Because you can’t save that child without their help. Not in this situation.
“Obama’s approach matches his posture toward the Middle East throughout his presidency. He creates a false moral equivalence between the deliberate murder of 1,400 people in Israel, with extreme brutality, with an ‘occupation’ that does not exist in Gaza and that exists in the West Bank only because the Palestinian Authority refuses to agree to peace with Israel,” Breitbart’s Joel Pollack explained.
“He adopts a post-modern approach that insists there is not one truth, but many truths, which has the effect of minimizing the evil of genocidal violence, as practiced by Hamas, into merely one perspective among many,” he noted further.
Pollack also said Obama essentially did the same thing in 2015 when the so-called “Islamic State” began to rampage through a large swath of the Middle East, posting brutal acts of violence online, including pouring fuel on a Jordanian pilot in a cage and setting him on fire.
