During an interview on the Pod Save America podcast with his former staffers, former President Barack Obama seemed to draw a parallel between Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel in October, which reportedly involved brutal violence against innocent civilians and children, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, where Hamas is in control.
According to Breitbart News, Obama stated that “All of us are complicit to some degree” in Israel’s subsequent “occupation” of Gaza. However, it is important to note that Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005. In fact, the country withdrew all soldiers and civilians in a “disengagement” effort aimed at reducing violence in the region. Breitbart further reported that Hamas responded to this disengagement by launching thousands of rockets at Israel and initiating several wars.
Obama’s complete remarks:
“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 further asserted that in 2015, Obama essentially replicated this action when the “Islamic State” initiated a devastating campaign across a significant portion of the Middle East. During this period, the extremist group shamelessly showcased their heinous acts of violence on the internet, such as the horrifying incident where they doused a Jordanian pilot in fuel within a confined cage and mercilessly set him ablaze.
