Sanders is leftwing on economic issues, but sees Israel as up against ISIS

posted on: May 1, 2015

Maybe you’re as excited as I am over the entry of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders into the presidential race. A socialist at heart, Sanders is actually going to push issues of income disparity and globalization into the US mainstream discourse, and in the wake of Baltimore will explain to Americans how our national community has been fractured, the middle class shattered, and the poor oppressed.

Sanders is also getting points for opposing the Iraq War, which Hillary Clinton supported, and he supports the Iran deal. But I’ve seen no one apart from Juan Cole, in this excellent summary of Sanders’s Middle East views, point out his yeoman defense of Israel during its assault on Gaza last summer. In July Sanders formed part of the “unanimous consent” to a resolution to support Israel in its attack, a resolution Salon’s David Palumbo-Liu said at the time “does more than confirm U.S. Senate support for Israel. It pushes that statement beyond any rational or ethical or moral framework imaginable.”

In a famous encounter at a town hall meeting in Vermont near the end of the onslaught– video below–, Sanders got so angry at pro-Palestinian constituents who were obviously deeply upset by an assault that had killed 500 Palestinian children that he told them to “shut up.”

Source: mondoweiss.net