Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: I Want to Make the ‘Moral Case for Israel’

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Rabbi Shmuley / Twitter)
Rabbi Shmuley / Twitter
Joel B. Pollak

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Saturday evening that he wanted to use his campaign and his possible presidency to make the “moral case for Israel” to a younger generation of Americans.

Kennedy spoke to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who leads the World Values Network, a Jewish and pro-Israel organization. Earlier this month, he was named the group’s keynote speaker on the “Case for Israel” on July 25.

Speaking to Boteach, Kennedy explained why he supports the Jewish state.

“I believe, in my heart, it is core to the values I was raised with,” noting the pro-Israel views of his father, the late Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-NY), and his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who advocated for Soviet Jewry.

Kennedy’s father, notably, was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, by a crazed Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who targeted Kennedy on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War over his public support for Israel. Kennedy had been on track to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on an anti-war platform.

Kennedy expressed his concern for growing antisemitism within the Democratic Party and a younger generation of Americans. He also praised the “unprecedented efforts that Israel makes to avoid civilian casualties when its adversaries actually target civilians.”

He explained further:

What happened in the Jenin camp last week was truly extraordinary where Israel, once again, put the lives of IDF forces at risk, to go into dangerous areas, into bomb factories, to make sure, instead of doing what the Russians did, what the U.S. would do in the same circumstance, which is to drop explosives so as not to put troops as risk. The IDF does something no army in the world does, which is to go into those areas and put Israeli soldiers at risk in order to avoid civilian casualties.

Kennedy added that he wanted to use his campaign and potential presidency to “bring the Democratic Party back to its traditional support of Israel, and to explain to my children’s generation the historical context and the moral case for Israel.”

Kennedy said that some Democrats, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), have crossed the boundary into antisemitism by “using a different standard” to judge Israel than they would use for any other country.

Omar recently announced that she will boycott a speech by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to a joint special session of Congress on Wednesday, July 19. Herzog, a former left-wing politician, was elected to the ceremonial post in 2021.

Others, such as Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), seek to appease extreme anti-Israel activists by claiming — as she did recently at a left-wing blogger conference — that Israel is a “racist state.”

Kennedy spoke to Boteach hours after the New York Post reported, inaccurately, that Kennedy had claimed that the coronavirus had been engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people.

Kennedy clarified that he was addressing the possibility that governments could engineer bioweapons to target specific specific groups, and he cited a study showing that COVID-19 had affected different groups differently as evidence that it could be done.

Kennedy never said that the virus had been engineered to spare Jews, though the false claim lit up the media. Notably, the New York Post reporter who was present at the dinner did not ask a follow-up or walk out in protest.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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