LOS ANGELES, California — Dr. Cornel West, an Ivy League professor-turned-independent presidential candidate, delivered a speech at a pro-Palestinian rally on Saturday in which he ranted against the “genocidal” existence of the State of Israel.
In a video West posted to his own Twitter/X account, West declared:
Let the word go forth here and now, that we stand with our brothers and sisters and siblings dealing with unbelievable assault and attack, genocidal on the one hand, but 75 years of it, and we still stand tall, they still stand tall, ’cause any time, yes, any time everyday people straighten their backs up they’re going somewhere, because folk can’t ride our back unless it’s bent, and we are standing in solidarity.
This weekend, I stood in Downtown LA with tens of thousands of people, united in a spirit of love and solidarity with our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza. We raise our voices in unison, calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the senseless loss of… pic.twitter.com/H8IeO5gwdQ
— Cornel West (@CornelWest) October 30, 2023
The reference to “75 years” is a reference to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The United Nations had partitioned the British Mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but the Palestinian Arabs, along with surrounding Arab states, decided to try to destroy the Jewish state (Israel) rather than to create a Palestinian Arab state. Israel survived; the claim that its very existence constitutes “genocide” is an inversion of history, and implies that Israel is illegitimate and should be destroyed.
Later, West declared: “Don’t let any of these mainstream folks try to manipulate you and say you hate Jewish brothers and sisters — you hate an Israeli occupation! You hate an Israeli genocidal attack on our precious siblings, Palestinian siblings in Gaza! … And some of us will be faithful unto death! Just like those in Gaza and faithful unto death!”
Israel is attacking Hamas and other terror organizations in Gaza, while encouraging civilians to take refuge in safe zones in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. The call to fight “unto death” echoes the slogans of many of those same terror organizations, which are attempting to stop Palestinians from fleeing and would prefer death to coexistence or surrender.
Not once in the video did West condemn Hamas, or terror against Israeli civilians, though he did call for learning “how to live with Israeli brothers and sisters.” It was not clear what he meant, though one position among pro-Palestinian activist in the West is that Israel should be replaced with a South African-style unitary state in which Israelis and Palestinians live together.
The terror attack of October 7, in which Palestinian Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, and tortured Israelis reinforced the strong Israeli feeling that such a unitary state would amount to the genocide of Israeli Jews. The antisemitism of pro-Palestinian rallies around the world — like the one West addressed — has also convinced Israelis that there is nowhere else in which to take refuge.
As Breitbart News reported, West also marched in the same rally while holding an antisemitic banner depicting “Zionism” as a snake, a common theme in antisemitic imagery, especially in Soviet anti-Israel iconography.
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 new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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