Democrat Julian Epstein on his party's failure with Israel

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Go to lifelock.com slash foxpod and save up to 25% your first year. The fastest three hours in radio. You're with Brian Kilmeade. Morally, I think we cannot say that one war crime deserves another. That is not what international humanitarian law says. Okay, with respect, I was just asking about the women and you turned it back to Israel. I'm asking you about Hamas in fact. I already answered your question, Dana.

I said it's horrific and I think that rape is horrific, sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians. So she got a lot of pushback and she should on that. You gotta be kidding me. Balance?

Really? 100, 790 innocent civilians, many of which are women, brutalized in the worst way imaginable? And we gotta give some balance? And she went on to try to straighten this out. It's a bunch of, it's three paragraphs.

I don't want to give her the time, but I'll just read this portion. She says, my comments about balance was not about rape and not intend to minimize rape and sexual assault. It was about recognizing the tremendous pain and trauma of so many Israelis, Palestinians, and their communities in this terrible war.

I understand that I have critics who disagree with me on policy, but for them to insinuate that I would think, say or act in any way that equivocates on rape is outrageous and completely inconsistent with my record and my life's work. All you seem to care about what's happening in Gaza, and that is solely Hamas's responsibility in my view. They are hiding behind the skirts of the Palestinians.

They are running and hanging in this, in the subways, which they call tunnels, and they're hoping they're not discovered while trying to kill innocent people who are unarmed. Julian Epstein joins us now, served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and staff director to the House Oversight Committee for, and he's a Democrat from 96 to 2001. Julian, these are some of the comments that I've just been astounded that are coming out of the squad and others on the Democratic side. Are you as a Democrat? Well, Brian, first of all, delighted to be with you again. It's been a couple months since we last talked.

I think we last talked on Fox and Friends on the Trump prosecution, so I'm delighted to be with you this morning. Yeah, I mean, the Democratic Party and the left has, I think, and I think the Israel-Hamas war has exposed this. The left has a major anti-Semitism issue, as Britain did with the Labor Party and Jeremy Corbyn.

And it really comes down to two things. I mean, as you just explained, the Jayapal statement is sort of the latest example of many, many examples with Democrats and many on the left saying there's sort of blame on both sides and there's some kind of moral equivalency here. And that is the most morally confused thinking that anybody could possibly have.

And it's shameful on the left. This is not a morally confused situation. This is not an issue in Israel where it's a dispute over land for peace. If it was a land for peace issue, this would have been solved decades ago. The Palestinians have been offered land for peace on at least six different occasions.

They've turned it down. This is a fight against Nazism and fascism. And Hamas is no different from the ideology of Adolf Hitler, is no different from the ideology of ISIS.

It is a fascist ideology that is bent on destroying the people because of their ethnicity. It is that simple. And if people can't see that, then they are morally confused. Yeah, I have not seen any Republican like equivocate on this. Joe Biden on the surface seems in support of it.

And so does some other Democrats. I want you to hear Hillary Clinton, Senator Gillibrand and Sheryl Sandberg. It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas. The world has to decide who to believe. Do we believe the Hamas spokesperson who said that rape is forbidden, therefore it couldn't have possibly happened on October 7th?

Or do we believe the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives? When I saw the list of women's rights organizations who have said nothing, I nearly choked. Where is the solidarity for women in this country and in this world to stand up for our mothers, our sisters and our daughters? I love that. I got to salute Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. You have a good speech.

You waited too long to give it. But Julian, did you know this was percolating underneath, especially with younger Democrats and so many on these elite campuses, these Ivy League campuses? Well, we've seen this. We've seen this developing for a decade now. And it's this insane anti-intellectual ideology of the left that is starting in the universities, the same way the Cultural Revolution in China started at Beijing University in the 1960s. This sort of very left-wing, what I think is sort of neo-Marxist way of understanding the world, either you understand everything through the oppressor versus the oppressed lens. And we certainly saw that in the last three or four years in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

We saw that well before that. And it's sort of this ideology that has developed that if you are sort of the lighter your skin and the more successful your group that you may be associated with, you're more likely you're considered the oppressor. If your skin is darker and you come from a less successful group or you belong to a less successful group or a less prosperous group, then you're considered the oppressor. And it is this bizarre sort of completely anti-intellectual ideology. But it's really manifested itself in two ways, I think, on the left, Brian. And if you look at what the left did with Elon Musk, Elon Musk retweeted an unfortunate tweet about immigration. And the left went and essentially blaming the open borders policy on the Jewish lobby that the Jewish left had sort of lobbied for, you know, permissive immigration policies.

And he was wrong to, I think, tweet that. But the left went absolutely berserk over Elon Musk. Consider that the left has been now almost entirely silent about the explicit anti-Semitism that we have seen from voices on the left. Two chapters of Black Lives Movement tweeted tweets that were sort of celebrating the Hamas attack. The Democratic Socialists of America countless academics. We've seen explicit anti-Semitism coming from voices on the left. The Democratic Party has not condemned. And then as you pointing out, we're seeing this sort of softer anti-Semitism, this sort of, you know, there are both sides to the argument that has manifested itself, not just in this refusal to address the attacks on the women and the brutal attacks and the celebration by Hamas of these attacks on women.

But you've seen this with countless sort of university professors who are... I mean, we saw it yesterday on Capitol Hill. And right now, listen, there was an anti-Semitism resolution. It passed the House yesterday.

You know who voted against it? These Democrats, Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rashida Talib, Ayanna Pressley, AOC, Summer Lee, all part of the so-called squad, Gariva, Jesus Choi Garcia, Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, what an embarrassment she is, Jerry Connolly of Virginia, Jaya Powell, as you probably know, Ilhan Omar, that's no surprise, and Delia Ramirez. I don't know what Thomas Massie is doing in Kentucky as a Republican, but look at what are they thinking? Well, I think what they're going to find out is, as you've noted on your show, both the radio show and on the television broadcasts, there is a massive exodus from the Democratic Party now, from working class blacks, working class Hispanics, and many in the political center. I think sort of the failure of the Democratic Party to explicitly condemn voices like the LA chapter, the Chicago chapter of BLM, the Democratic Socialists of America, the countless voices who have endorsed statements like from River to the Sea, all of these other voices on the left, some of which have been funded, by the way, by Mideast countries.

If you look at sort of a lot of this university activity is being focused in a way that hasn't been traced very carefully, but a few have documented it, a lot of this money is coming from abroad. The failure of the Democratic Party to really deal with that, I think the result you're going to see is you're going to see an exodus of Jews, and all of the resources and the ingenuity and the capacities that they bring in our politics, you're going to see the exodus of Jews from the Democratic Party. I mean, you've just seen too many examples of explicit antisemitism or this call for a balance. Let's balance, you know, there's some moral equivalency here that's going on between what Hamas did and what Israel is doing to respond, which is an idiotic comparison.

It's just factually wrong. The fact that you see both sets of voices, the explicit antisemites and the sort of the and the sort of the balanced crowd, the appeasement wing of the Democratic Party, who thinks they have to appease some group of the far left. You're going to see an exodus of Jews, and I think centrists from the Democratic Party as a result.

And the thing is, this is so real. It's not like, wow, I don't like the tax policy. I think there's, the Republicans are too much into defense. I think they want to cut social security.

Those are the good old days. This is, excuse me, who's an ally? Whose back do we watch? Who can we count on? And there's no better ally than Israel outside the UK or along with. Julian Epstein, thanks so much for your perspective. Brian, it's great to be with you again.