Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had harsh words for anti-Israel protesters in his Wednesday address to a joint session of Congress, slamming the activists as “useful idiots” for Iran and other bad actors even as they congregated outside the Capitol.
“Defeating our brutal enemies requires both courage and clarity,” he said. “Clarity begins by knowing the difference between good and evil. Yet, incredibly, many anti-Israel protesters choose to stand with evil. They stand with Hamas. They stand with rapists and murderers. They stand with people who come into the kibbutzim — into the home — with the parents and the children, the two babies in the secret attic, and murder the parents, find the secret latch to the attic, find the babies, and they murder them. These protesters stand with them. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
Netanyahu referenced the claims from many anti-Israel protesters that Hamas terrorism constitutes legitimate resistance while Israel’s retaliatory war is out of bounds.
“They refuse to make the simple distinction between those who target terrorists and those who target civilians — between the democratic state of Israel and the terrorist thugs of Hamas,” he told the chamber.
The prime minister stressed in his speech that anti-Israel protesters are not just opposed to the existence of the Jewish state but are anti-American as well.
“These protesters burn American flags even on the Fourth of July,” Netanyahu said. “And I wish to salute the fraternity brothers at the University of North Carolina who protected the American flag — protected the American flag — against these anti-Israel protesters.”
After a brief round of “U-S-A” chants, Netanyahu took aim at Iran, referencing the recent revelation from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that the Islamic Republic has been funding campus protests in the United States.
“For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now outside this building,” he said. “When the tyrants of Tehran who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting, and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”
To Netanyahu, the “people who run the campuses” have also failed to make clear moral judgments.
“Eighty years after the Holocaust, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and — I’m ashamed to say — my alma mater, MIT, couldn’t bring themselves to condemn the call of the genocide of Jews,” the prime minister recalled. “Remember what they said? They said ‘it depends on the context.’ Well, let me give these befuddled academics a little context: Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. For centuries, the massacre of Jews was always preceded by wild accusations. We were accused of everything from poisoning wells to spreading plagues to using the blood of slaughtered children to bake Passover matzos. These lies led to persecution, mass murder, and ultimately to history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust.”
The same sorts of canards, he said, are now being spread about Israel.
“Just as malicious lies were leveled for centuries at the Jewish people, malicious lies are now being leveled at the Jewish state,” Netanyahu told the audience. “The outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish state, and demonize Jews everywhere. And no wonder we’ve witnessed an appalling rise of antisemitism in America and around the world.”
Some of the more prominent members of the House Education and Workforce Committee — the legislative body investigating colleges and universities alleged to have permitted antisemitic harassment and discrimination on their campuses — applauded Netanyahu’s mentioning of the committee’s work, struck by the notion that Jews in Israel have been watching events in American higher education.
Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) told National Review that she met with Netanyahu immediately after his address and discusses campus antisemitism with the prime minister.
“We both said that this is how it begins, and this is why we have to expose it and stop it, and he talked about how horrible it is on the campuses,” Foxx said. “I think what he reminds us is we have very deep challenges that we’re facing as a nation and a world, and that rooting out antisemitism is so important in our country. Unless we root it out in America, America is not going to be safe for the Jewish people.”
Foxx told NR she was heartened to hear Netanyahu make the case — one that her committee has made over the past nine months — that hatred of Jews and Israel is a way into hatred of America.
“This is not just antisemitism; it’s anti-Americanism,” she told NR. “We’ve been saying that too. He made the point more than once, and we’ve heard it before, that Iranians say Israel is the ‘little Satan’ while we’re the ‘great Satan.’ They want to keep the Mideast in turmoil and they want to destroy Israel. Israel’s their first target; we’re their next target. The prime minister said that in many different ways today.”
Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), who asked the question that prompted the “depends on the context” answers Netanyahu referenced, wrote in a post on X that the question is a moral one, not a political one.
“Thank you @netanyahu for delivering the message to the pro-Hamas antisemites who appease terrorists and facilitate hatred and violence against the Jewish people,” Stefanik wrote. “It does NOT depend on the context.”
While Netanyahu spoke, protesters swarmed landmarks and monuments in Washington. They wrote “Hamas is coming” on a statue outside of Union Station and vandalized the model Liberty Bell. They tore down American flags, set them on fire, and replaced them with Palestinian ones. When a man saved the Stars and Stripes from immolation, the mob yelled at each other to “get him.”