Bernie Sanders Heckled On Israel, Tells Hecklers to 'Shut Up!'

[circlethesquare]

The David Pakman Show

[elleng]

1. 'Shut up and let me answer the question,'

NOT a crispie cream 'shut up.'

[marym625]

2. I agree with Pakman and Sanders on this

Which is why I refuse to get into this discussion

K&R

[liberal N proud]

3. Yeah that's a great way to handle it

I defer to Obama's method, I have seen it several times both when he was running for office and after he was elected. I was at events where he was speaking and some one from the crowd heckled him, he paused for a moment and then asked them to speak their mind.

One was some photographer (he had a press pass) started heckling before he even spoke demanding he say the Pledge of Allegiance, then candidate Obama, acknowledged him and asked him to lead the group.

Another was after he was elected and someone started in on him and everyone in the crowd started to boo, he stopped them and asked the man what he wanted to say.

Now that's how you handle it.

[Quixote1818]

4. I am a big Sanders supporter but I have to agree with you

That is one of Obama's great skills. This was more in the direction of Chris Christy than Obama. Hopefully Sanders will get some advice and learn from this and not handle things like this again. That being said I think his position on Israel is a pretty fair one.

[iandhr]

8. POTUS is from Hawaii...

… Berine is from Brooklyn.

[BeyondGeography]

19. Another not-ready-for-primetime moment from Bernie

He lost his cool and he gave the impression that he doesn't have that much cool to begin with.

Obama plays rope-a-dope with these people, and the contrast invariably exposes them as rude and unreasonable, upon which the crowd turns on them. They do the shouting instead of Obama.

That's how you stay above the fray and look like a leader. People really do like to see that in a President. They don't want him/her to be just another person shouting at the bar.

.

[AzDar]

5. Well-done, Senator... No Quarter to disruptors and Fox-ops, or they'll soon proliferate.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

6. Right Wingers keep claiming the choice is either support EVERYTHING Israel does,...

....or you believe the Jews should be wiped out.

[iandhr]

9. Oh so Berine is a right winger now?

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. No....

Listen to the exchange again.

He mentions things that Hamas has done and says, "Okay." Then before he gets to talk about the Israeli side of it he's got assholes screaming the classic, "Israel has a right to exist!" crap designed to shut down the discussion.

[iandhr]

13. I did...

Other people are heckling him for supporting Israel as well.

Hope you listened to what the guy said about anti-semitism and to what Berine said about Hamas tunnels as well.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. These people were there to shut down discussion....

Reminds me of this:

[stillwaiting]

12. Agreed. They do tend to not see LOTS of scenarios and opportunities that life can present.

Small and agenda-driven minds.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

14. Remember the 90s?

Back when all a conservative had to do was to accuse someone of being a liberal and then do this:

[Plucketeer]

7. Maybe Bernies white mane

could be mistaken for a halo, but it's not. Alas, he's relegated to mere mortal like the bulk of us are. I wish I'd been in that audience. I've had yelled SHUT UP! on Bernie's behalf. Then I'd have asked the inconsiderate rube just WHEN he would be announcing HIS candidacy.

[BrotherIvan]

10. Yet Bernie was the first to announce he wouldn't be attending the Netenyahu speech

So that happened.

[Half-Century Man]

16. I have expressed this before.

The Anti-Israel sentiments the American Left have is a reaction to the American Right's publicly expressed stance and close ties to the current Israeli government.
Some portion of the anger and frustration at the republicans is being expressed in a proxy condemnation of Israel.

[Voice for Peace]

17. I don't agree. The anti-Israel sentiments are directly related to the Israeli oppression

and targeting of Palestinians. Probably one of the reasons
the Republicans are so religious about Israel, too.

[JDPriestly]

18. I disagree. As Bernie would have pointed out had the hecklers allowed him to speak,

the anti-Israel sentiments are often motivated by the desire to completely destroy the right of Jewish people to have some bit of land to call their own on this earth after many centuries of persecution. And that desire to deprive the Jewish people of any right to some tiny spot on the earth to call theirs, culturally theirs, is based on anti-semitic or anti-Jewish feelings.

Hamas does throw rockets. Certain segments of the Palestinian population does deny the rights of Jewish people to a homeland. And some Israelis in response want to take more and more land from the Palestinians.

The violence and hate has to end on both sides. Some on the left are profoundly anti-Jewish. And some on the right are profoundly anti-Palestinian. And all of those who are mired in that hate, whether Jewish or Palestinian are hurting the people who will suffer and in some cases die because of the ongoing violence and war in that area.

As for Bernie's yelling at the hecklers, he needs to watch how Obama handles this sort of thing. He needs to learn to be cooler than he was in that video. I think he can do that.

I saw Hillary dealing with the Code Pink ladies right before her Iraq vote. It is really pretty bad. It is a woman's version of what Bernie did. Women don't usually scream "Shut up," they walk away in an angry huff, and that is what Hillary did.

So both Hillary and Bernie have something to learn in this area. But Hillary's angry exit was due to her intention to vote for war. Bernie's shouting is due to his desire to explain his sympathy on the one hand and condemnation on the other for both sides that are perpetuating the war in Israe/Palestine. I respect Bernie's intention which is essentially to foster peace and criticize the aggressors on both sides of the dispute. I cannot respect Hillary's anger at the Code Pink women because Hillary was taking the side of a war that should not have happened. And her refusal to really listen to the Code Pink women not only showed a bad temper but also showed bad judgment.

[Voice for Peace]

22. I can only speak for myself. Always a mistake when I generalize.

d'oh!
My personal anti Israel feelings are as stated above. It has
nothing to do with dislike of Jews. And I'd also love to have
a little land of my own.

I didn't see Bernie's response but what you are describing
sounds about right.

Obama seems to understand that if you let somebody say
their piece, and you hear them, they are more likely to shut
up and let you say yours.

[JDPriestly]

23. Once you have been persecuted and excluded and killed for centuries because of your religion, I

will support your claim of a country for yourself and others of your religion. Let me know when that happens.

[Voice for Peace]

24. don't need a country, just a little land.

a few chickens.. like that. I am not making light of Jewish
history. But wouldn't it be nice to give others their own
country, too, along with all the money and strength they need
to protect themselves a bazillion times over. Give a little
land, a small country each, to all the ones who have been
persecuted, stolen or driven from their lands, and murdered en
masse by the civilized thieves, the self righteous ones.

And it doesn't matter in this context, since I'm not actually
demanding a country for myself: but I am of a subset of
humans who've been persecuted excluded and killed throughout
history. Just not for religion or ethnicity.

It is not antisemitism, but I do not understand what makes
the persecution of Jews so much more important than that of
so many other people? How did that come about?

[JDPriestly]

25. Maybe the Holocaust had something to do with it.

Then there were the pogroms. The persecution of Jewish people in the Inquisition. Hundreds and hundreds of years of living in fear for their lives. The last anti-Jewish shrine in Austria was not exposed as a fraud until the late 1970s. I believe that Poland maintained an anti-Jewish shrine even longer than that. Just hundreds and hundreds of years of fear and horrible persecution, I suppose.

Wikipedia:

In the Middle Ages Antisemitism in Europe was religious. Though not part of Roman Catholic dogma, many Christians, including members of the clergy, have held the Jewish people collectively responsible for killing Jesus, a practice originated by Melito of Sardis. As stated in the Boston College Guide to Passion Plays, "Over the course of time, Christians began to accept … that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for killing Jesus. According to this interpretation, both the Jews present at Jesus Christ's death and the Jewish people collectively and for all time, have committed the sin of deicide, or "god-killing". For 1900 years of Christian-Jewish history, the charge of deicide has led to hatred, violence against and murder of Jews in Europe and America."[3]

During the High Middle Ages in Europe there was full-scale persecution in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. An underlying source of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed, a prime example being the Rhineland massacres. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.[4]

As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating more than a half of the population, Jews were taken as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed by violence in the Black Death persecutions. Although Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by the July 6, 1348 papal bull and another 1348 bull, several months later, 900 Jews were burnt alive in Strasbourg, where the plague hadn't yet affected the city.[5]

In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. Until the 1840s, they were required to regularly attend sermons urging their conversion to Christianity. Only Jews were taxed to support state boarding schools for Jewish converts to Christianity. It was illegal to convert from Christianity to Judaism. Sometimes Jews were baptized involuntarily, and, even when such baptisms were illegal, forced to practice the Christian religion. In many such cases the state separated them from their families, of which the Edgardo Mortara account is one of the most widely publicized instances of acrimony between Catholics and Jews in the Papal States in the second half of the 19th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews

Then of course, in the 20th century, there was the Holocaust. But the persecution had been occurring long before that.

[Voice for Peace]

26. I don't know enough to compare persecutions and holocausts

but find it hard to believe that the persecution of Jews
was significantly more terrible than that of other people
who've been persecuted and exterminated through
generations, across lands, through no fault of their own.

I was just reading about the Irish, for example.
More than a million were deliberately starved to death, according to this historian.

Charles Trevelyan, the key figure in the British government, had foreshadowed the deadly policy in a letter to the “Morning Post”, after a trip to Ireland, where he heartily agreed with the sentiment that there were at least a million or two people too many in the benighted land and that the eight million could not possibly survive there.

“Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.” Shortly after, he was in charge of a policy that brought that situation about.... “The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/proving-the-irish-famine-was-genocide-by-the-british-tim-pat-coogan-moves-famine-history-unto-a-new-plane-181984471-238161151.html

[JDPriestly]

28. True. The Irish were also perseccuted. So were the African slaves.

But nobody was persecuted for as long and as persistently and unrelenting as the Jewish people. It's incredible. They were persecuted on all sides.

This was even true of North Africa in WWII.

One of Mohammed's first moves was to eject the Jewish people from Medina.

It is a constant throughout history. Unbelievable but true.

I know it is hard to imagine. But the persecution of the Jews has been unbelievably cruel and harsh. It is worse than anything that I know of.

[swilton]

29. If it's worse than anything you know of

you should check out the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

[JDPriestly]

32. The Palestinians have received an enormous amount of

aid and help from many countries. Unfortunately, their leaders in many cases have enriched themselves at the expense of the ordinary Palestinians.

Also, the Palestinian leadership has not been realistic about the situation of their people. They could be so much better off if they worked with their situation and tried to get a better deal rather than completely resisting every effort for peace. The Israelis are now on the war wagon almost as much as the Palestinians, but that was not always the case. There were some years prior to the Second Intifada when the Israelis were ready to move toward peace. The Palestinians did not keep their extremists in line. It's a real shame.

I remember all this history because my father (and my mother) were more pro-Palestinian as are some other members of my family. I watched this situation and, honestly, the Palestinians are completely unrealistic about how the world works. There are so many things they could do to show good faith toward working toward peace and they mess up every time.

I favor a two state solution that moves toward one state or two states but with religious tolerance on all sides. That is the key -- religious tolerance -- but neither side has really committed to it. Real religious tolerance is not very common anywhere in the Middle East.

Eventually, the two sides must join together to trade and solve the problems they share because of their geographic proximity.

A lot of DUers blame Israel for the problems, but they do not think of the many, many Jewish people who have been forced to leave their homes in various countries in the Middle East, the immigrants from Russia and the desperation of the Allies after WWII facing so many, many refugees from Eastern Europe as well as the hungry, exhausted and frightened Jews, many of whom were orphaned or had been in concentration camps, who had witnessed so much horror and could not stay in Europe because it was truly too dangerous.

We in America accept so many refugees and so many people from across the world.

I remember the period after WWII. I was born in 1943. I remember all the refugees. So many, many refugees. It took time before all could be absorbed or even brought to the US.

The Jewish refugees knew where they wanted to go. It is not at all surprising when you think of the logistics of finding places for so many people to live and work in such urgent circumstances that the Allies who had found the Palestinians to be uncooperative in many cases (one of the major religious leaders from Gaza went to Berlin to be with Hitler during part of WWII) perhaps because they did not like the British rule (I don't know) acquiesced to the Jewish request to go to Israel.

It's complex, but the Palestinians have not handled the situation very well. I sympathize with their needs, but they have chosen leaders who do not serve them well. Netanyahu is also a leader who in my opinion does not serve Israelis well. But I can understand how frightened the Israelis are and I think their election of Netanyahu is driven by fear.

[Voice for Peace]

30. worse than the Roma?

that's got to be an awfully long-term persecution.

[JDPriestly]

31. The Roma are also a terribly persecuted group, and for

some of the same reasons that the Jewish people have been so persecuted.

[swilton]

20. Packman

Last edited Wed May 6, 2015, 01:27 PM - Edit history (1)

as a journalist should investigate what exactly these rockets consist of. According to Norm Finkelstein they're glorified projectiles which hardly compare to the US high-tech weaponry supplied to Israel.

The casualties from the last incursion into Gaza support this analysis - nearly 2,000 Palestinians (of which 354 were children under 12) to 73 Israelis, all but 6 of whom were soldiers.

The presentation on the May 6 show of Democracy Now says it all.

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2015/5/6

Say or criticize what you will about Israel behavior, until the myth of 'Israel has a right to defend itself' is exposed as the fraud that it is, every other criticism is meaningless.

[freshwest]

21. He's paid attention to foreign affairs which is essential for a presidential candidate.

All facts are needed to resolve issues. Media hype never gives the facts, but is biased to bring about a planned reaction in the minds of those who take it in.

So let's give as much clear data, often expressing in opposing views, without being too heated. We are not learning what's going through media editorializing.

We need 'neutrality' in these discussions to determine what is right and wrong. We can turn off TV long enough for that, I hope.

[djean111]

27. At least the heckler was not arrested and beaten for a silent protest, like at a Clinton speech.

Ray McGovern. So there's that.