President Joe Biden was heckled Monday during a campaign speech at the Mother Emmanuel American Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, as pro-Palestinian activists interrupted him to demand a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Biden was using the scene of a racially-motivated mass shooting in 2015 to rally supporters against his likely Republican rival, President Donald Trump, whom Biden has already tried to tie to the shooting, though he had no connection to it whatsoever.
But Biden was interrupted by radical anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian hecklers.
“If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine,” a heckler said. She was followed by chants of “Ceasefire now!”
The crowd drowned them out by standing and chanting, “Four more years!”
As the commotion continued, Biden tried to appease the protesters.
“I understand their passion, and I’ve been quietly workin with the Israeli govenrment to get them to reduce, and significantly get out of Gaza, and using all that I can to do that.”
The crowd applauded.
A supporter shouted: “They don’t realize that — you’re a good man!”
A ceasefire would leave Hamas in charge of Gaza and able to deploy its terrorist arsenal against Israeli civilians. It would also permit the terrorist organization to continue holding over 120 Israeli hostages in harsh conditions, against international law.
Biden continued his diatribe against Trump, lamenting the “insurrection” of the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. “He’s a loser,” Biden said of his rival.
He went on to talk about the history of slavery, and the creation of a federal holiday in 2020 to honor Juneteenth, a day on which the liberation from slavery has traditionally been observed.
Biden’s use of the Charleston church to insinuate that his opponent is a racist is an old, familiar tactic employed by Biden in the past, including in 2012, when he told a black audience in Virginia that Mitt Romney wanted to “put y’all back in chains.”
Ironically, Biden — as a Senator — sided with segregationists and voted to restore U.S. citizenship, posthumously, to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate General Robert E Lee.
But Biden is concerned about shoring up black support, amid weak polls generally.
He reminded the crowd that he had rearranged the Democratic Party’s presidential primary to make the South Carolina primary, in which black voters are the majority, the first primary in the calendar instead fourth after Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
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 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. 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.
