US President Joe Biden vowed to fight antisemitism and keep strengthening the US-Israel alliance during a call with Jewish community leaders ahead of the high holidays.
“We’ll continue to confront societal challenges [such as] antisemitism,” Biden said. “It remains all too present today.”
“Since I became an elected official, on the 16th birthday of each of my children I put them on a plane and take them to Europe and the first stop I’ve taken them to was to go into one of the concentration camps, because I wanted them to see how this can happen again,” said Biden.
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“I used to think that hate could be defeated, that it could be wiped out,” he continued. “But I learned a long time ago, it can’t. It only hides. It hides under the rocks and given any oxygen at all it comes out. It’s a minority view but it comes out and it comes out raging. And it’s been given too much oxygen in the last four or five, seven, ten years.”
US President Biden welcomes Israel’s Prime Minister Bennett, in Washington (credit: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST)
He mentioned antisemitic attacks such as the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh. “It just shows that if we walk away from never again it’s going to happen again,” said Biden. “All antisemitic attacks aren’t just a strike against the Jewish community. They’re striking against the soul of our nation and the values which we stand for.”
He also addressed his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, finishing a war that lasted 20 years, and ended with a chaotic ending.
In a reference to the thousands of Afghan personnel who are arriving to the US, the President said: “We now embark on the next phase of this mission which is the cause that the Jewish community so often led; whether it was Soviet Jews coming to America or Ethiopian Jews headed to Israel, we have to integrate these newcomers and help them begin to renew and rebuild their own lives.”
Speaking about the US-Israel relationship, Biden said: “We’re going to maintain those deep bonds that started at the birth of the Jewish state, a bond I had the honor of renewing with Prime Minister Bennett the White House last week.”
“He’s a gentleman,” Biden said about Bennett. “We talked about how he has much more conservative views on matters in the Middle East than I do.”
“We never waver in our support for the future security of the State of Israel,” Biden added.
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