House Speaker Johnson defends Israel when Erin Burnett asks about children dying ‘at Israel’s hands’

Speaker in those early days, yeah, I was in some of the caboose and you could smell the death and the bodies. It was horrific. And yet what’s happened since has been horrific too. And there there’s a student here, a PhD student at Columbia. I wanted to quote him. He is Jewish. He has written a testimonial about what’s going on here right now, his experience on campus, and and he says, I’ll read it to you. The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. We should be focusing on the material reality of war, the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which killed Palestinians by the thousands and the Americans participating. In the violence, do you think that protesting the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, protesting the 10s of thousands of innocent people who have died there is anti-Semitic in and of itself? I I think there’s always a place for debate in the free exchange of ideas, but let’s not equivocate on what’s happening in Hamas, with Hamas and in Gaza. This is a battle, as Netanyahu said, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, between good versus evil, light versus darkness, civilization versus barbarism, this isn’t a close call. We have terrorists who preyed upon and attacked viciously and killed. Many innocent Israelis and the idea that they would be out here in support of that Hamas is using civilians as as Shields for themselves. They put their their operations under hospitals and schools. They they are. They’re using civilians in the theater of war. And so it’s difficult. Why would someone blame Israel for trying to stamp out the very terrorist threats that are right there on the doorstep? We should not be dictating to Israel their military strategy. We should be supporting our ally, which is the only stable democracy. Is there anything Israel could do that would be over the line for you because when when you talk about stamping it out, I mean. Many innocent children have died and are dying at Israel’s hands on the idea. They have, there have been civilians murdered, but that is not the fault of Israel. It’s the fault of the terrorists, the Hamas operators and soldiers, the terrorists who have used these people and put them into harm’s way. Israel, I’m convinced, is doing its very best to prevent civilian casualties. But this is a war and they’re fighting for their very existence and they are not the aggressors. It is the other side. Some of the people here seem not to understand that, and I think that’s a real problem. We can debate the merits of all these things, but what they’re doing here is intimidating Jewish students. That’s the thing that is so problematic.