Vice President Mike Pence lashed Democratic opponents and touted President Trump’s record during an annual summit of evangelical supporters of Israel in an address that saw the policy and lobbying conference double as a campaign rally.
“Anyone who aspires to the highest office in the land should not be afraid to stand with Israel,” Pence said Monday at the Christians United for Israel Washington Summit.
That rebuke of the five Senate Democratic presidential hopefuls who voted against legislation that denounced the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel was among the vice president’s most explicit references to the 2020 election cycle. The former lawmaker from Indiana, himself a prominent evangelical, targeted Democratic opponents throughout the speech.
“We must never allow the memory of those lost in the Holocaust to be cheapened as a cliché to advance some left-wing political narrative,” Pence said. “Last month, a leading Democrat in Congress actually compared our U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facilities to concentration camps. Her allies in Congress, the Left, and in the media shamefully came to her defense.”
He was talking about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who accused the Trump administration of establishing “concentration camp systems” on the southern border.
“To compare the humane work of the dedicated men and women of Customs and Border Protection with the horrors of the Holocaust is an outrage,” Pence said.
Ocasio-Cortez has become a favorite target of Republicans since her arrival in Congress earlier this year. Trump gave a pointed repudiation of socialism during his State of the Union address in February, and Pence’s comments Monday dovetailed with the broader effort to pressure moderate Democrats into a choice between clashing with their liberal voting base or with centrists who might decide the general election.
“And make no mistake about it: This slander of law enforcement was an insult to the six million killed in the Holocaust,” Pence said. “And it should be condemned by every American of every political party everywhere.”
Pence also highlighted recent disputes over the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, which has been endorsed by another first-term House Democrat, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar. The campaign, an effort to target Israel with the kind of economic and diplomatic pressure that brought down the apartheid South African government at the end of the Cold War, prompted Republicans to draft legislation that would allow states to blacklist from contracts companies that cooperate with the BDS movement.
“But you deserve to know: Remarkably, today, all but one Democrat running for president voted against the Combating BDS Act in the United States Senate,” he said.
That list includes Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Most Democratic opponents echoed Kentucky Republican Rand Paul’s argument that the legislation infringed on First Amendment rights.
Pence received an enthusiastic welcome from the assembly on the heels of a satellite address from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that previewed much of Pence’s praise for Trump’s record.
“They have never been stronger,” Netanyahu said of U.S.-Israel ties, in response to a question from Pastor John Hagee, the founder and national chairman of Christians United for Israel. “I deeply appreciate all President Trump has done.”
Netanyahu touted Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the country’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He also praised Pence and other senior members of Trump’s “fantastic team” of foreign policy advisers one day after the leak of confidential British diplomatic memos that portrayed the administration as “dysfunctional” and “faction-riven.”
“These are exceptional people, and I work with them, and I intend to work with him over the next two-and-a-half years to deepen the cooperation across the board — intelligence-sharing, cyber, you name it, we’re doing it,” Netanyahu said. “And I believe we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do together.”
Pence set that record in religious terms. “It’s true — our alliance with Israel has never been stronger,” he said, quoting Netanyahu’s earlier comments. “In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘For the sake of Zion, I will not be silent,’ it was written. And, my friends, this president, for the sake of Zion, has not been silent.”
