Sen. Ted Cruz had particularly harsh words – even for him – for Barack Obama in response to the former president’s comments on the Israel-Hamas War, seizing on his use of the word “occupation” to describe the conditions leading up to the attacks of Oct. 7.
Cruz appeared Monday on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” where the host played a clip from Obama’s appearance on “Pod Save America,” which she described as “his old buddies who helped work on his [campaign].”
“[Obama] actually tried to blame what’s happening in the Middle East not on himself – that would be totally appropriate – but on all of us. We’re all complicit. Listen to this,” she added, before running the clip, in which Obama said:
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act – to constructively do something – it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem like contradictory ideas… that what Hamas did was horrific and there’s no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable – that all of us are complicit to some degree.”
“What occupation?” Cruz demanded. “This is a lie – and it’s a lie the radical Left pushes. Gaza is not occupied. Israel left Gaza. Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians, said it’s all yours. Israel doesn’t govern Gaza. Israel doesn’t control Gaza. Gaza is run by Hamas. Hamas is in charge of Gaza. There is zero occupation in Gaza of anyone other than the Palestinians. And why is Hamas, why is Gaza, such a miserable place with so much poverty? Because all they care about is their vicious racist hatred of Jews.
“Let me say it again,” he added later, “the Gaza Strip is not occupied. When he says ‘the occupation is unbearable’ he is repeating antisemitic lies, because the radical Left hates Israel. Barack Obama loathes Benjamin Netanyahu. He spent eight years undermining the government of Israel and now Joe Biden has spent the last three years undermining the government of Israel because in their cultural Marxist world view the Israelis, the Jews, are the oppressors.”
Cruz and Kelly both tore into Obama for musing about his time in office; at one point, the former president said: “I look at this and I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward? As hard as I tried – I’ve got the scars to prove it – but there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well was there something else I could have done?’”
On a podcast where nothing is bleeped, that inspired the following from Cruz:
“What utter and complete bulls–t,” he said. “Was there something else you could have done?! Here’s an idea: Don’t give a hundred billion dollars to the monsters who are committing these massacres.”
“[Obama] tried to normalize Iran!” Kelly said by way of agreement.
Watch the entire exchange in the video clip above.
