Independent presidential candidate Cornel West and his newly announced running mate refused to condemn the Hamas terrorist group for its invasion and slaughter of Israeli innocents beginning Oct. 7, with West calling the attacks a “counterterrorist response.”
West and Melina Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, aired their anti-Israel stance in their first joint TV interview as a presidential ticket Thursday night. West told CNN that the Oct. 7 attacks were “absolutely” a “counterterrorist response.”
“I don’t believe in killing an innocent anybody,” West said. “But you don’t start with those voices without coming to terms with the vicious killings and occupations that’s been going on for 75 years, and then you get a counterterrorist response to that.”
In addition to blaming Israel for Oct. 7, the pair also refused to call for Hamas to release the remaining hostages in exchange for a cease-fire.
“Hamas is not the culprit, it’s the [Israel Defense Forces], and they’re terrorizing,” West told CNN.
“The IDF is not gonna cease-fire just for releasing. They themselves have to stop,” West said. “The Palestinian lives that are being lost, we’ve got to start there.”
Abdullah doubled-down on the statement that BLM released two days after Hamas attacked Israel, in which the group framed the killing, rape, and kidnapping of women, children and infants at the hands of Hamas as “a desperate act of self-defense.”
“I find it really troubling that we are constantly asked to condemn Hamas. I’m not a member of Hamas,” Abdullah told CNN on Thursday. “I find it even more troubling that an entire state has been built on the genocide of a people, and I think that we have to start with that first.”
Also in the interview, Abdullah defended a 2015 statement she made on social media declaring “the KKK, the police, and government officials are one in the same,” according to The Hill.
“We can just confirm that there is no historian that I’ve ever come in contact with, who disputes the fact that policing in this country hails from slave catching,” Abdullah, a professor at California State University, told CNN.
The West-Abdullah ticket has qualified to appear on the ballot in four states — South Carolina, Alaska, Utah and Oregon.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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