A political analyst says US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar might have been put under pressure to compare the Palestinian resistance groups’ defensive acts with the atrocities committed by the US, the Taliban, and Israeli occupation forces.
On Monday, Omar tweeted a video of her exchange with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
During the back and forth, the Minnesota Democrat asked Blinken why he was opposed to courts' investigation into alleged crimes against humanity in both the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan, while making references to Israeli occupation forces, Hamas and the Taliban in an indiscriminate manner.
“It seems to me, someone must be putting pressure on her for her to compare the Palestinians tactics to those of the US for example, which, you know, the US regularly commits war crimes,” Daniel Kovalik, an academic at the University of Pittsburgh, told Press TV on Tuesday.
Kovalik said what Palestinians have used in their defense against Israel’s onslaughts is not “at all” equivalent to the tactics used by the US and Israel in their war crimes.
“In the theaters in which it is set said I don’t see that, in terms of the Palestinians, I mean I think the Palestinians truth have been amazingly restrained given what they’ve been enduring for years. I do not see the tactics of the Palestinians as equivalent at all to those of the US or those of Israel.”
He added “Israelis are actually targeting civilians and targeting civilian infrastructure in a way the Palestinians are not.”
When asked about why the US has repeatedly postponed the UN session on the Palestinian people’s crisis and its roots, he said, “I think they don’t want to look at the root causes because that would require the US to reconsider its exceptional support for Israel, its over $3 billion a year support for Israel.”
“It would make the US have to reconsider the fact that it allotted almost $800 million in emergency financing for Israel’s military during the attack, violent attack against Gaza.”
Therefore, the US, in order to divert attention from its financial help to Israel, is now to making “an equivalency argument between the Palestinians and Israel and the US which is common.”