Van Jones, a CNN senior political commentator and former Obama administration official, said Monday that Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed needs to explicitly denounce a campaign ad that blames Israel for high prices, calling the ad “dangerous” on CNN’s “NewsNight.”
Jones said the ad suggests Americans are struggling at the grocery store because of U.S. support for Israel, even though Israel receives a small share of overall American foreign assistance compared with other recipients.
“You’re picking out the Jewish state, and you’re pointing to the Jewish state, and of all the — we spend money in Qatar, we spend money all around the world, but you’re going to say that, because of the Jewish state, that’s why you’re suffering,” Jones said.
Jones warned that rhetoric blaming Jews for economic hardship has a dark history. “When you start getting people riled up — and you’ve seen this all through the last century — against Jews and blaming Jews for all your problems, you’re headed down a dark pathway,” he said. He added that the ad amounts to “an example of anti-Jewish hate, and it should be taken down immediately and denounced. And by the way, Abdul should denounce this ad immediately.”
Guest host Michael Smerconish noted that El-Sayed’s campaign “has distanced itself” from the ad. Jones responded, “They’ve distanced. They haven’t denounced.”
Fellow CNN commentator Scott Jennings, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, pressed the point further, noting that El-Sayed “himself, in this campaign, has argued we can’t have good education in this country because we fund the Iron Dome.” Jones called that argument “nuts.”
Jennings also brought up El-Sayed’s past comments, including his remark that “hurt people hurt people” in response to the attack on Temple Israel, and his refusal to say whether Iran poses a bigger threat than Israel. Jones agreed those statements were problematic. “The things that he said that Scott pointed out were terrible things to say, and he shouldn’t have said them,” Jones said.
But Jones pushed back on the idea that El-Sayed has failed to distance himself from the Muslim Brotherhood, and he criticized attacks tying El-Sayed’s faith to false claims about border policy. “When you have the president of the United States saying he’s going to open up the borders and let in jihadists, that is a lie, and it is a lie based on bigotry,” Jones said. “It’s a lie based on scaring people about him being a Muslim. He’s never said anything about opening the borders for jihadists. He’s said dumb things about foreign policy, but not about that.”
Jones also said he “didn’t like” that El-Sayed has declined to condemn the Iranian ayatollah.
