John Fetterman Leaves Out Key Detail While Blasting ‘Sh*theads’ Protesting Outside Synagogue

Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA via AP Images

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) on Wednesday indignantly condemned protesters and his own party after a demonstration outside a New York synagogue, but omitted an important detail.

Fetterman quote-tweeted a post from Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, who shared a video of the protest.

“To summarize the evening: the mob came to a Synagogue, forced a Jewish day care to close early, came with a Hezbollah flag, cheered for intifada, and said ‘we don’t want no Zionists here,'” Poupko wrote. “We cannot normalize this behavior.”

The aforementioned flag – which is green, white, and black – appears very briefly and does not seem to resemble the Hezbollah flag, which features a rifle.

The demonstration took place outside the Park East Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side.

“Mob of Pro-Hezbollah / Hamas sh*theads raging against law enforcement and terrorizing the NYC Jewish community near a synagogue and day care,” Fetterman tweeted. “Where’s my party’s condemnation?”

Absent additional information, it would seem as though the protesters – quite disturbingly – sought to target a synagogue and just happened to choose Park East out of the hundreds in the city.

However, as The New York Times reported, the synagogue was hosting a gathering that was billed “the Great Real Estate Event,” which “promotes American real estate purchases in Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the latter of which most of the world considers to be illegal.”

Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967, and since then has established a series of settlements, often violently expelling Palestinians from their homes.

According to a U.N. report, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 2023.

“Pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanted ‘Long live the intifada’ and ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ slogans that many pro-Israel groups view as calls for violence,” the Times reported. “Some counterprotesters chanted, ‘There is no Palestine.'”

Notably, the original platform of the Likud Party, of which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a member, stated that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

Fetterman, who is up for reelection in 2028, has become increasingly critical of the Democratic Party, so much so that some Republican senators are endeavoring to bring him into the GOP fold, or at least lobby him to become an independent. If they are successful, that could have serious ramifications in the upper chamber, which Republicans control 53-47 ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The senator, however, insists he is staying put.

“I’m a Democrat and I’m staying one,” he said.

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