JNS
Two fringe, anti-Israel activist-journalists were removed from the State Department press briefing after accusing the secretary of state of complicity in war crimes for supporting Israel.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the delay in reaching agreement over the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal a “loose end” on Thursday that he expected to be resolved.
“I am confident, and I fully expect, that implementation will begin, as we said, on Sunday,” Blinken told reporters. “It’s not exactly surprising that in a process, a negotiation, that has been this challenging and this fraught, they may get a loose end.”
“We’re tying up that loose end as we speak,” Blinken said. “I’ve been on the phone, in one way or another, all morning with Brett McGurk, with our Qatari friends, and I’m very confident that this is going forward, and we’ll see the start of implementation on Sunday.”
Israel’s security cabinet is now set to meet on Friday to vote on the deal after a last-minute announcement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas had reneged on part of the deal. Those issues have apparently been overcome.
An anti-Israel protester is removed from the room as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, on January 14, 2025. Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images.
Speaking at a farewell press briefing before the Biden administration leaves office on Monday, Blinken was repeatedly shouted down by anti-Israel, activist-journalists, who screamed at him about U.S. policy in Gaza before State Department staff escorted them out of the room.
Max Blumenthal, a far-left blogger and conspiracy theorist, accused Blinken of betraying Judaism. (Blinken is Jewish.)
“You helped destroy our religion, Judaism, by associating it with fascism,” Blumenthal said. “Your father-in-law was an Israel lobbyist. Your grandfather was an Israel lobbyist. Are you compromised by Israel?”
Blumenthal’s father is the longtime Clinton-family hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal.
State Department security dragged Sam Husseini, another anti-Israel blogger and conspiracy theorist, from the room.
“Why aren’t you in The Hague?” he shouted, as a pair of guards carried him out, in a rare forcible removal from an executive branch press briefing.
After finishing his remarks, Blinken took questions from the press and said that he regretted not reaching the ceasefire-for-hostages agreement sooner, after U.S. President Joe Biden proposed it in May.
“Do I wish we could have gotten the ceasefire agreement months ago? Of course,” he said. “The lives lost since could have been avoided if we’d gotten this over the line sooner, but in something as complex, as complicated, where different events have intervened, and the work that we had done, the progress we were making toward bringing it to conclusion, was delayed or derailed.”
“As the president said yesterday, almost every time you’re trying to deal with something this hard, and as George Mitchell put it so well in the context of Northern Ireland peace, you’re going to have many, many days of setback and struggle before you get to that final day of success,” he added. “Every one of those days of setback and struggle is necessary to get you to the day of success.”
Blinken also rejected criticism of the Biden administration that it had been either too pro- or too anti-Israel following Oct. 7 and the war against Hamas.
“Some people say we did too much to restrain Israel when it comes to Iran, when it comes to Hezbollah and when it comes to others. Others say we did much too much to enable,” he said. “All of those questions are the right ones to ask, and they’ll be asked for a long time.”
