According to MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, the one person most responsible for Tuesday’s trio of progressive Democratic House primary triumphs in New York City isn’t Mayor Zohran Mamdani; it’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Election Day, Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, three Mamdani-backed pro-Palestinian candidates who made criticism of Israel a central part of their campaigns, emerged victorious from their respective primaries in New York’s 7th, 10th and 17th congressional districts.

“[I’m] hearing a lot of people talking about the antisemitism in New York City and ‘Last night proved the antisemitism in New York City’ and ‘This is Mamdani’s fault,’” Scarborough said of the results on Wednesday. “It’s really not.”

“If you want to blame anybody for what happened last night … I think you have to blame Benjamin Netanyahu,” the “Morning Joe” host argued.

Scarborough said pundits and politicians in the U.S. should not be “shocked that Israel is in such low standing in America right now” after what he described as “four years of maximalist aims” carried out by the Israeli military under Netanyahu’s leadership.

The MS NOW host said it was naive to believe that there wouldn’t be “blowback” from those actions, blasting “the idea that you’re going to be able to [without consequence] brutalize children and women in Gaza with bombing that looks indiscriminate on TV day in and day out for years. That you’re going to be able to level half of Lebanon.”

Scarborough argued that those current events are shaping voters’ views on Israel. “I was always instinctively pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian growing up,” he explained. “You know why? Because when I was a young child, one of my first memories was the ’72 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian terrorists killed Israelis, and it was shocking. And we saw time and time again terror attacks throughout the ’70s that shaped an entire generation’s views on that conflict.

“Well, what’s shaping the views now?” he asked. “Images out of Gaza, images out of the West Bank, images out of Lebanon.”

“[Netanyahu] is the reason why Israel’s standing, not only in New York City but across America, is lower than it has been since 1948, and you’re starting to see that,” Scarborough said.

You can watch Scarborough’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.

The post Joe Scarborough: Netanyahu is to ‘blame’ for success of pro-Palestinian candidates in NYC appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.