Hillary Clinton failed to condemn an anti-Israeli questioner Thursday during a campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina.
A woman from the audience asked Clinton what she would do about the homeless problem, overpopulation in prisons, and sending aid to Israel. The audience member said money to the Jewish state would "fund apartheid."
"My third question is about Israel, we spend too much money, $6 billion dollars to Israel to fund apartheid!" said the questioner, while a campaign staffer tried to stop her from continuing. "There is not the shared values that we are supposed to share with Israel."
Clinton smiled through her question. She ignored the slight on Israel and did not debunk the audience member’s claim. She did lay out her plan for addressing the homeless issue for children and spent a majority of her response on reforming the prison system and overall criminal justice reform.
Clinton has been noted for pandering to her audience when it comes to Israel.
Politico reports,
Hillary Clinton is privately signaling to wealthy Jewish donors that — no matter the result of the Iranian nuclear negotiations — she will be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama.
But, even as donors increasingly push Clinton on the subject in private, they have emerged with sometimes widely varying interpretations about whether she would support a prospective deal, according to interviews with more than 10 influential donors and fundraising operatives.
Clinton’s private responses in some ways resemble a foreign policy Rorschach test; donors who see a deal as important to world peace have come away thinking that Clinton shares their perspective, but so, too, do donors who oppose any prospective agreement as compromising Israeli security.
Publicly, she’s expressed support for the negotiating process, which she secretly initiated during her time as secretary of state, but has also said " no deal is better than a bad deal."