According to Joe Biden, it was not the economy, health care, or national security that drove him to run for president. It was anti-Semitism. Repeating a tall tale he hopes to get away with, he declared in his acceptance speech:

Remember seeing those neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists coming out of the fields with lighted torches? Veins bulging? Spewing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the '30s?

Remember the violent clash that ensued between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it?

Remember what the president said?

There[sic] were quote, "very fine people on both sides."

It was a wake-up call for us as a country.

And for me, a call to action. At that moment, I knew I'd have to run...

Almost identically, when Sen. Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign in early 2019, she:

...lashed out at President Donald Trump for “fueling division,” including on anti-Semitism.

“Racism is real in America, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia — these things exist in America,” Harris said...  “We have seen when Charlottesville and a woman was killed that we’ve had a president who basically said, well, there were equal sides to this,”...

Yet, in a scandal that's hiding in plain sight, Biden and Harris themselves have shared a forum with representatives of groups reportedly linked to deadly violence against Jews in Israel. And in dramatic contrast, they've snubbed Israel and its supporters.

Harris boycotted the 2020 American-Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, along with fellow candidates who understood that the party was turning against Israel, and that associating with its supporters might hurt her with the Democratic base.

Yet, as a presidential hopeful, she addressed the 2018 Netroots Nation convention in New Orleans, where her fellow speakers included an official of a radical anti-Israel organization that allegedly assists in the slaughter of innocent Jewish men, women, and children by funding Palestinian terror gangs.

Leah Muskin-Pierret addressed the convention's Democratic activists on behalf of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), which has funneled money to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), according to a Tablet magazine expose two months before the conventiion.

The Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund and American victims of terror are suing the USCPR, based on the Tablet investigative report.

The Jewish Journal reported that the USCPR  “has also celebrated convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh...” Odeh was convicted of the bombing murder of Hebrew University students Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner in 1969, an atrocity reminiscent of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four African-American girls attending Sunday school.

The USCPR was not the only allegedly terror-linked group at the convention. As the Zionist Organization of America noted, the Progressives for Palestinian Rights panel was “run by leaders of the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, an unindicted conspirator named in the Holy Land Foundation trial for funneling money to HAMAS), and other radical anti-Israel groups.” CAIR has also rallied in support of double murderer Rasmea Odeh.

The ZOA reported that at the convention, Harris' fellow speaker Zahra Billoo, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA) office, “jokingly commented that she participated in 'all the terrorist orgs you could imagine!'...”

Senate colleagues of Harris have noted Billoo's organization's ties to terrorists. Sen. Richard Durbin said CAIR “is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.” Sen. Chuck Schumer said its co-founders have “intimate links with Hamas.” and that “we know [CAIR] has ties to terrorism.”

CAIR's Billoo has tweeted:

--”No need for a holocaust museum, seeing as Israel has taken it upon itself to recreate it. #Israel #Nazis."

“‘Israel ‘defending’ itself from Palestinians is analogous to Nazi Germany defending itself from Jewish uprising.’"

--“Blaming Hamas for firing rockets at [Apartheid] Israel is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist. #FreePalestine.

--”AH [Alhamdulillah - Praise God] for Hezbollah having the courage to do what the Arab governments won't!"

-- “Will we hunt down and kill the IDF terrorists.”

--‘Zionism is the violent ideology responsible for the genocide and displacement of indigenous Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian land.”

--“Israel commits war crimes and terrorism as a hobby.”

Billoo also spoke at Netroots Nation four years earlier in Detroit, a few minutes after Vice President Biden delivered a keynote address.

Another of Biden's 2014 Netroots Nation fellow speakers was Max Berger of the anti-Israel extremist organization IfNotNow. Berger had his own troubling trail of tweets:

--“What Israel is doing in Gaza should be familiar to Jews. It's called a pogrom. You'd think Jews would be against those. #Shanda #NotInMyName.”

--“Sometimes I feel the biggest obstacle to peace in Israel-Palestine is the bigotry of American Jews.”

--“I support BDS because ultimately it's the only way to stop the occupation...”

--“Confession: I would totally be friends with Hamas.”

The ZOA's Morton A. Klein and Mark Levenson noted that Berger's organization:

...trains camp counselors to infiltrate Jewish summer camps to teach little Jewish children the lie that Israel is an evil occupier of “Palestinian” lands and to turn Jewish children against Israel.

Max Berger also reportedly was affiliated with Dream Defenders, whose long string of anti-Jewish anti-Israel activities include lauding as heroes the designated foreign terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and bringing people to meet with PFLP leaders and PFLP front group Addameer...

And, just as Harris boycotted AIPAC after palling around with officials of terror-affiliated groups, Biden would go on to display the same double standard. The year after his Netroots Nation keynote, in his role as president of the Senate, Biden refused to be in the same room as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, boycotting his address to a  joint session of Congress regarding the Iran nuclear deal. A mere eight of 100 senators joined  him in the boycott.

In repeating falsehoods that smear Trump as a racist and supporter of murderous anti-Semites, Harris and Biden appear to be projecting their own coziness with terror-promoting bigots onto the president.

The media has been silent about this under-the-radar scandal. But imagine the reaction if it were Trump or Vice President Pence addressing a Republican activist convention where fellow speakers represent organizations that reportedly funnel money to facilitate the mass murder of Jews, African-Americans, or any other historically persecuted minority group.

Edward Davis is the author of Netroots Nation and the Democrats' War on Israel.

Image credit: Alisdare Hickson, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0