Third-Party Presidential Candidate Cornel West Calls October 7 Hamas Attack a ‘Counter-Terrorist Response’

Independent presidential candidate Cornel West on Thursday claimed the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was a “counter-terrorist” response.

Both West and his newly-anointed running-mate, Melina Abdullah, declined to condemn the attack during an interview with CNN anchor Abby Phillip.

“There’s no doubt that there’s a variety of different Palestinian voices in the resistance movement,” West said. “Hamas doesn’t speak for every Palestinian.”

“I don’t believe in killing an innocent anybody,” he added. “But you don’t start with those voices without coming to terms with the vicious killings and occupations that’s been going on for 75 years, and then you get a counterterrorist response to that.”

Asked to clarify whether he was referring to the October Hamas attacks as a “counterterrorist response,” he replied, “Oh absolutely, if you’ve been terrorized for 75 years, and you responded the same way.” 

“The IDF has engaged in terrorizing the Palestinians, and terrorizing anybody is wrong, but the terrorism that they are doing, it reaches the point of the crime of genocide,” he said. “So, for me, they have to stop.”

He went on to say he finds it “really troubling that we are constantly asked to condemn Hamas.”

“I’m not a member of Hamas. I find it even more troubling that an entire state has been built on the genocide of a people, and I think that we have to start with that first,” he said.

Also on Thursday, Abdullah defended a controversial statement she made on X in 2015 that “the KKK, the police, and government officials are one in the same.”

On Thursday, she said: “I want us to understand the history of policing in this country. And so, Twitter doesn’t allow you to give a whole history of policing in this country, but in a few sentences, we can just confirm that there is no historian that I’ve ever come in contact with, who disputes the fact that policing in this country hails from slave catching.”

“When we say that policing is you know, the new millennial slave catching, we’re not saying that we don’t want public safety, we’re saying we want real public safety, where community is really centered, where Black safety is centered. And we know that when Black people are safe, we also create safety for everyone else,” added Abdullah, a professor at California State University in Los Angeles who previously chaired the Pan-African studies department.

West, who first entered the presidential race as a progressive Democrat before switching to the Green Party and eventually landing on the decision to run as an independent, is running behind both President Biden and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

West has qualified to appear on the ballot in South Carolina, Alaska, Utah and Oregon.