June 4 (Reuters) - Karine Jean-Pierre, who was former President Joe Biden’s press secretary at the White House from 2022 until 2025, has left the Democratic Party and is now an independent, according to the publisher of her forthcoming book.
“We need to be clear-eyed and questioning, rather than blindly loyal and obedient as we may have been in the past,” she was quoted as saying by Legacy Lit, part of the Hachette Book Group, that will release her book ‘Independent’ in October.
I understand that what I’m about to say might come off as cold, but this is how I see the conflict: the overwhelming reason for the high number of civilian casualties isn’t the IDF - it’s Hamas. That’s not to say the IDF or the Israeli government is without guilt, let alone individual soldiers who’ve committed atrocities that absolutely match what Hamas has done. But there’s so much Hamas could have done to protect their own civilian population, and instead they’ve consistently chosen the opposite - to use them as human shields.
If we now decide that the civilian death toll is intolerable and use that as a reason to pressure Israel into ending the conflict, to me, that’s equivalent to paying ransom to kidnappers. It shows the tactic works - and it encourages more of it. I want us to do the opposite: make it clear that it doesn’t work. If you fight from among civilians, then civilians will get bombed, and the responsibility for that will be placed on you. That’s how Hamas should be treated, and honestly, how their own people should come to see them too.
I just don’t buy the narrative that Israel is intentionally bombing civilians as part of some ethnic cleansing campaign. If that had been the goal, they could’ve pursued it decades ago. But they haven’t. Hamas, on the other hand - I genuinely believe they would if they could.