I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes.

This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated:

To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.

Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it to any one of the following statements that former President Joseph Biden has made over the course of his career.

In 2014, nine months before Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, Vice President Biden told a group of Jewish leaders:

You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States…there’s really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.

On October 12, 2023, five days after the Hamas attacks upon Israel, President Biden declared, “Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”

At a Hanukkah party in 2023, three months after the October 7 attacks, President Biden reiterated that “were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe. I make no bones about it.”

Even with all the passions and prejudices that attach to our beliefs about Israel and Palestine, I find it hard to believe that any reasonable Jewish person would feel safer listening to Biden— who is telling them that no matter what they do in the United States, the Jews will never be safe here, that they need Israel to be safe—versus El-Sayed’s saying that he sees the safety of the Jews as intimately bound with the safety of every other person in the United States, including that of his daughters.

I understand that you might not believe El-Sayed, but again, purely at the level of the rhetoric, you damn well should believe that El-Sayed is saying the right thing and Biden—and everyone he speaks for in the Democratic establishment—is saying the wrong thing. And when you hear the Bidens of this world saying what they say, you should be a lot more concerned than you are or may be when El-Sayed says whatever he says that is critical of Israel.