Don’t deny it, Gov. Joshua Shapiro. We know you are a secret agent for Israel. All of us participate in Israel’s conspiracy to seize control of the entire world.
They gave him the license to kvell whenever he personally rebuilds a Pennsylvania highway in record time, a reference to his reconstruction effort on I-95 in Northeast Philadelphia. They numbered him 2028 to signal his likely presidential ambitions.
My governor revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris’s team asked him if he was an agent for Israel when she campaigned for president in 2024. In the process of vetting him for a possible running mate as vice president, Dana Remus asked him, “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”
“Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding?” the governor wrote in his forthcoming book Where We Keep the Light. “I told her how offensive the question was.”
Note that he neglected to give her a straight answer. He was evading the question.
Remus then asked if he ever communicated with an undercover Israeli agent, to which he responded: “If they were undercover…how the hell would I know?”
Shapiro wrote that he was asked why he criticized anti-Israel protests at the University of Pennsylvania amid “a lot” of questions about Israel in another vetting session, this time with U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former associate Attorney General Tony West and former senior Biden adviser Cedric Richmond, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me – the only Jewish guy in the running – or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way,” the governor added.
In case of doubt, I am only teasing when I confess that the Jewish people contribute to an Israeli conspiracy. There could well be readers who take this admission seriously. Let me be plain: As far as I am aware, Josh Shapiro is no agent for Israel. I was merely, ahem, joshing.
The questions that upset Shapiro have no place in candidate vetting, of course. Democratic Party officials should inquire about this interrogation. It suggests that antisemites have infiltrated the highest levels of the party, even if it is authorized by only one leading Democrat, namely Kamala Harris.
It is legitimate to question potential running mates about Israel, so long as the candidate’s concerns are relevant.
Those familiar with the James Bond spy series know that he has a license to kill and possesses the number 007.
It is widely known that the U.S. House of Representatives already includes members who are openly against Israel, and there is a campaign to install more of them later this year. Some of them probably believe that Shapiro is an Israeli agent. Why not? His savvy skills as a campaigner must be derived from his license to kibitz.
Oh, yes, Israel honored me with the license to kvetch when the government assigned me to serve as a secret agent. What else except for kvetching do I do when I write commentaries?
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist