Embattled Progressive Congresswoman Cori Bush’s Campaign Backtracks After She Refused to Call Hamas a Terrorist Group

Embattled progressive Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) campaign recently backtracked after she had refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization.

Covering Bush in her home district, The New York Times‘ Annie Karni noted that Bush was loath to use the descriptor:

Ms. Bush was one of two Democrats who voted in January against a resolution to bar members of Hamas and anyone who participated in the attacks against Israel on Oct. 7 from the United States.

Sitting at a breakfast spot in Ferguson, where she was greeted like a celebrity, Ms. Bush said the vote was an act of defiance in the face of efforts to intimidate her and other lawmakers who have expressed pro-Palestinian views.

“You can’t buy members of Congress, and you can’t scare them,” she said. “That’s why we take those votes.”

e only operate under attack; if it’s me today, it’s Rashida Tlaib tomorrow,” she added, referring to the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who is the only Palestinian American lawmaker in Congress. “We knew that coming in the door.”

Ms. Bush said that she was reluctant to classify Hamas as a terrorist group given how little she knows about it.

“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not,” Ms. Bush said. “I have no communication with them. All I know is that we were considered terrorists, we were considered Black identity extremists and all we were doing was trying to get peace. I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”

The congresswoman also observed that “we were called terrorists during Ferguson,” referencing the combination of protests and riots that engulfed Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014.

“Have they [Hamas] hurt people? Absolutely. Has the Israeli military hurt people? Absolutely,” submitted Bush.

Bush spokeswoman Marina Chafa later walked back her boss’s statement, asserting that “the congresswoman knows Hamas is a terrorist organization” before going on to argue that the term was being “weaponized by the far right consistently to justify violence and in this instance, the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

Recent polling shows that Bush may be in danger of losing the Democratic nomination in her district to Wesley Bell, another progressive with more moderate views on the war between Israel and Hamas.

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