Protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza briefly derailed a speech by President Joe Biden in South Carolina on Monday.
Biden was speaking at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—the site where a white supremacist gunman killed nine Black churchgoers in 2015—when around six protesters broke in with chants of “ceasefire now.” One protester also shouted, “If you really care about the lives lost here, you should honor the lives lost and call for a cease-fire in Gaza,” according to footage of the event.
Others in the crowd began shouting them down, taking up a call of “four more years” as the handful of protesters were escorted out of the hall. The president quieted his supporters, saying that he understood the protesters’ “passion.”
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“I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza, using all that I can to do that,” he added.
“You’re an understanding person,” a woman in the crowd called out. “They don’t realize that. You’re a good man.”
The Biden administration has been under increasing pressure to do more to assuage the humanitarian crisis spiraling in Gaza, which has been relentlessly bombarded by Israel since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ emergency relief chief, said last week that Gaza had become “uninhabitable” and a “place of death and despair.” The death toll has topped 23,000 people, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Sunday. Nearly 60,000 more have been wounded in the conflict.
Biden’s stop in Charleston comes less than a month ahead of the state’s Democratic primary—the nation’s first in the 2024 election—on Feb. 3. Designed to shore up flagging support among frustrated Black voters, the event saw the president thank the congregation and South Carolina’s Black population for his election in 2020. “I owe you,” he promised to applause.
He also used the speech to link racism and political violence in the U.S.’ past to the unrest that has starkly split the country today, pointing to his rival, former President Donald Trump, as the cause. “The truth is under assault in America,” he said. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country—because without truth there’s no light.”
Biden reiterated that Trump lost the 2020 election, adding to the crowd’s delight, “He’s a loser.” It was a line the president weaponized to great effect at a speech last Friday, according to Politico.
He also jabbed at Nikki Haley, another Republican presidential candidate and the former governor of South Carolina, who came under fire last month after skirting around mentioning slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
“Let me be clear for those who don’t seem to know — slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” Biden said. “There’s no negotiation about that.”
