On April 3, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told an audience at the Boston Islamic Center that she believes there is “ample evidence” that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. Having attached to Israel the least true and most libelous label she could think of, she then said she wanted to “get past a labels argument.” Instead, she proposed chastising the Jewish state on moral grounds. What Israel is doing, she said, is “wrong.” So Israel’s forces must stop fighting terrorists who openly intend to destroy the Jewish state and, should Warren bother to acquaint herself with their charter, all Jews anywhere.
Warren did not condemn Hamas and its bestial war on Israel. She did not demand that Hamas release the 130 hostages it currently holds. Nor did the feminist breaker of glass ceilings mention that released hostages have testified to endemic sexual abuse. This, like all of Hamas’s conduct, would be a war crime were it not carried out against Jews. Warren’s constituents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are big on “anti-racism,” pronouns, and environmental panic. They think Warren is just great. They are, as they once said about former President Donald Trump, “complicit” with Warren as she sides with the real génocidaires.
On April 7, President Joe Biden told a Univision interviewer that he thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “approach” to the Gaza war is “mistaken.” “What I’m calling for,” the president said, “is for the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks total access to all food and medicine going into the country.” The technical term for a one-sided ceasefire is surrender. The technical term for Biden not mentioning the Israeli hostages, some of them American citizens, is either senility, stupidity, or a depraved cynicism. Perhaps he was having a good day and hit the trifecta.
As usual, the cleanup team swooped in and scooped up the president’s musings in the media equivalent of a little green baggie. There was, the traditional “unnamed White House official” said, “no change” in policy. The president was “reiterating our long-standing position”: an “immediate ceasefire that would last for at least six weeks as part of a hostage deal.” This was a lie. As Univision’s transcript shows, the president reiterated none of this. He only called on Israel, a close ally fighting for its survival, to stop fighting immediately. The stink lingers, just as the libel becomes the label.
It is the stink of desperation and appeasement. The administration is desperate to retain the White House in November. It is desperate to stifle the Democratic Left, which, apart from holding the Jews in the secular equivalent of Augustine’s “teaching of contempt,” openly despises the United States of America. It is desperate to appease Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, many of whom appear to be all in for Hamas and Hezbollah. It is, for reasons no one in Washington can quite define, desperate to appease the Qataris, who host Hamas at the suggestion of the previous Democratic administration. All this makes it desperate to stop Israel’s offensive short of Rafah and create a fake peace that might hold until November, even though this means appeasing Hamas.
The left-leaning media and much of the Democratic Party are defending a death cult. Hence, John Kirby, the White House press spokesman, said on April 3: “If we don’t see changes from [the Israelis’] side, there’ll have to be changes from our side.” Imagine if this White House treated its enemies as it treats its friends. Then consider that Biden’s handlers believe Iran is their friend, or at the worst, a kind of temporary frenemy who still merits the dispatch of fungible cash and the nonrenewal of sanctions. Look at it their way, and the Israel-Hamas war and the wider Israel-Iran war are disputes between American clients, to be contained in a balance. In which case, the administration is indeed indulging its friends as they fire rockets at American ships and bases and indeed treating the Israelis as enemies of the American interest who must be pushed to accept the intolerable. Which they won’t — because they can’t if they wish to survive.
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This pandering will not suffice to ensure Biden’s victory in November, but its radical incoherence is already ensuring America’s defeat abroad. By blocking an Israeli assault on Rafah, Biden’s team told Hamas to hold tight. No need to negotiate in Cairo. No need to surrender before you’re annihilated. The cavalry is coming, splendiferously uniformed as humanitarian chefs and human rights lawyers, and we will send it next time you rape and murder children, too. The administration is serving Hamas’s strategy: commit crimes against humanity, ride out the Israel response by mobilizing the Western Left, media, and NGOs against Israel and the Jews more generally, retain power, and claim victory.
That victory would not just be over the Jews, the Christians, and the Americans, or over any Arab or Muslim who dreams of a better future than Islamist tyranny. It would be an American-sponsored defeat for the very ideas of liberal democracy and freedom. This war is about much more than Israel, or Netanyahu, or settlements. If we allow performative frauds, moral imbeciles, and ethical auto-frotteurs to set the frameworks of foreign policy, no liberal democracy will be able to defend itself.
