Sen. Bernie Sanders and goon “Squad” leaders Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib demand that President Joe Biden stop selling arms to Israel. They’ve introduced resolutions to block $735 million worth of equipment that would help the Israel Defense Forces target terrorists more precisely.
Democrats wring their hands over the death of innocents, including 63 Palestinian minors, amid Israeli retaliation for Hamas’s 4,000 rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. But what is the United States selling? The answer is guidance systems, without which the innocent death toll would rise, not fall. Sanders and the Squad are so appalled by the carnage that they’re taking steps to make it worse.
Hamas certainly doesn’t concern itself overmuch about the suffering of the 2 million Palestinians it governs. The terrorist organization seized power in a 2006 coup and has held it ever since without elections. Its fighters position their missile launchers in densely populated areas such as apartment courtyards so women and children are slaughtered when Israel hits back. That way, Hamas can portray Israel falsely as the aggressor and harvest sympathy from fatuous “world opinion.”
The IDF takes more care than any army in history to avoid civilian casualties, forewarning inhabitants of targeted buildings so they can get out before the bombs fall. You should watch video of a Gaza landlord on the phone to the IDF seeking a 10-minute delay in bombing and admitting that all inhabitants have evacuated safely.
Sanders’s and the Squad’s resolutions will fail, but not because they’ll be voted down. They’ll never be allowed a vote at all. The reason for this is highly revealing of the rot within the American Left. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi don’t want votes because a tally would show how many Democrats now side with the terrorists and yearn to abandon our staunch ally and the only real democracy in the Middle East.
Democrats ignore the facts — that the latest clash started as a property dispute in which Jews sought to evict Palestinians from property they say was seized by Palestinians in 1948, while Palestinians claim it’s just cover for Jewish expansion in east Jerusalem; that Hamas stoked violent protests over this within Israel, then unleashed its missile bombardment after Israel security forces sought to restore order; and that only then did the IDF move to destroy Hamas installations and military potency in Gaza.
When Hamas supporters “debunk” these truths, they argue simply that Israel is an occupying power so terrorism is self-defense. But Israel pulled out of Gaza 15 years ago. Not a single Jew remains there except those who’ve been kidnapped by the terrorists, as Israeli satirist Lior Schleien aptly noted in an on-point rebuttal of a tendentious monologue by comedian John Oliver.
So why, according to Democrats, are the Israelis the bad guys and Hamas’s murderers the good guys? This is where one gets to the central corruption and myopia of today’s Left. It is apparently incapable of viewing any dispute anywhere on Earth except through the lens of woke domestic politics.
Its worldview reduces everything to a simplistic pitting of white against black. This is not always, but is often, about skin color. But it is also about power. The Left is revolutionary in its DNA. Challenging power, resisting authority, disdaining law and order, and seeking the end of the status quo (preferably violently) is what it’s about, its raison d’etre.
Because Israel is successful, rich, entrepreneurial, inventive, democratic, law-abiding, and many other wonderful things, plus its government in Jerusalem is in power and an American ally, it is, ergo, the bad guy. The Left wants America to fail, along with its entire structure and system, and any enemy is thus the Left’s friend. Gazans are poor, backward, undemocratic and incapable of self-government, and their leadership has codified the destruction of Israel and genocide of Jews into its foundational documents. So they are, ergo, the good guys in the Left’s distorted horror-house mirror.
The conflict has revealed that the party Biden heads is no longer one he actually represents, as the Washington Examiner’s James Antle noted last week. Biden is the papier-mache figurehead of a party that is an increasingly comfortable home for extremists.
Biden resisted Democrats’ pressure to abandon Israel, but only briefly. He soon called on Jerusalem to stop destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, such as its many miles of tunnels dug to infiltrate terrorists into Israel to murder Jews. The Left is blind in Gaza. But on this, as on much else, its leader is no Samson.
