Speaking on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, outgoing US President Joe Biden blabbered, “Those protestors out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”
By “those people” Biden was referring to the pro-Hamas mobs calling for “intifada revolution” and “smashing the Zionist entity.” He was referring to people chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” barking “Bibi, we’re at your gate, we’re taking back ’48,” bellowing that “Hamas is coming,” and promising that October 7 would be repeated “10,000 times and every day.”
Biden was referring to rioters screaming “Stop arming Israel” and calling for “Death to Zionists.”
They were not mildly calling for a reasonable Mideast ceasefire, nor ardently advocating for a peaceful two-state solution.
He was referring to deeply unpatriotic goons, so-called “progressives” that have brought antisemitic street violence to America’s cities and whose prime targets are Israelis and Jews but whose targets also include American democracy.
But Biden says “they have a point” because “a lot of innocent people” have been killed on “both sides,” seeming to suggest that Hamas and Israel are correspondingly culpable: The jubilant murderers of Hamas and the heroic civilian soldiers of the Jewish state, he suggests have both shed “a lot of innocent” blood and are similarly at fault for the continuation of the Gaza war. That is how it sounded to me.
Well, no, Joe, the people who say they support October 7 don’t have a point.
The truth behind October 7 supporters
What they are really demanding is the elimination of Israel and the exclusion of Jews from American life. They are wrong, and you should be calling them out, not coddling them. Instead, you insinuated a horrifying moral equivalency between the Palestinian butchers of Gaza and the defenders of Israel.
I am sure that President Biden didn’t intend to do so. He knows better. But what he was trying to do, and this is the problem, was thread a needle: To signal to both supporters of Israel and to those who genocidally oppose it, that the Democrats sympathize with their positions.
By equivocating, Biden was trying to help Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign through the Mideast minefield. Biden and his handlers (former president Barack Obama?) apparently think it better not to judge whether people waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags and burning Israeli and American flags are a constituency to be appeased or extremist radicals to be rejected.
This is weak-kneed leadership, verging on political debauchery. It portends a slide into policy that is hostage to the most rabidly anti-Israel forces in America.
KAMALA HARRIS, who now officially holds the Democratic presidential nomination, showed Biden the way. One month ago, she declared that Gaza “is not a binary issue,” meaning, I guess, that there are “very fine people on both sides” of the protest lines.
Asked for her opinion about the students “occupying” (vandalizing and terrorizing) the campuses at which they supposedly study, Harris said, “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be as a response to Gaza.”
Harris further wanted anti-Israel protesters to know “that I see you and I hear you,” and that she “will not be silent” about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. “I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their [the protester’s] points,” Harris added as an aside. “But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
It escapes me how the blind rage, the hate for America, and the bashing of Israel that characterizes the mobs demonstrating against the Biden-Harris administration is a “human emotion” to be saluted. Alas, Harris is overcome with “emotions” that “have to be navigated and understood.”
Indeed, it seems that “famine” and feminine hygiene in Gaza are of greater concern to Harris than defeating Hamas or countering its near-nuclear Iranian sponsor. “Do they [Palestinian women in Gaza] have pads?” Harris emoted in a June interview with The Nation. “Early on [in the war] I was asking about sanitary hygiene, even if this makes people feel uncomfortable.”
And what about Palestinian cooking conditions? Harris worries about this too because she “likes to cook,” she told The Nation. And without good flour and clean water, “You can’t make s**t.”
So there you have it. The Democratic Party candidate for president has Palestinian sanitary hygiene and food security, “pads” and “shit” (how vulgar!), at the forefront of her concerns, and this has been the case since the early days of the war. She emotes about these things much more than defending embattled Israel or asserting American military dominance against Iran and its proxies (or against Russia, China, and other adversaries).
Maybe this is because Harris is just a potential “president of joy,” as former president Bill Clinton hailed her this week. And joyous leaders don’t dirty themselves with difficult things like urban combat against radical Islamic enemies or winning wars against threatening hegemons.
Enraptured and overwhelmed by joy, they are incapable of understanding the clash between “barbarism and civilization” that is underway in the Middle East, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently outlined in Congress.
Suffering on both sides?
At most, they emote about “suffering on both sides” while dialing away from America’s only true ally in the Mideast.
FOR ME, a joyous countenance and empathetic heart are not sufficient qualifications for the post of president of the United States of America; they may even be disqualifiers. Rather, I need to know what policies a candidate would pursue. So, here are several concrete questions for Kamala to answer:
“You have boasted that you were the ‘last person in the room’ with President Biden before he announced America’s precipitous, slapdash withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left the Taliban with more than $5 billion in advanced American weaponry and military equipment. Do you still think this was wise, and are you planning similar American troop withdrawals from, say, the Iraq/Syria/Jordan border area or Taiwan or Eastern Europe?
“How do you intend to push back at Iran, as it ramps up its nuclear weapons program and expands its proxy terrorist network – which threatens American interests in the Middle East and global security? Are you waiting for Iran to test its first nuclear bomb, and what will you do then?
“If or when Israel has to pulverize the Iranian-backed terrorist army in Lebanon called Hezbollah, will the US under your leadership provide Israel with every weapon necessary to get the job done swiftly and convincingly, or withhold weapons from Israel again because of concern over civilian casualties?
“Instead of repining about pads for Palestinians in Gaza combat zones, wouldn’t it make more sense to force the creation of humanitarian relief precincts for Palestinian civilians in Sinai, despite Egyptian reticence to do so? Might your compassion for Palestinians lead to creative solutions led by America in this regard, not just to criticism of Israel?”
And finally: “Are you going to continue the outrageous Biden administration focus on sanctioning right-wing Israelis that you don’t like, ranging from settlers to opponents of humanitarian aid for Hamas; while negotiating sanctions relief for Iran and pumping the terrorist-supporting Palestinian Authority with more US taxpayer dollars?”
The writer is director and senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy. The views expressed here are his own. His diplomatic, defense, political, and Jewish world columns over the past 27 years are at davidmweinberg.com.