Douglas Murray: Biden betrays Israel for the feeling of a few clueless college students
What a difference a day makes.Bret Stephans: President Biden Just Made His Biggest Blunder
On Tuesday President Biden was speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum commemoration at the Capitol in Washington.
There he drew a direct comparison between the events of the Holocaust and the attacks on Israel of October 7th.
That is not my comparison. It was President Biden’s. Talking about the phrase “Never Again” he said:
“Here we are not 75 years later but just seven and a half months later, and people are already forgetting. They’re already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas who brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”
As I say, what a difference a day makes.
Within hours the same President who uttered those words was attempting to prevent Israel’s victory in Gaza. By withholding arms shipments to Israel Biden made it clear that he does not want Israel to achieve its military objectives in the final battle of Rafah.
Opponents of the war have briefed for months about the need for a pause or a ceasefire. But there has been an effective pause for months as Israel has waited for this push into Hamas’s final stronghold.
It is believed that Rafah is the place where the remaining Israeli hostages are being held, and the place where Yahya Sinwar — the mastermind of the October 7th attacks — is hiding.
Most likely surrounded by “the best” hostages — which to his sick mind would include the remaining child captives.
“Never again” indeed.
If the Israeli army does not destroy Hamas in Rafah then the war is effectively for nothing, and all the pain and grief on all sides might as well not have occurred.
As I have said before, there is no point in putting out 80% of a fire. Until the Israeli army can clear Hamas out of Rafah the fire of Gaza is not out.
But Biden seems to be bowing to pressure from some of his own base. As someone joked a few months back, Biden does indeed want to focus on a two-state solution, but the two states are Minnesota and Michigan.
He is desperate to chase the few tens of thousands of voters who might turn on him because they care about Hamas more than they care about America.
The munitions cutoff helps Hamas.Jake Wallis Simons: The West is proving that Islamist terrorism works
The tragedy in Gaza is fundamentally the result of Hamas’s decisions: to start the war in the most brutal way possible; to fight it behind and beneath civilians; to attack the border crossings through which humanitarian aid is delivered; and to hold on cruelly to Israel’s 132 remaining hostages, living or dead. Whatever else the arms cutoff might accomplish when it comes to Israel, it is both a propaganda coup and a tactical victory for Hamas that validates its decision to treat its own people as human shields. And it emboldens Hamas to continue playing for time — especially in the hostage negotiations — with the idea that the longer it holds out, the likelier it is to survive.
It doesn’t end the war. It prolongs it.
No Israeli government, even one led by someone more moderate than Benjamin Netanyahu, is going to leave Gaza with Hamas still in control of any part of the territory. If the Biden administration has ideas about how to do that without dislodging it from Rafah, we have yet to hear of them.
That means that, one way or the other, Israel is going in, if not with bombs — and the administration is also considering barring precision-guidance kits — then with far-less accurate 120-millimeter tank shells and 5.56-millimeter bullets. Other than putting Israeli troops at greater risk, does the Biden administration really think the toll for Palestinians will be less after weeks or months of house-to-house combat?
It diminishes Israel’s deterrent power and is a recipe for a wider war.
One of the reasons Israel isn’t yet fighting a full-blown war to its north is that Hezbollah has so far been deterred from a full-scale attack, not least from fears of having its arsenal of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles decimated by the Israeli Air Force. But what if the Lebanese terrorist group looks at reports of Israeli munitions’ shortages and decides that now would be an opportune time to strike?
If that were to happen, the loss of civilian life in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other Israeli cities could be immense. Biden would have no choice but to authorize a massive airlift of munitions to Israel — reversing this week’s decision. And the United States might have to even more directly support Israel militarily.
What would be the worst foreign policy message imaginable? There are many contenders, but the frontrunner has to be simply that “terrorism works”. Once this lesson has been learnt, the door will be open to years of violence against us. It’s called appeasement, and history has taught us where it leads.
If you, like me, are concerned by the rise of Islamist extremism around the world, the danger it poses to Jewish communities everywhere, and the way it threatens both the firmness of liberal values and our national security, the inconstancy of Western support for Israel in its mission to destroy Hamas – including here in Britain – should fill you with dread.
Most voters want our country to stand up for democracy, not capitulate to the terrorist forces rising to menace it in the most brutal manner imaginable. Why can’t our leaders express without equivocation that backing Israel in its fight to destroy Hamas completely was, and is, the right thing to do? Why do they stay silent, giving succour to our enemies.
Instead, seven months on from October 7, Western politicians seem intent on pursuing what Ronald Reagan called the “utopian solution of peace without victory”. As he put it during the Cold War: “They call their policy ‘accommodation’ and they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” Of course, the opposite is true.