Happy talk is dangerous.
It’s dangerous because it gets people killed. It leads people to believe foolish things. Out of idiotic hopes and fatuous dreams, leaders tend to believe what they want to believe. That is precisely the opposite of their job, particularly when it comes to national security: Foreign policy ought to be the preserve of cold-eyed men and women capable of making hard but correct decisions.
Unfortunately, politics tends to draw those with starry visions — or, at least, cowards who will mask their own cowardice with those starry visions.
It’s hard to tell which one President Biden is these days.
As Israel’s war against Hamas continues — and make no mistake, it will continue until Hamas is utterly destroyed — Biden is starting to waver. Biden has made many of the right sounds: He has expressed support for deposing Hamas and has correctly stated that Israel has a difficult task in doing so while minimizing civilian casualties.
Yet now, prodded by a radical Left-wing legacy media and young, daft staffers, he seems to be wavering.
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Thus, yesterday, Biden issued the following tweet: “Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace. To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can’t do that.”
Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace.
To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek.
We can’t do that.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 28, 2023
What, precisely, did Biden mean by this tweet? It seems to create a catch-22. You can’t give Hamas what they want, apparently — which is more violence. But it also takes violence against Hamas to destroy them.
So is Biden arguing for leaving Hamas in place … in the name of defeating Hamas? Or is he simply setting up deeply unrealistic expectations for any military in the face of a terrorist group that purposefully embeds itself in civilian areas in order to prey on Western softheartedness with regard to civilian casualties?
Either way, Biden is harming Israel’s war effort with such rhetoric. He is falling victim to the propagandistic efforts of the legacy media, which continue to promote four claims: first, that Hamas isn’t as bad as it seems; second, that Israel is much worse than it seems; third, that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to defeat Hamas; and fourth, that Biden’s electoral prospects rely on believing the first two claims.
First, there is the claim that Hamas isn’t all that bad.
It’s astonishing to watch Holocaust denial form in real time, but we’re watching it happen. That’s the only phenomenon I’ve seen similar to what’s happening: the active attempt to rewrite Hamas into some sort of political protest group, who is just a little more passionate. This has involved outright lies — the lie, for example, that Hamas didn’t kill people at the Nova Music Festival and that Israeli helicopters did — or obfuscation (Do you have tape of Israeli women being raped, or merely medical reports of their broken pelvises?).
But more often, it’s taken the form of downplaying Hamas’ evil altogether. Thus, we get Ayman Mohyeldin of MSNBC’s claiming that Hamas is a reasonable negotiating partner.
We get the legacy media claiming that Hamas’ hostage release strategy spells the beginning of a broader round of negotiations with Israel’s supposed new peace partner — the same people who just murdered 1,200 Israeli citizens six weeks ago and took 240 hostages.
Then there’s the second claim: that Israel is morally equivalent in some way to Hamas.
This claim usually takes the form of suggesting that Israel is “carpet bombing” Gaza or “indiscriminate” in its use of firepower. That’s absurd. According to Hamas — a terrible source — Israel has dropped some 40,000 bombs on Gaza during this conflict and has killed some 15,000 people. Normally, bombs kill more than 0.3 people.
What’s more, Israel is protecting civilian evacuation routes Hamas is attacking; Israel is giving weeks of warning before striking sites; Israel is using “knock bombs” to empty buildings; Israel is allowing Hamas terrorists to merge into civilian populations rather than killing too many civilians.
Israel is being more careful than any army in modern history. It is also dealing with a terrorist group hiding in a heavily urban area. That means civilian casualties will be high, by necessity. Again, that isn’t uncommon in war. A paper in the Journal Frontiers of Public Health gives account of civilian death rates by modern war (meaning civilian deaths over total deaths): 74% in the Korean War; 46% in the Vietnam War; 88% in the Persian Gulf War; 56% in the Balkan War; 28% in Afghanistan; 36% in Pakistan; 67% in Iraq.
Yet the media are participating in Hamas’ moral equivalence to the hilt. They are, in fact, acting as though Hamas ought to be granted immunity and permanence specifically for their evil tactic of hiding among civilians. Which of course means that every terrorist group in the future will do just that.
Yesterday, Jake Tapper of CNN asked former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett one of the media’s typical silly questions: Won’t killing members of Hamas just create new members of Hamas?
Bennett answered that if that’s the case, you can literally never win a war. He reminded Tapper, “It depends what we do next. I want to remind you that Nazi Germany, in the final months of the war, there were many, many civilian casualties. Yet Germany was denazified after the war and we had a new Germany.”
Yet the Biden administration is falling for this obvious ploy. John Kirby of the Pentagon said, “It’s even all that more of an added burden on Israel to make sure that as they start to plan for operations in the south, whatever that looks like, that they have properly accounted for … the extra innocent life that is now in south Gaza.”
And according to the Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. push to have Israel fight a more targeted war signals a shift away from President Biden’s full-throated support at the outset for the campaign to oust Hamas, and is the focus of intensive consultations between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to handle the conflict.”
Certainly if the U.S. has a magic wand it has been hiding, Israel will be all ears. Until then, this is empty verbiage that lends credibility to Hamas’ lies about supposed Israeli evils.
Then there’s the third claim: that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to somehow curb Hamas.
This is the claim of simpleton Thomas Friedman, august foreign policy columnist for the execrable New York Times, who has never met an Israeli concession he didn’t like. Today, he writes “a revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of moderation, coexistence and decency triumphing in all three wars. It is the keystone for reviving a two-state solution… the Palestinian Authority, which since Oslo has been committed to reaching a two-state solution based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war.”
To believe this, one must truly be an imbecile.
The Palestinian Authority, from the outset of Oslo, saw the Oslo Accords as a Trojan Horse. Their leadership said as much.
Yassar Arafat said in 1994, “This [Oslo] agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad and Quraish.” That agreement was the prelude to the slaughter of the Quraish tribe of Mecca a few years after Mohammed signed a false peace agreement. This is why Arafat increased terrorist activity after Oslo. It is why he walked away from the Camp David Accords in 2000, and, instead, launched the Second Intifada. It is why his successor, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, did the same with Ehud Olmert in 2008.
The PA has never wanted a two-state solution. The PA is a terror group. It remains a terror group. That’s why the PA has claimed that Israel fabricated evidence of October 7.
Concessions to terrorists breed terrorism. It is that simple. But the Biden administration continues to pretend that a “two-state solution” led by the PA is somehow an answer to Islamic extremism.
Every day proves that thesis totally wrong. Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Palestinian population, radicalized over the course of generations. By polling data, that population does not want peace with Israel. They like Hamas. They like Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In fact, according to the most recent polling data from AWRAD, the Palestinian Authority has the support of approximately 10% of the population — which is approximately the same level of support as the Western media itself.
There is video of the Palestinian population who is supposedly so ready for peace. There is footage of Palestinians mocking Israeli hostages being released, including children and old women.
‘Innocent Gazan’ civilians again. People with such a clear line between them and Hamas, obviously. Bravely taunting & jeering elderly Jewish women. pic.twitter.com/CDNYBmK69C
— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) November 28, 2023
Clearly the answer is more Israeli concessions like, say, turning over the Gaza Strip entirely to Hamas. That worked out amazingly well last time.
Then there’s the final claim: that Biden is in electoral danger specifically because of Israel’s war to exterminate Hamas.
That, too, is a lie. The data simply don’t exist to suggest that Biden’s electoral trouble is because of the Gaza War. On October 7, Biden was riding at 44% in polls against Donald Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Today, he’s riding at 45%. On October 7, he was at 40.5% approval; today, he’s at 40.4%. In other words, he’s just unpopular.
But the media are beating the drums: If Biden doesn’t cave to Hamas, then he’ll lose the youth vote! And he needs citizens like the ones from Oakland, who went wild when the city council considered condemning Hamas.
Last night the Oakland City Council voted on a resolution to call for a ceasefire.
A city council member tried to insert language condemning Hamas.
This was the reaction… pic.twitter.com/r7aTb2mkrQ
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 28, 2023
These are core parts of Biden’s supposed constituency. According to a Harvard Harris Poll, as explained in the Wall Street Journal, “Roughly half of Americans 18 to 24 years old think Hamas’s October attack was justified by grievances of the Palestinians. Just 9% of people aged 65 and older feel the same.” According to the media, this is the real danger to Biden’s 2024 efforts.
This is, once again, ridiculous. Biden will either be running against Donald Trump — the most pro-Israel president in American history — or Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley — the most pro-Israel candidates in American history. Are all these Hamas-lovers going to stay home and watch one of those three be elected? What’s more, those 65 and older vote far more than those aged 18-24. So an incremental gain among those voters would likely be outweighed by an incremental loss among older voters.
But the media have their story. And they’re pushing it.
In any case, Israel isn’t stopping. They can’t. The IDF spokesperson explained:
Where this is going forward from here, is that we are ready, and as soon as we will get the green light from the government of the State of Israel to continue operations we will do so because we understand that there is a direct link between ground operations and pressure on Hamas and their willingness to hand over the hostages. And we are ready and equipped to do so. And I hope that that will commence as soon as possible. Every day that Israeli hostages are returned is great. But we are preparing for the next stage of operations. And we have our site firmly focused on the aim, to dismantle Hamas to make sure that never again will any terrorist organization in Gaza have the ability to do what Hamas did on October the seventh.
That’s exactly correct.
Israel can’t stop. They’ll either do it alone, or they’ll do it with Western help. So what does it matter if the West backs Israel?
It certainly means one thing above all others: a West perceived as a weak, cowardly horse is a West ripe for the taking.
And a happy-talking West is a weak West.