On Wednesday, at the annual menorah lighting at the White House for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which celebrates the Jewish people’s heroic and successful fight for freedom against the oppression of the Greek Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epimanes, President Biden, who reportedly is determined to push for businesses to impose vaccine mandates, ignoring judges blocking his vaccine mandate, cynically used the opportunity to reference his Build Back Better agenda, declaring, “Whether it’s in a temple in Jerusalem or the temple of our democracy, nothing broken or profane is beyond repair. Nothing. We can always build back better, or perhaps build back brighter.”
Biden stated:
You know, when we light this menorah in the White House, when Jewish families place their menorahs in their windows, we’re proclaiming liberty; we’re exercising the freedom the Maccabees sought to simply practice their faith, and we’re showing that there’s still light. That even the most fragile flame can be sustained in a tradition and nourish the soul of the people.
That little bit of light, wherever it is found, can dispel the darkness and illuminate a path forward. And whether it’s in a temple in Jerusalem or the temple of our democracy, nothing broken or profane is beyond repair. Nothing. We can always build back better, or perhaps build back brighter.
Biden has bragged that he had known every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir well, eliding his reported famed encounter with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1982, when Biden reportedly banged on a desk and berated Begin that if Israel continued building settlements in Judea and Samaria, the U.S. would cut off financial aid. Begin fired back:
Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work…. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.
Biden’s claims of close ties with Israel fly in the face of the fact that his administration seems determined not to act in any punitive way with the despotic, theocratic regime in Iran, which is threatening to annihilate the Jewish state. As The Daily Wire reported November 29:
With the Biden administration set to restart a new round of nuclear talks with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the spokesperson for Iran’s military stated over the weekend that they will not give up their pursuit of wiping Israel off the face of the earth.
“We will not back off from the annihilation of Israel, even one millimeter,” Brig.-Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, spokesman for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s armed forces, told the Iranian Students News Agency. “We want to destroy Zionism in the world.”
In September 2020, two months before the presidential election, Biden snapped that former President Donald Trump had “put Israel in danger” by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. He also insinuated that Trump had put American Jews in danger because he had “embraced” conspiracy theories.
“Trump has put Israel in danger by tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and replaced it with nothing,” Biden stated. “Iran is closer to a [nuclear] weapon than when we left office in 2017. And instead of Iran being isolated, we are the ones being isolated.”
The very next day Trump announced that Bahrain became the latest Arab country to normalize relations with Israel, following the United Arab Emirates doing so in August 2020.