Where have we heard this before?
“From the river to the sea ...” Hamas’s intentions couldn’t be clearer. With the help of Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and, who knows, China and Russia, they might get their wish.
What was in jeopardy was the mammoth number of dollars that our administration seeks to send to Ukraine, then to be recycled, of course, to our military-industrial complex.
People were beginning to smell a rat.
Even some in Congress had had enough.
Some had smelled this rat before Air Force One took off. Why was the president going? A photo op, sure. But something else?
Did he go so he could come back and make a speech justifying certain policies?
I wonder to what degree that speech was written before President Biden even left; probably a good deal of it.
President Biden or those who dictate to him—Jake Sullivan? Antony Blinken?—seemed to have their plans already in line, so rapidly after the speech they appeared.
The $105 billion being requested of Congress—with more than four times as much going to Ukraine as to Israel—was likely well into the planning stage with only minor tweaks, if any, made on the flight back.
The Hamas rampage and what sympathy that rampage built for Israel—the “Squad” and a fair amount of others, alas, excluded—was being exploited to justify $61.4 billion for Ukraine on top of the estimated $75 billion already sent.
This is being done despite repeated testimony that Hamas has always strong-armed such moneys for themselves in the past. At best, this seems a bit of desperate virtue signaling to stay on the good side of the Arab world, but everybody must know that $100 million isn’t much when you’re throwing around $105 billion.
Much more important to Biden et al. was to restrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lest years of their Iran appeasement strategy—the useless nuclear deal and so on—begun under President Barack Obama, go down the drain.
Iran would be warned publicly to keep its Hezbollah lackeys in check with a couple of aircraft carriers floating around the Eastern Mediterranean as backup, but Bibi wasn’t to take matters into his own hands without full U.S. approval, which it was rather clear he would never get.
This has left Israel in a terrible situation as we’re now more than two weeks out from the terror invasion and the most Jews killed since the Holocaust.
The Israeli Defense Forces have been told to stay put while hostage releases are being negotiated. For how long, we don’t know. Perhaps Bibi will act on his own, although it will be hard for him, dependent on U.S. ammunition.
Hamas, which can take as long as it wants for that, is surely enjoying prolonging the delays as it sets booby trap after booby trap across its territory.
Peaceniks everywhere are now clamoring for a negotiated settlement. Of what sort? Does anybody in his or her right mind not think that Hamas would then just bide its time and do this again in a year or two, next time with more Iranian, North Korean, or Chinese technology or who knows what, creating more devastation?
Of course not. It’s what it does.
But from the streets of New York and other cities to the classrooms at Harvard, it’s clear that Hamas has more than its share of supporters, more than most of us imagined.
They’re all voters. Or most of them.
And if there’s one thing that President Biden pays attention to, even in his dotage, it’s voters.
Many hold positions at our elite universities. Maybe they will get through to the retrograde presidents and administrators at those institutions who, in their silence or equivocation, have been complicit with Hamas, and start a trend.
