By Steve Huntley
April 14, 2024
Virtually all the media assert that Israel is becoming ever more isolated in its war against Hamas. What goes unmentioned is a major reason for that:
Israel’s closest ally is headed by a man who doesn’t have the courage to stand up forcefully and eloquently in defense of the Jewish state’s righteous battle to defend itself against an Islamist terrorist militia.
The president of the United States often is called the most powerful man in the world. But has that exalted office ever been occupied by a weaker individual than Joe Biden?
Inept, ineffectual, inconsistent, incoherent, anxious, fearful, vacillating, weak and wrong — the dictionary is packed with words for failure to characterize the record of this perhaps ever-more senile old man and his faint-hearted administration.
The latest development, a direct attack on Israel by Iran this weekend, offers an opportunity for Biden to demonstrate powerful support for Israel in confronting this escalation of the current war. But this new Iranian aggression would not have happened if Biden had stood strong in recent weeks. Instead, his ever-declining backing for Israel in its existential war represented the latest Biden failure on the world stage.
Weakness invites aggression. And under Joe the Faint Hearted, American weakness has definitely invited aggression.
First off, America’s allies were shocked, and its foes emboldened by the humiliation of the chaotic, shameful Afghanistan departure that was more like a hasty retreat than an orderly pullout.
The ugly takeaway — 13 U.S. servicemen dead, panicked Afghans falling from U.S. aircraft as the planes lifted off from the abandoned Bagram air base, billions of dollars in military hardware left to the Taliban, and an innocent Afghan family of 10, including seven children, killed in a mistaken U.S. drone attack.
Also heartening to America’s foes has been Biden’s hemming and hawing over Ukraine. His Ukraine policy — one of offering just enough help to ward off defeat but nothing more — yet again demonstrates a faint-hearted foreign policy. His stance is characterized by a hesitancy to act strongly, fear of seeming to be too bold, and failure to explain to the American people the stakes in Russia’s invasion.
Then there’s the pitiful sight of Biden’s foreign policy functionaries chasing and all but begging the fanatical mullahs of Iran to restore the Obama-negotiated nuclear weapon deal. That pact was said to be designed to prevent Tehran from developing its own atomic bomb but in actuality would have only delayed for a while that outcome. President Trump wisely dumped the faulty deal but Biden, like President Obama before him, has been doing everything, including throwing money at the Iranians, to try to entice them back but they only stall and stall.
The result: Trump sanctions against Iran, a sponsor and bankroller of terrorism, reduced its foreign reserves to $4 billion. Biden lifted those sanctions and now Iran has $75 billion in foreign reserves to finance its evil designs.
In the current turmoil in the Mideast, Iranian proxies attack and kill Americans but Biden’s White House worries about a too-strong U.S. response. How else to characterize the U.S. reaction to a January attack that killed three Americans and injured more than 30 others in Jordan near the Syrian border? As the Wall Street Journal reported, the administration leaked word of its retaliation in advance, enabling Iranian commanders in Syria time to flee the U.S. strike.
That kind of record set the stage for the ever-deteriorating U.S. support for Israel in its just war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. A strong president standing up for America’s ally would have rallied support around the world, maintained backing through the inevitable difficult and bloody days of urban warfare, and combat efforts to isolate Israel.
But the U.S. abstained from a crucial UN Security Council vote, allowing passage of a resolution calling for a cease-fire that would be detrimental to Israel’s war effort. The resolution didn’t even demand that Hamas release the more than 100 hostages it still holds, five Americans among them.
Following a mistaken attack that killed seven aide workers, Biden, in a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, demanded an immediate ceasefire. If only he would demand that Hamas surrender and release all hostages — something that could actually end the war and the suffering in Gaza.
Now he’s calling for a six-week cease-fire, at least once doing so without requiring Hamas release hostages. Sensing weakness, Hamas pushes for a deal that would effectively end the war with a permanent cease-fire, ensuring the terrorist organization survives to commit more atrocities another day.
Biden loudly tries to bully our ally but largely stands silent against the terrorist enemy of Western civilization. Biden and his State Department mindlessly repeat false accusations that Israel is conducting its campaign against Hamas by ignoring the rules of war and inflicting too many civilian casualties.
That unfounded, distorted and perfidious narrative only reinforces the blood libel of genocide hurled against the Jewish state from Israel’s enemies and antisemites in America and Europe. The record is clear that Israel exposes its own soldiers to injury and death in trying to avoid civilian casualties among the Palestinians. Hamas hides behind those civilians, pushes them into harm’s way and contrives to block Israeli efforts to evacuate civilians to less dangerous areas of Gaza.
The numbers bear all that out.
The Gaza health authority controlled by Hamas claims 33,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas broke a cease-fire and started the war with a horrible massacre Oct. 7. Israel says a third of Palestinians casualties are Hamas terrorists. But leave that aside for a moment and let’s accept the Palestinian number.
This war is six months old. That’s about 180 days. That calculates to an average of 184 deaths a day.
On the one day of Oct. 7, Hamas savages slaughtering Israelis in their homes and at a music concert killed 1,200 people, and Hamas intentionally targeted civilians for murder, rape and kidnapping.
If Israel were indiscriminating killing Palestinians in Gaza — population more than 2 million packed in the small Gaza Strip — it could easily register a death count of 1,200 a day, and by now the Palestinian casualty toll would be 216,000 dead or more.
That the Palestinian death toll is only a small fraction of that number attests to the lengths the Israelis go to in adhering to the international norms of warfare. Make no mistake: the actual war criminals dedicated to genocide are the Hamas savages.
The steady retreat from an initial strong backing for Israel after the Oct. 7 atrocity is motivated by a fearful Biden awash in a political panic over Muslim voters in Michigan and Minnesota threatening to withhold votes for his reelection bid.
A week ago, a Muslim demonstration in Dearborn, Mich., with a majority Arab population, erupted with shouts of “Death to America!”
Besides the scandal of illegal aliens crossing into this country at our southern border, the Dearborn hate-America fest reveals that we have a problem with legal immigration. Who are we letting into our country? That’s something that needs more attention.
Biden shies away from strong support for Israel and Ukraine and gives comfort to Hamas and Russia. What must China be making of all this? President Xi Jinping becomes increasingly vocal and belligerent about his desire to take over Taiwan, by invasion if he deems it necessary.
As America’s military budget under Biden struggles to keep up with inflation, Xi builds and expands his military.
As the Pentagon promotes “anti-racist” theories in military training and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worries about pronouns, China pumps up the martial fervor of its army. As noted previously in another johnkassnews column Biden has forgotten or failed to learn the lesson forced on America on 9/11.
The planner of that monstrous attack, Osama bin Laden, put it this way: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”
But of course Biden probably doesn’t want to be reminded about anything about bin Laden. Remember that when the opportunity came during Obama’s presidency to kill bin Laden, Biden was for holding back, waiting for more confirmation about the terrorist’s whereabouts, and worrying about the political fallout from killing him. Fortunately Obama and his other advisers ignored him and ordered bin Laden’s death.
Joe, always the faint-hearted. Obama once characterized the man who was his vice president this way: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” Former Secretary of State Robert Gates once described Biden’s record on foreign policy over 40 years in government this way: “He’s been wrong on nearly every issue.” Faint-heartedness combined with poor judgment.
Today the world is a much more dangerous place than during the Trump years, when no new wars erupted to involve America.
In these perilous times, no one should underestimate the possibility of a miscalculation that could ignite a possibly unrestrained cycle of escalation. But the lesson of history, best articulated among recent presidents by Ronald Reagan, is that strength is the best protector of peace.
Biden’s presidential record on foreign policy may go down in history as the most flagrant appeasement by a world leader since the disastrous record of Britain under Neville Chamberlain in the years leading up to World War II.
The fundamental question, the one voters must face in November, is this: Does Biden have the wisdom, judgment and courage to lead the United States in a time of peril?
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Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews, from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columnbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain.
For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages.
Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.
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