Biden Devotes His Speech on Threats to U.S. Security to How Awful Americans Are

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 20, 2023

 

The Oval Office is a momentous platform. It should be reserved for matters of sobering and serious import. And the subject to which Joe Biden ostensibly dedicated his primetime address to the nation is worthy of that stage. An emerging alliance among anti-American great powers, rogue nations, and a constellation of stateless terrorist groups is working toward the goal of hastening America’s decline and replacing the U.S.-led order with something ugly, violent, and pre-modern. Last night, Biden warned America of that emerging challenge — a little. But his speech also focused to an utterly superfluous degree on latent evils that lurk within his fellow Americans’ hearts.

 

Biden deserves credit for speaking plainly about the “evil” Hamas perpetrated, and he was right when he observed that the October 7 massacre did not occur in a vacuum. The president connected the slaughter of over 1,400 Israelis, Jews, and foreign nationals to the war in Ukraine — not just in terms of their tactical similarities (“mass” murder, “torture,” “rape used as a weapon,” and the abduction of civilians) but in strategic terms as well.

 

“Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine and it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups in the region,” the president said. “Meanwhile, Putin has turned to Iran and North Korea to buy attack drones and ammunition to terrorize Ukrainian cities and people.”

 

It’s all related, and not just in theory. As the president spoke, an ongoing series of attacks attributable to Iran’s proxy militias in the Middle East targeted U.S. positions with drones and rockets. The attacks on America’s partners and its interests abroad are only a prelude. “American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe,” Biden added. “To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”

 

The president might have limited his remarks to this stirring call to action. But he did not. Instead, the president veered wildly into a neurotic digression in which he dwelled on the hatreds that supposedly consume Americans in times of trouble — a mindless barbarism that afflicts the American soul, which Biden scorned from his Olympian remove.

 

“We have to be honest with ourselves,” the president scoffed. “In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia right here in America.” The October 7 attacks have intensified those hatreds, Biden warned. He condemned with righteous and justifiable contempt one psychopathic murder of a Muslim child and the stabbing of his mother as well as the climate of fear descending upon America’s Jewish community. “We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism,” Biden said. “We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.” Hardly controversial stuff there. But what might have been a throat-clearing deviation from the serious business of preserving American hegemony against an axis of revisionist nations consumed much of the rest of the speech.

 

Biden urged Americans to resist the “fear and suspicion, anger and rage” to which they so readily succumb in times of insecurity. “When I was in Israel yesterday, I said that when America experienced the hell of 9/11, we felt enraged as well. While we sought and got justice, we made mistakes,” Biden added. “So, I cautioned the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.” Biden’s preemptive admonition of Israel, advising it to avoid doing things it is already not doing, is repellent enough. The line gives succor to those who retail defamatory allegations against Israel, which serve only to promote the notion that Israel is defending itself with inhumane zeal. But beyond that, Biden’s admonition contains the implication that Americans were similarly blinded by hate after the September 11 attacks. That is slander.

 

Biden’s disparagement of his fellow citizens and his implied indictment of how they behaved after 9/11 is a work of revisionist history — one that is relentlessly promoted by activists, the academy, and the press. It’s a fiction that has been internalized by the caste of overeducated, youngish professionals who have little memory of the post-9/11 environment but feel nonetheless confident to write presidential speeches about it.

 

There were, of course, episodes of thoughtless hatred following the 9/11 attacks, but FBI hate-crime statistics in the years 2000 to 2008 show that violent anti-Muslim episodes were mercifully rare, and the phenomenon was fleeting. “In 2000, the FBI recorded 28 instances of anti-Islamic hate crimes,” Jonathan Tobin observed in Commentary. “That went up considerably to 554 in 2001, the year of 9/11, but then went down in 2002 to 170. That number remained relatively stable throughout the decade.” By contrast, the number of hate crimes against other American minorities — Jews in particular — vastly outpaced those targeting Muslims despite the alleged epidemic of mindless jingoism abroad in the land.

Those who lived through the attacks recall entreaties to charity toward Muslim Americans from President George W. Bush. They remember the interfaith-outreach efforts that typified the American mainstream, the vigilance of law enforcement on the Muslim community’s behalf, and the national campaign by media outlets who assumed the worst of their fellow Americans aimed at destigmatizing Islamic practice. There were terrible exceptions and “complaints of quiet but persistent bias,” but that only proves the rule.

 

Perhaps the president was casting fashionable aspersions on America’s post-9/11 projects abroad as well as scolding its citizens at home. Maybe he sought to indict the ouster of the Middle East’s foremost supporter of terrorism from power, or the folly of seeking to replace al-Qaeda’s sponsors in Kabul with friendlier faces. Having presided over the Taliban’s restoration, that would serve Biden’s interests. But what does that have to do with Iran’s murderous puppets in the region, Russia’s territorial expansionism, North Korea’s arsenal of illiberalism, or China’s irredentism? It’s little more than a public display of self-flagellation, the effect of which could only be to dampen the American resolve Biden ostensibly set out to summon.

 

“I know we have our divisions at home,” Biden continued. “We have to get past them. We can’t let petty, partisan, angry politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation.” By all accounts, however, Americans do stand ready to meet these challenges to the U.S.-led order abroad despite a loud partisan minority that hates its domestic political opponents more than it fears America’s foreign enemies.

 

Polling shows that Americans do support and hope to promote Israel’s right to self-defense. Americans do understand the threat to U.S. national interests posed by a wider war in the region, which Iran and its allies risk precipitating. Americans do believe that backing Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s war of conquest is an American geopolitical priority. Biden devoted undue attention to the Americans who oppose these efforts, but why? To fabricate a troglodytic caricature against whom he could inveigh? That is precisely the sentiment he supposedly set out to anathematize.

 

“In moments like these,” Biden concluded, “we have to remember who we are.” Rather, it seems like it’s the president and the people with whom he’s surrounded himself who need reminding.