Why Isn’t the President Angry?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 11, 2024

 

Joe Biden has invested a lot of political capital in the idea that the terrorist group Hamas was a rational negotiating partner. His administration leaned into the notion that there could be, if not a negotiated settlement to Israel’s defensive war in the Gaza Strip, a brokered end to the hostage crisis Hamas inaugurated on October 7. But there won’t be.

 

Officials with the terrorist sect revealed this week that it does not have 40 living hostages in its custody, the release of whom had been the primary demand on the organization in cease-fire talks that have sprawled across the last several months. That fact perhaps explains why those prospective cease-fire deals have collapsed — not due to Israeli recalcitrance, which is all the administration seems to want to talk about in public, but the predictable perfidy of a death cult.

 

“The assertion raised fears that more hostages might be dead,” the New York Times reported — a tally that could include the five Americans in Hamas’s hands. If true, that would constitute an attack on the United States, an extension of the unspeakable barbarism that took the lives of 32 Americans on 10/7.

 

This affront is, to say the least, enraging. So why isn’t the president enraged? His administration has taken the news in stride. Indeed, for the last several months, Biden has seemed to hold his emotions in check only until the subject of Israel’s battlefield conduct is raised. Perhaps that was defensible amid sensitive negotiations with Hamas and its Middle Eastern intermediaries, but it’s not defensible any longer. If the death cult that calls itself the sovereign in the Gaza Strip cannot produce the hostages in its custody, the hostage talks are functionally over.

 

Or, at least, they should be. But that assumes the administration has a limited appetite for humiliation abroad. Biden and the West have been played for fools by Hamas for weeks on end. The president’s interlocutors are bad-faith actors. They have strung the United States and its allies along by promulgating the faulty impression that they had valuable chips to play in Doha and Cairo. It was a stall tactic, and it worked like a charm. The targets of that ploy, the president among them, are justified in their righteous fury. So why don’t we see that from Biden?

 

I don’t mean that the president should theatrically emote as part of some calculated political maneuver. This is not the BP oil spill, a disaster that led Democratic political consultants to conclude that Barack Obama should use the opportunity to neutralize the impression among voters that his professorial demeanor rendered him unapproachable and aloof. An overcoached reaction to the abuse and probable murder of Hamas’s hostages would be worse than no reaction at all. Something approximating a genuine human response to a months-long campaign of subterfuge culminating in the possible murder of Americans by a foreign terrorist organization shouldn’t need coaching.

 

Obama’s aloofness was practiced, which is why he needed to be instructed out of it. But Joe Biden’s detachment is something else. If his administration’s bottomless tolerance for disruptive and unsympathetic anti-Israel demonstrators and its lopsided fixation with policing the conduct of Israel’s war against a mutual adversary didn’t come off as blinkered before, it most certainly will now. Maintaining that myopia still would reflect a degree of indifference to our shared reality that Americans should not tolerate in our president.

 

Perhaps the president isn’t indifferent. Maybe he’s simply scared — not just for his own reelection prospects, tenuous though they may be, but of what acknowledging Hamas’s actions obliges him to do. That diagnosis would make sense. His administration has been plagued by fear; fear of Russian escalation if they gave Ukraine the tools to win its war rather than simply not lose, fear of what the Taliban would do if they blew through a self-set deadline to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, fear of having to restore stability to a region rocked by Iranian-backed terrorist attacks on Americans and their allies. The White House projects weakness and intimidation, a posture that encourages our adversaries. America’s enemies do not understand where Biden’s lines are, and they will keep testing him until they find one. This must be it.

 

Biden has shown incalculable patience with Hamas’s dilatory tactics, but that patience should reach its end with the news that it was all a game. The president and the nation he leads have been soundly embarrassed. It’s incumbent on Biden to summon at least some of the rage his countrymen feel and act accordingly. Americans and the world are watching, Mr. President. It’s your move.