By Jim Geraghty
Monday, May 13, 2024
The Washington Post, Saturday morning:
The Biden administration, working
urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering
Israel valuable assistance in an effort to persuade it to hold back, including sensitive
intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas
leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people
familiar with the U.S. offers. [Emphasis added.]
So, the U.S. knows where the Hamas leaders are hiding but
isn’t telling the Israelis?
For a moment, forget blindsiding the Israelis and not telling them about Hamas’s counteroffer and ruse that it
had agreed to a cease-fire deal, forget the Gaza Pier, forget cutting off arms exports to Israel . . . if we know
where Hamas leaders such as Yahya Sinwar, the accused architect of the October
7 attacks, are hiding, why would we not tell the Israelis that? Why would we
effectively protect Hamas leaders?
Why are we protecting the lives of the leaders of a terrorist organization that has taken Americans
hostage?
For months now, there have been consistent reports that
Sinwar keeps hostages around him to deter any operation to capture or kill him.
From a Post report in February:
The Israeli military is confident
that Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar, the alleged architect of
the Oct. 7 attacks, is hiding inside a labyrinthine network of tunnels beneath
southern Gaza. But he is surrounded by a human shield of hostages intended to
deter an operation to capture or kill him, frustrating Israel’s efforts to
dismantle the terrorist organization and bring the more than four-month-long
war to a close. . . .
Sinwar is believed to be bunkered
in the warren of tunnels beneath Khan Younis, the city in southern Gaza where
he was born in 1962 into a family that had been forced out of the Palestinian
town of Majdal, now Ashkelon, in the wake of Israel’s 1948 war for
independence. U.S. officials said they concur with the Israeli assessment that
Sinwar is hiding somewhere underneath his hometown and has surrounded himself
with hostages, an ultimate insurance policy. . . .
In recent days, some officials
have speculated that Sinwar may have moved a few miles away to Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
Israeli officials have publicly disputed press claims that Sinwar escaped over
the border.
If you know where the Hamas leaders are, you will
probably find at least some of the hostages nearby. And we’re refusing to share
this information with the Israelis, unless they make concessions?
Whose side are we on? Because right now, it really looks
like we’re acting like Hamas’s defense attorney, trying to get it the best deal
possible.
I want to remind you of President Biden’s words on October 7, 2023:
In this moment of tragedy, I want
to say to them and to the world and to terrorists everywhere that the United
States stands with Israel. We will not ever fail to have their back.
We’ll make sure they have the
help their citizens need and they can continue to defend themselves. . . .
And my administration’s support
for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering. . . .
And let there be no mistake: The
United States stands with the State of Israel, just as we have from the moment
the United States became the first nation to recognize Israel, 11 minutes after
its founding, 75 years ago.
Since then, Biden has broken every word of that pledge.
On Friday, Axios quoted a pro-Israel
Democratic leader putting the best possible spin on how Biden has handled the
conflict so far:
Mark Mellman, the president and
CEO of the influential group Democratic Majority for Israel, told Axios that
“there has never been a president more pro-Israel than Joe Biden but at the
same time we are very concerned about what appears to be a significant shift in
US policy.
Horsepucky.
The term “gaslighting” gets thrown around willy-nilly
these days, and it is often misused as a synonym for “a statement I don’t
like,” or run-of-the-mill lying. Traditionally, it’s supposed to be more
insidious and manipulative, an attempt to make you doubt what you know for
certain and fool you into believing a false narrative of events. Up is down,
left is right, the lights in the room are not getting dimmer.
Running around insisting that “there has never been a
president more pro-Israel than Joe Biden” while the president and his team
refuse to turn over the exact information that Israel has been hunting since
the beginning of the war, with the lives of hostages in the balance, is
spectacular gaslighting. I mean, that’s just chef’s kiss.
President Biden appeared at a campaign fundraiser at the Seattle Art Museum on
Sunday, and for a few moments veered off script and started acknowledging
the obvious, before realizing that what he was saying was contradicting his
recent policy decisions:
Look, before I begin, let me
answer a question related to the hostage deal I get — keep getting asked by the
press and all the folks out there.
You know, there would be a
ceasefire tomorrow if Hara- — Hamas would release the hostages — the women and
the elderly and the wounded. Israel said it’s up to Hamas; if they wanted to do
it, we could end it tomorrow. And the ceasefire would begin tomorrow. It all
has to do — you know, we’ve not — anyway, I don’t want to — I guess I shouldn’t
get into all this about Israel. But, you know — well, I don’t want to get
going, I guess. (Laughter.)
But, look, I want to thank you
for your support and — for this campaign, especially Brad and — and Kathy
Smith. Brad, you’ve been — we were — where — there you are. We were recently in
another part of the world — in Wisconsin doing an incredible job.
Can’t let Grandpa Magoo speak off-the-cuff for too long!
He might acknowledge that his administration is bending over backward to save
the terrorist organization that started the war, broke the previous
cease-fires, keeps refusing new cease-fire offers, refuses to release the
hostages — American hostages! — and keeps raping the hostages.
A lot of Democrats know that the president’s stance on
the conflict is a contradictory hodge-podge at best. It began with the right
words and actions, and is has slowly morphed into a de facto pro-Hamas stance,
driven by a spectacularly wrongheaded notion that the entire presidential
election comes down to Michigan (it may not) and that winning Michigan comes
down to Arab-American, Muslim-American, and Palestinian-American voters. (If
Biden had a high job-approval rating on the economy and the border right now,
he wouldn’t be worried about the campus-activist voters drifting to Cornel West
and Jill Stein or staying home.)
Once a Democratic official is safely retired, or near
retirement, they can acknowledge the obvious. Most of the young rabid
anti-Israel protesters don’t know the first thing about the Middle East, don’t
know which river and which sea they’re chanting about, and
operate from a “colonial oppressor vs. noble savage” mindset that completely misreads the history
of the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Hillary Clinton is never running for office again,
so she can admit what everyone else can see — Democrats are
attempting to placate a youth-activist corps that doesn’t know squat about any
of this:
“I have had many conversations,
as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now,” she
said on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “They don’t know very much at
all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many
areas of the world, including in our own country.”
Ms. Clinton then went on to imply
that young people “don’t know” that had Yasir Arafat, the former leader of the
Palestinian Authority, accepted a deal brokered by her husband, President Bill
Clinton, the Palestinians would already have a state of their own. “It’s one of
the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say yes,” she said.
Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer is running for reelection,
but he’s 84 and usually wins with about two-thirds of the vote. He got surprisingly blunt in an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju:
While not mentioning [New York
Democrat Jamaal] Bowman specifically or calling out any members by name, Hoyer
said some of his colleagues’ rhetoric has given him pause.
“I regret that there are members
who really are in effect, I think, reflecting the views of Hamas, which are to
kill Jews and eliminate Israel,” Hoyer said.
Hear that? There’s a de facto pro-Hamas caucus in the
U.S. House of Representatives.
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