Hamas Is Not Afraid of the Biden-Harris Administration

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 03, 2024

 

Perhaps the most affecting moment of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention was the speech given by the parents of Hamas hostage and U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

 

The 23-year-old captive’s parents showed all the anguish and anxiety that would befall anyone in their unendurable position. With wavering voices, they recounted Hersh’s story. An attendee of the Nova music festival, he was featured in one of the grisly videos Hamas terrorists took of their demonic works, being dragged off into Gaza after part of his left arm had been blown off by a hand grenade — a wound he suffered while attempting to save his friends from a similar fate. As television cameras at the DNC wheeled around to the audience, attendees could be seen brushing away tears. Democrats felt every ounce of their pain. Together with Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the attendees resolved to “bring them home.”

 

But Hersh Goldberg-Polin would not be coming home. He and five more Hamas hostages were xexecuted by their captors as members of the Israel Defense Forces closed in on their position in Rafah, after spending months detained in conditions suggestive of abuse and neglect. The Hamas terrorists did not fear the consequences associated with putting a bullet into a defenseless American citizen, and why should they? They had no reason to think twice before killing an American because the U.S. hadn’t given them one.

 

The Biden administration’s principals talk a good game about the need for a robust response to the October 7 massacre — an attack in which 32 U.S. citizens were slaughtered — that neutralizes Hamas as a political and military force in the Gaza Strip. But when the IDF acts on this imperative, it is subject to endless carping from the administration. Its hands are tied and much-needed weapons are withheld with the aim of putting an end to the war that leaves Israel short of its stated objective. The result of this schizophrenic policy has been to prolong the war and provide Hamas ample evidence that, if it just holds out long enough, it can survive to massacre even more Israelis and Americans.

 

This isn’t the only American blood on the hands of the constellation of terrorists in orbit around Iran. In January, three U.S. soldiers were killed in a Shiite militia-led attack on an American outpost in Jordan. There have been countless attempts on American lives since the 10/7 attacks. U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria have come under near-continuous assault for the last eleven months. Yemen’s Houthi rebels — another Iran proxy — have engaged in a ceaseless campaign of attacks on U.S. navy assets and Western commercial vessels, and they are utterly undeterred by the Biden administration’s pinprick retaliatory measures. Indeed, in July the Houthis mounted a sophisticated drone attack on Tel Aviv in an attempt to target the U.S. diplomatic mission there — an operation that quite nearly succeeded.

 

Iran and its proxies can rest easy insofar as the sophisticated Western response to the horrors they orchestrate is to blame the victims. Just survey the reaction to the execution of Goldberg-Polin and his fellow hostages over the weekend, which some bloodlessly attributed to Hamas’s “change in policy” following the successful liberation of some of its captives earlier this summer. Joe Biden insists he’s “working tirelessly” on a deal that will result in Hamas sacrificing all its remaining leverage over Israel, probably not in exchange for its permanent, voluntary dissolution.

 

Axios reporter Barak Ravid relates that the thinking among Biden officials is that Benjamin Netanyahu is the recalcitrant party here. As such, the administration must hash out the terms of an agreement that is amenable to Egypt, Qatar, and, yes, Hamas — terms that will be imposed on Israel whether it likes them  or not — as though the true obstacle to a temporary cease-fire deal isn’t the party that has rejected the administration’s overtures time and time again. For her part, Kamala Harris’s statement following the murder of an American accepted the reality that Hamas is “evil” and that it “cannot control Gaza.” But she, too, insisted on the need for a cease-fire deal that renders Hamas the arbiter of events in the region.

 

Both Harris and Biden perfunctorily insist that Hamas will “pay for these crimes.” But how? Who will be the author of this vengeance? That question is left unanswered because the administration does not have an answer. Hamas knows it will not suffer the wrath of an aggrieved America. It understands that this administration is as invested in restraining Israel as in deterring Iran. When Israel is unsuccessfully attacked by a full-scale barrage of drones and missiles emanating from Iran, it is told to “take the win” as though a successful defense is some rare species of victory. When Israel is closing in on its captives, it is castigated from great moral heights over its wholly imaginary disregard for Palestinian civilian life. When Israel takes out terrorist leaders in pristinely targeted operations — terrorists with U.S. bounties on their heads who are responsible for the mass murder of U.S. soldiers — the president and his officers occupy themselves with handwringing over what Hezbollah might do next.

 

This has it precisely backward: It is America’s enemies who should be consumed with apprehension over our next move. But America’s enemies do not fear this president. The murderers who butchered one of our own fear only the wrath of the IDF, a fear tempered slightly by the Biden administration’s efforts to restrain Israel from meting out the retribution they deserve. The terrorists take solace in the Democratic Party’s attachment to shibboleths — the desirability of a “cease-fire” that puts an end to “the suffering in Gaza” and the necessity of a “two-state solution.” Hamas does not share these objectives. It will not be transformed into a responsible sovereign of the territory it seized in a coup. It is a collection of murderous thugs who speak only the language of strength. And in the Biden administration, they see only weakness.

 

American citizens who may be operating under the flawed assumption that there are real consequences associated with kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Americans must recalibrate their expectations. No one is coming to save them — not with this cast of characters in charge — and America’s enemies know it.