Now that President Biden does not have to worry about getting reelected and therefore does not need to avoid angering Muslim voters, perhaps he should consider going back to following his instincts and resume his full-throated support for Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas. It will be recalled that from the moment the enormity of what had happened on Oct. 7 became apparent, President Biden promptly adopted Israel’s view of the necessity of destroying Hamas, pledging unequivocal U.S. political and materiel support for the effort.
Unfortunately, virulently anti-Israel Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib – the sole Palestinian-American member of Congress and other Arab-American leaders – knew exactly which button to push in response. They warned President Biden that come election time, their community would not forget that he did not call on Israel to agree to an early ceasefire in Gaza which, of course, would have saved Hamas.
According to NBC News, while Muslims make up only 1.3% of the U.S. population – about half the size of the Jewish population – their voters are bunched up and critical in battleground states that may be won or lost by narrow margins, including Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia and Arizona.
The President soon began citing the since discredited, Hamas-supplied, highly inflated statistics of Palestinian civilian casualties and talking about never proven allegations of “indiscriminate” Israeli air attacks which unnecessarily killed or wounded Palestinian civilians. His Secretary of State Antony Blinken began speaking about avoiding civilian casualties as priority number one – not eliminating Hamas. There was also talk of leveraging U.S. weapons supplies to get the IDF to tamp down the fighting. Both acknowledged that Hamas used civilians as human shields and the National Security Adviser freely noted that Israel did more to protect civilians in battle zones than any other army in modern history.
The bottom line for the U.S. thus became a Hamas-manipulated limit on how Israel could fight its war with Hamas, thereby encouraging Hamas’s recalcitrance and terrorism. But the problem didn’t end there.
When President Biden focused most attention on preventing civilian casualties and not the defeat of Hamas as the prime concern while also accusing Israel of indiscriminate bombing raids, he ineluctably fed into claims that Israel was guilty of war crimes. And this in turn, could not but fan the flames of antisemitism across the country.
And it’s not as if the former Senator Joe Biden from Delaware, who had been a friend of Israel and the Jewish community for decades, actually thought that the IDF went out of its way to kill Palestinians.
So now may be an opportune time for Mr. Biden to clean up the mess.
