AS U.S. COLLEGES and universities futilely attempt to cope with ‘micro-intifada’ training, comprised of protests, occupations, and violence from pro-Hamas demonstrators in ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampments’ on campus, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to save his nation, faith, political career, and legacy. For him, it’s existential.
There have been rumors since early May that the International Criminal Court may issue an arrest warrant against him and other Israeli leaders for allegedly waging a genocidal campaign in Gaza. News isn’t always true these days, to be sure, but it seems Netanyahu has been fairly restrained and sober in his response to the Hamas threat. And, IMO, he has also been too deferential to the corrupt senile occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, who seems to think the Israeli leader should roll over and play dead, but maybe not before the I.C.C. acts.
“Israel expects the leaders of the free world to come out strongly against this scandalous step, a step that will harm the self-defense not only of the State of Israel, but of all democracies,” the P.M. prodded world leaders. Netanyahu, who typically overstates his positions, said that issuing a warrant against him would be an “antisemitic hate crime.” And why not? Isn’t everyone antisemitic these days? And isn’t everything a ‘hate’ crime?
The illicit and corrupt Biden regime says it opposes such an action against Netanyahu because Israel has not recognized the I.C.C.’s jurisdiction, a claim the U.S. also made over I.C.C. actions against itself in Afghanistan. Russia was quick to point out the hypocrisy that the U.S. not only supported, but encouraged the issuance of I.C.C. warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin last year for its military action in Ukraine. Yet neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties either.
And still, Biden has done absolutely nothing to lessen the hostilities. If anything, he has fomented dissent by pandering to pro-Hamas protesters at least in part because they are a target demographic in his inexplicable and reprehensible campaign for president. It is also why he now placates them by bringing Gaza refugees to the U.S. and making them U.S. citizens by executive order, something hardly anyone supports or should support, especially in light of the U.S. border crisis. However, despite his inaction, there has slowly been a reduction in violence at the campuses due to arrests, and the occupations have finally begun to be broken up by police. This was a big breakthrough since most school administrators and educators are, like Biden, so ineffectual or are part of the problem themselves.
Netanyahu has recently become emboldened to make his own demand for the U.S. to crack down on pro-Hamas student protests, calling a failure to do so ‘antisemitism.’ He’s not wrong, but that doesn’t mean he’s right, because in fact, many of the protesters are Jewish themselves. And never mind Palestinians are Arabs and Arabs are Semitic people, too.
You’d think Biden would have the human decency to at least be embarrassed by his ineptitude, insincerity, and hypocrisy, but he just plays both sides. His is an existential political journey, too. And one he absolutely must lose, if America is to retain any credibility in the world.
The Biden regime recently urged Congress and the hopelessly feckless and naive new House Speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), to pony up more big bucks hustled from American taxpayers for Israel, but it was a gratuitous insult to also include funds for Hamas, who, after all, instigated this latest round of violence in the Holy Land. (Would Biden’s handlers similarly offer charitable aid to Russia in addition to funding the Ukraine regime, for example?)
Also insulting was the amount of money was dwarfed by the heaps of cash and weapons the U.S. has bestowed on Ukraine’s corrupt President Volodymyr Zelensky, though in fairness, Israel has always been the recipient of disproportional aid packages, amounting to $3.8 billion annually, thanks to extremely effective lobbying by AIPAC. A cutback is certainly in order, though the timing is unfortunate.
AIPAC will be spending oodles of money—in a way, offset by American aid in a cynical sort of way—on the U.S. elections, which is another reason the dangerous kook in the White House is attempting to talk through both sides of his mouth. Even with his rapidly progressing dementia, though, Biden groks the threat from the AIPAC website: “[AIPAC] is the largest pro-Israel PAC in America and contributed more resources directly to candidates than any other PAC. 98% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general election races in 2022.” (Emphasis added.) And as between Biden and pro-Israeli Donald Trump, guess who AIPAC will endorse? The only question is whether American Jews will care what AIPAC thinks, given Jews tend to vote Democrat. They just might not now.
Indeed, Israel clearly learned the business of government from its America masters over the decades, just as Netanyahu learned activism, propaganda, and the art of politics from M.I.T. and Harvard. For anyone not clear on this point need only look at Netayahu’s massive Israeli settlement expansion, turning an obvious provocation into a political fait d’accompli.
The pledge of additional aid from the U.S. last month may metaphorically become a mirage in the Negev, however. Biden has placed often changing conditions on how the aid can be used by Jerusalem. And for the most part, Netanyahu had obeyed the Big Guy.
For example, Netanyahu held off on initiating an operation to demolish a massive maze of tunnels to Rafah, on the Israeli border town of Gaza and Egypt which was engineered to deliver weapons and supplies to Palestinians to fight Israel. It was considered the last stronghold of Hamas in Gaza. But it is also being used as a lifeline to transport humanitarian aid to Gazans—at least until Israel issued an evacuation call this month in anticipation of its planned offensive. (A fairly accurate, albeit Arab description is here.)
Some, but not all in the U.S., including Biden, agreed and still agree with the United Nations, that this operation could be a humanitarian disaster, however, and the American regime is now withholding delivery of long-awaited supplies to its best Middle Eastern ally.
For its part, the State Department has concluded it is “reasonable to assess” that Israel has violated international law by pursuing its military operation in Gaza (a belief echoed by an independent task force), yet remarkably didn’t find its offense such that aid should be withheld. Such conflicting messaging is both confusing and angering its recipient.
Whether the operation would or would not result in a humanitarian disaster is not dispositive of the fact that the U.S. has unequivocally betrayed Israel by withholding aid, pure and simple. It’s not a good look, nor is it promising for international relationships with present and future allies who will no longer trust American promises of international support or military largess.
That it may, indeed, become a humanitarian crisis, also doesn’t address whether and to what extent Hamas has some culpability here, too. After all, Israel was attacked first by Hamas. The duplicity of the Biden regime continues to amaze. Would it, for example, tell its comrades in Ukraine to stop winning, but still send it weapons bought and paid for by weary U.S. taxpayers?
A big takeaway is that Rafah was a figurative bomb waiting to explode for years, and should’ve been shut down by Israeli Defense Forces earlier. As it stands on Friday, Israel’s Security Cabinet has voted to expand the Rafah operation while keeping settlement talks with Egyptian mediators open in an effort to obtain the release of at least 128 hostages still held by Hamas since Oct. 7th, the day its terrorists invaded Israel, killing 1,139, taking 200 hostage.
Egypt waits and worries as to what comes next. After translating it into Hebrew, Netanyahu gave Biden an unequivocal middle finger and sent the I.D.F. to the Palestine side of Rafah to conduct aircraft strikes, which apparently killed ‘terrorists.’
As an aside, I don’t recall common usage of the word ‘terrorist’ until Netanyahu arrived on the public scene in the early ‘90s, even though tensions in the region have been present since the establishment of Israel in 1948. He overstates things, so one can only hope, in a perverse sort of way, that they really were terrorists.
Notably on Friday, the U.N. General Assembly voted, 143-9, for a resolution to confer to the “state of Palestine” certain rights and privileges reserved only for member states, which, of course, ‘Palestine’ is not. In fact, most people probably don’t even know the U.N. recognized Palestinian ‘statehood’ for its own purposes back in 2012, allowing it observer status in the Assembly. It’s sort of an international legal fiction.
But a U.N. member? The U.S., and obviously Israel, voted nay. True statehood would have to be recognized bilaterally with other states. And full U.N. membership will still need to go back to the Security Council. Joe Lauria of Consortium News explains it well, here.
The problems with the U.N. resolution are myriad. It defies principles in the U.N. Charter, for one thing. It renders definitions of terms in major international documents into a mockery of law and language, for another. It also essentially rewards terrorism. And it renders the U.S. financially liable for yet another U.N. undertaking—and one it doesn’t even support. And now an Israeli envoy is demanding the U.S. cut U.N. funding, which is actually a good idea. It starts to look a lot like NATO and the foolhardy plan to invite Ukraine to an outdated relic of history at enormous cost to the U.S., both fiscally and politically.
Sadly, a two-state solution was always rejected by the Palestinian Authority and its military arm, Hamas. Now it is an impossibility, and renders statehood an impossibly fluid concept for the rest of the world. Optimistically, the U.S. may, at least, shed itself of the burden of paying for the U.N., albeit, as it recklessly shifts the money to any of a number of corrupt or hostile states.
As it turns out, back in the U.S., just as many of us suspected, CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other agitpropists such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundation are behind the bedlam. Most of their useful idiots don’t even know what they’re protesting about, other than evil ‘Zionists,’ transparently meaning all Jews. Ask the protesters, donning their designer unisex keffiyehs, for example, what river and sea it is that they refer to in their chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.’ They have no idea.
The protesters just tear down the American flag on campus and replace it with a Palestinian one, but we shouldn’t wonder why. After all, they saw former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her comrades feverishly waving Ukraine flags or watched her unceremoniously and disrespectfully rip up a State of the Union Address delivered by President Trump inside the House chamber. They don’t know any better.
What these student protesters do know is they’re getting paid (!), given tents in which to occupy the campus grounds, and that their demands are being largely met by the Biden regime. An extremely enlightening article about this is here.
Their demands for delicious hot meals and regular heath monitoring from school administrators are largely being ignored, though. And why not? It turns out, most aren’t even matriculated, so the schools have no obligation to cater to them. And those demanding passing grades and degrees have done little to earn them. Between this, Covid, and the Occupy movement, this will surely be the stupidest generation ever produced!
The protesters whine about not having their voices heard, especially by the free-speech advocates they so detest, but it is their acts that makes them repelled. In that regard, they are zealots like those they are defending—they demand one listen to them and by extension, do as they say, without delay or contradiction, or else… Whatever happened to debate clubs or moot courts? They must’ve gone the way of five-and-dime stores and integrity.
sua sponte 