In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln famously appealed to the “better angels of our nature” as the country descended into civil war. Lincoln’s words expressed a last hope. In the end, it took four bitter years of conflict to create, at Appomattox, the silence in which our better angels could finally be heard. Still, President Lincoln never stopped listening, even in the darkest moments of the conflict, to his own better angels. When it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism, either Joe Biden’s better angels are silent, or he is too deaf to hear them.
How else are we to interpret his recent action to suspend a previously promised shipment of Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS) to Israel? The express purpose of this action was to compel Israel, as stated in Congressional testimony by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, to not launch its attack on the final Hamas stronghold of Rafah “without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battle space.”
This is so wrong on so many levels that one scarcely knows where to begin.
First, it fails to acknowledge that, at every stage of its current operations in Gaza, Israel has bent over backward to minimize “civilian” casualties. I put “civilian” in quotation marks because, from day one, Hamas has completely ignored and brutally exploited any distinction between civilian and military. On Oct. 7, Hamas “soldiers” — their word, certainly not mine — deliberately and almost exclusively targeted the most vulnerable civilians. Hamas fighters have worn civilian clothing and hidden among a regrettably complaisant civilian population. Despite these egregious violations of every law of civilized warfare, Israel has been careful, often at the cost of IDF casualties, to account for and protect civilians who are in the battle space.
A further irony is that the JDAMS are explicitly designed to ensure precision targeting. Since Oct. 7, at every stage in the evolving conflict, Israel has demonstrated a genuinely astonishing capability to engage legitimate military targets with great care. I detest the term “surgical” in this context since warfare can never be surgical, but, by any reasonable standard, the Israelis have used precision munitions with great care. The contrast with the missiles fired by Hamas, Hezbollah, and, in Iran’s massive attack, could not be more stark. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 96: We’re Playing Dangerous Games in the Middle East)
By suspending the shipment of JDAMS, the Biden administration might well be saying “Use dumb bombs, kill more innocents, and expose yourselves to more mindless criticism from the world press.” Or it could be telling Israel to make Rafah a purely ground battle, a close-quarters slugging match with infantry and tanks, in the end just as brutal, but with many more Israeli casualties along the way. Dead Israelis seem to be of little concern to Biden as the conflict enters its most critical phase. When it comes to securing Michigan’s electoral votes, Jewish lives seem to matter very little.
And this is what the suspension is all about; it’s the kind of mindless virtue signaling that will go down well on Ivy League campuses and with the likes of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, but, in concrete terms, will only prolong the humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe that Gaza has become. It’s of a piece with more facile nonsense from our demonstrably unserious Secretary of Defense.
In a recent Congressional testimony, Secretary Austin tried, repeatedly, to insist that deploying a thousand troops to Gaza to erect a pier for humanitarian aid, would not put U.S. “boots on the ground.” Reading the testimony, one is reminded that Democrats have a penchant for hair-splitting. Austin’s prevarications recall nothing so much as Bill Clinton’s definition of “sex” and even “is” as he tried to wriggle his way past the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (RELATED from James H. McGee: Biden’s Gaza Pier Is ‘Black Hawk Down’ All Over Again)
We’ve seen this coming almost from the beginning. On the morning of Oct. 8, even as one horrific news item followed another, I wrote in these pages of the need, once and for all, to stand unequivocally with Israel. At that time, I expressed my concern that Biden would quickly begin to waffle in his support for Israel, and so he has, all the more so as naked anti-Semitism has emerged from the cesspit of “progressive” left-wing politics. A better man than Biden might have called out those among the Democrats who have countenanced or even encouraged this, but, on his best days, his message has been contradictory to the point of utter incoherence.
Instead, he panders. This latest gesture is nothing more than pandering: Pandering to the campus crazies and their allies in the mainstream media, pandering to the faction within his own State Department that still pursues Obama’s idiot dreams of accommodation with Iran, and pandering to anyone whose support he needs to cling to the presidency past 2024. No serious person, here or abroad, respects this. From the Afghanistan withdrawal to this latest betrayal of an ally, this administration has demonstrated that, as long as it exercises power, the United States is not to be trusted.
Months ago now, I wrote that there was a sure path to peace in Gaza — a path that, in the final analysis, represented the best possible humanitarian outcome for the people of Gaza and peace in the Middle East. That path meant demanding that Hamas either surrender or be utterly crushed. Now cornered in Rafah, that moment has arrived, and predictably, Hamas and its backers are doing everything possible to wriggle out from this necessary reckoning. At that time I also wrote that Israel was “the canary in the coal mine,” and that those who hate Israel also hate us. The daily chants of “death to America” and the spoliation of American war memorials by pro-Hamas demonstrators make this all too clear.
But Joe Biden seems determined to allow Hamas to survive, and to enable it, in due time, to come back stronger than ever — all to appease his left-wing, anti-Semitic base. We will pay a price for this someday. That day may come soon.
Abraham Lincoln understood better. He knew that, in the end, an appeal to the “better angels” could not be mistaken for craven submission to the whims of the moment. Would that we had such leadership today.
Instead, we have Joe Biden.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.
