Rapper Macklemore, who owns two Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers along with collaborator Ryan Lewis, just released a song in solidarity with the Palestinians and their well-wishers on American college campuses.
He calls it “Hind’s Hall,” the name activists at Columbia University rechristened Hamilton Hall to honor a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces earlier this year. He raps: “The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all / And, f*** no, I’m not voting for you in the fall.”
Eight years ago, Macklemore proudly posed for a picture with Joe Biden at the White House. Midway through Biden’s 2021 inauguration, the rapper released a dis track aimed at his Election Day opponent called “Trump’s Over Freestyle.” (READ MORE: Zero Championships for Hamas)
Like many on the left, he now feels buyer’s remorse. In a song, he articulates — with more of a grunt than with eloquence — the opposition to Israel felt by many self-styled progressives. A few merely do not like their tax dollars funding war overseas. Others go further and regard the Israelis as colonizers and mark Israel for extinction (strangely while depicting the war as a genocide against the Palestinians). It remains a visceral opposition, which means it comes from the place of appetites and not intellect.
Whatever motivates the Left on Israel seems less important than the fact that it appears motivated.
In “Hind’s Hall,” one hears the conviction in this rapper’s voice and grasps the number of young people influenced by him. It sonically instills a sense of why Biden faces a nightmare in piecing together a winning coalition.
Jews account for, by some estimates, roughly half of the dollars donated to the Democratic Party and its candidates and causes. Democratic dollars and Democratic energy clash on Biden administration policy toward the Israel-Hamas war, leaving party “leaders” who take their cues from their ostensible followers confused as to their most politically expedient course.
According to a survey taken months before the current violence, 49 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians, while just 38 percent sympathized more with the Israelis (Republican and independent sympathies veer heavily toward the Israelis). Earlier this year, months after the violence started, 9 percent of Democrats regarded the U.S. as “not supportive enough” of the Israelis as compared to 44 percent who said the same about U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, according to an Associated Press poll.
Observationally, the bias toward the Palestinians over the Israelis looks more intense, far more intense, among activists. These people include communists and other troubled types not in the Democratic Party orbit to begin with. Their ranks also include those who knock on doors, stuff mailers, and hold signs bearing the names of Democratic candidates at intersections. Even if their energies were not diverted here, most would not work for Biden this fall because of what occurs in the Middle East on his watch.
Given the 50-50 nature of recent elections, a fraction of the activist wing voting for Jill Stein or Cornell West, or merely voting their disgust by not voting, bodes poorly for Biden come November. Their disruptions to traffic, campuses, and, presumably, the Democratic National Committee means further bad optics for Biden in the press. Over the weekend at George Washington University, the protesters superimposed Joe Biden’s image atop a large American flag hung the university. Below his visage appeared the words “Genocide Joe.”
Does anyone think people associating the president with genocide will vote for him in November?
Twenty-twenty’s deliverer from chaos plays the role of Captain Chaos in 2024. And this all remains outside of the president’s control and within the control of a leader 6,000 miles from the White House repeatedly denigrated by the president and his minions. Worse still for Biden, the war beyond his control the purist Left imagines as within his control.
Politically, Biden cannot condemn anti-Semitism without angering the pro-Palestinian contingent, and he cannot pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to ease off without angering partisans of Israel within his party. It’s a no-win situation for him, but by playing both sides at various times it can work as an all-lose situation.
The president has handled this poorly. But even Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and other presidents with considerably more skills could not have made lemonade from lemons here.
And as an impotent and indecisive Biden cannot win over there in May, he increasingly looks as though he cannot win over here in November.
