Anti-Israel Forces Encouraged by Biden’s Weakness
“…It has taken the Democrats all of four months in power to screw up the Middle East, and the good guys in the region are not pleased or inclined to play along.
Four years of relative peace in the Middle East have been shattered by a conflict between Hamas and Israel, which began when Hamas bombarded Jerusalem. The Iranian-backed force that rules Gaza then expanded its target list to other Israeli cities.
Why now? The Middle East and particularly the Levant had been on the mend since then-President Donald Trump took the handcuffs off U.S.-led forces in 2017 and allowed them to all but obliterate ISIS. Trump also knocked off balance the terrorism-exporting Iranian regime by curtailing its finances and confronting it with an aggressive military posture in the Arabian Gulf.
The biggest Trump breakthrough came with the Abraham Accords, which achieved a historic breakthrough between Israelis and Arabs, with the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
Unfortunately, the new Biden administration refused simply to accept this new and beneficial status quo upon entering office. Biden officials set about immediately to let Iran out of the doghouse. The administration is set on resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal that showered Tehran with money and still allowed it to keep the key parts of a nuclear program it today is using to enrich uranium far beyond what is necessary for peaceful purposes.
Biden officials also put the Palestinians, and therefore Hamas (aka, the Muslim Brotherhood), back on the payroll with $235 million in payments. Trump had cut them off in 2018, realizing they funded terrorism. In restoring the funds, the administration said it “wanted to restore credible engagement” between the Palestinians and Israelis. Certainly, it did: nothing is more credible than a rocket attack targeting civilians in one’s capital…”
Related:
Moral Clarity Versus Moral Depravity in Israel and Gaza
“…Nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager has often observed that if the Israelis were to lay down their guns, Israel would be destroyed tomorrow, but if the Palestinians were to lay down their guns, there would be peace tomorrow. It has always been thus.
The latest flare-up of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is no different. The proximate causes are a thorny combination of an abstruse housing dispute in northeastern Jerusalem, deceitful Palestinian slander about an ostensible threat to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the destabilizing nature of Israel’s current domestic political morass and the contemporaneous American appeasement in Vienna of the Palestinians’ preeminent jihad bankroller, the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the immediate aggressors, as per usual, are clear: Hamas, the internationally recognized Gaza-based terrorist outfit whose founding charter calls for the murder of every Jew worldwide, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, ruled in profoundly corrupt fashion by serial jihad-inciter Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denialist now in the 16th year of his four-year term.
The result has been the worst bout of bloodshed since the last full-scale Israel-Hamas war in 2014. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state, seeking—and, tragically, occasionally succeeding—to inflict maximal harm upon Israel’s civilian population. Hamas’ rockets do not discriminate on the basis of age, race or religion: Victims include an Israel Defense Forces soldier, a 6-year-old boy in the oft-targeted Gaza border town of Sderot and a 32-year-old Indian national in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. One would be waiting in vain for Black Lives Matter, or other leading institutional wokesters and intersectional shakedown artists, to reconcile such calamities with their professed principles.
When it comes to some contentious issues, dogmatic ideology or blind zeal can prevent reasonable people from assessing a situation through the lens of prudence, which Aristotle recognized as the queen of the virtues. But this does not apply to the plight in the Levant—to the Palestinians’ century-long civilizational jihad to destroy the world’s sole Jewish state. In this latest round of recriminations and escalations, there is a side that is in the right and a side that is in the wrong.
Israel, a first-world nation-state and global technological hub with ascendant geopolitical and diplomatic clout, is in the right to exercise its sovereign right to defend itself from the predations of a thuggish Palestinian Authority and a genocidal Muslim Brotherhood offshoot; Ramallah’s deceitful inciters of Temple Mount jihad and nationwide anti-Jewish pogroms, along with Hamas’ murderous petty tyrants, are in the wrong. To anyone with a functioning moral compass, this stark dichotomy ought to be intuitive and obvious…”