Biden, Hamas, and Israel

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In this rather confused video clip (some of it in text form in this article), Biden seems to be saying that (1) he believes the “30,000 Palestinians killed” number which has been circulating, which most observers believe is bogus, (2) that Israel is violating the international rules of war, which he says “we” changed following WWII, and (3) strongly implying that Israel is conducting carpet bombing, which is false.  He also says that Hamas would like a ceasefire because they would “have a better chance to survive and rebuild.”  He is apparently just fine with this outcome.

He also says he told the Israeli war cabinet:  “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”

Whatever one thinks about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it requires a special kind of cluelessness to not notice the geographical closeness of Gaza-based Hamas to Israel, and the immediate and murderous nature of the threat that Israel faces.

Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.

36 thoughts on “Biden, Hamas, and Israel”

  1. Biden’s teleprompter: “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”

    Ummm — What about the Ukraine, then? Is it just possible that might have been a mistake too?

  2. Whatever his deficits, he understands that the activists who make up the core of the current Democratic base are hard-left and antisemitic, and that he needs to accommodate them to retain a chance of being reelected.

  3. It’s pretty clear that Hamas can only get some sort of cease fire by producing all the hostages. This will not happen for the simple reason that it’s impossible. Which ever of the hostages that may still survive have likely been so abused that Hamas can never let them give testimony, the others are simply dead. You can be sure that the Israeli negotiators will require proof of life before they make any concessions.

    Withholding weapons, if we have any in stock, will only force the Israeli’s to use less accurate weapons with consequently higher collateral damage. It won’t dissuade them from finishing this fight. This is not a war Israel can afford to lose whatever the cost.

  5. “Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.”

    That’s exactly it, David.

    But also of negligible importance – it certainly seems – are the lives of American soldiers.
    See:
    1) https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/so-a-pier-for-hamas-it-is
    2) https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/bidens-gaza-floating-port-plan-generating-concern-among-military-professionals/

    One wonders where this idiocy originated. The State Department? The DNC? Biden’s handlers? Some combination thereof?

  6. 1) If the Israelis have only killed a mere 30k they need to up their game. 2) I don’t recall any mention of these rules of war when a certain set of terrorists took over several US passenger planes and slammed them into buildings. 3) Fsck Biden, a traitor criminal rapist.

    But also 4) the real purpose of the Gaza pier is to facilitate the importation of the welfare leeches of the Gaza Strip into the America, where they can help provide a political base to enable the demonrat party’s hatred of the American people and the destruction of the United States.

    Depopulating the Gaza strip seems to be something Israel wants very much, so AIPAC wants it very much too. Whether or not it’s in the interest of the United States as usual never matters much to anyone involved.

    I expect most of these folks to end up in Michigan, so thankfully I have escaped that worsening ****hole.

  7. “Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.”

    At the risk of repeating myself, I disagree. Thoroughly. Israeli lives will be quite safe when all the terrorists are evacuated into the United States, leaving Israel free to settle the Gaza strip and eventually the rest of the West bank as well.

    And then the insanely disfunctional Palestinian culture will be yet another problem our globalist rulers have dumped upon us demanding we deal with it, because all the Palestinians will be here, inside the US.

    Mark my words.

  9. If you doubt the still terrible power of the media, even its decrepit and discredited state, look no further than Biden’s craven statement of “30,000” (or Austin’s “25,000”) Casualty figures announced by the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health were discredited as far back as October, 17 with the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion where a few vehicles wrecked in a parking lot by an errant Hamas missile was marketed as hundreds killed by an Israeli munition. Soon after that Hamas (sorry, Ministry of Health) was publishing detailed lists of the thousands they claimed Israel killed when anyone with half of a brain (especially after the Maui fires) knew that with the number of displaced people combined with high explosives that it was impossible to come up with any definitive number.

    I should also add that for the past 8 years, the media has been on a jag of decrying “false equivalence” and “both sideism”, meaning that they felt justified in treating Trump and Republicans in general as outside the bounds of acceptable society. Yet the same media outlets were more than willing to publish obviously false from a genocidal terrorist organization without batting an eyelash. Genocidal perpetrators or mass sexual violence more credible than the Republican nominee. However we’ve learned, and the media knew, that if you repeat even the most blatant propaganda long enough it becomes of the ambient environment in which policy is made.

    As far as that pier….

    I’m sure I’m not the only one getting flashbacks to past American humanitarian efforts. The 200+ dead Marines from 1/8 came because they were deployed into 1983 Beirut as peacekeepers. The 18 dead soldiers of “Blackhawk Down” were in Somalia to prevent criminal gangs from stealing food aid from their own starving people. Contrary to Major General Ryder why should we expect anything different for those 1,000+ Americans building that pier? Like Hezbollah and those Somali thugs Hamas and Islamic Jihad hate us, but unlike them they in Gaza have artillery in the form of rockets and mortar tubes. Judge by capability, not intent…. and now we will have boots on the ground who are not only hostages but make us direct players into the Gaza War.

    If you follow only the public debate, it’s still not clear what problem this pier is supposed to solve. There is no discussion of why the Israelis might be restricting food convoys or why there are problems with down-the-chain distribution of food aid to actual civilians, probably because that would reveal the rotten core of the Hamas-NGO apparatus in Gaza. Also it will be at least two months before that pier is operational… what will be the situation on the ground be by then? Also piers are dual-use in that they can be used not only for disembarking things but also for embarking… people?

    Tell me how this pier makes any sense.

    One other thought, which is even more frightening. If the past 3+ years has shown us and the world anything is that Biden can be bullied into doing just about anything. If you were a hostile power and you saw Biden’s behavior and current polls showing he might very lose in November to be replaced by that madman Trump wouldn’t this be the time to make your big global move?

  10. The thing with Sherman (as with Sheridan during “The Burning” in the Shenandoah) was while they destroyed property they left the civilian population alone.

    The dirty secret of history is that ethnic cleansing works. While our betters like to focus on our saving the Kosovars the truth is that the first round of the Yugoslav wars solved a lot of the problems of mixed-communities that were composed of Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. Today it looks like the Azeris are prepared, Godfather-like, to settle all family business in regard to the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Let’s not forget the post-1948 liquidation of the historic Jewish communities throughout the Middle East.

    The most effective ethnic cleansing of the past 100 years was in Europe. It’s not as catchy as the tune from They Might Be Giants but Kaliningrad was once Königsberg, where Prussian kings were crowned for centuries. But to paraphrase what Clemenza once said of Paulie Gatto, “You won’t see the Germans anymore” as the Red Army cleansed all of Prussia in 1944/45 in a way that Hamas must be envious of. Poland and the pre-WW II Danzig question? Well with apologies again to They Might Be Giants, Danzig is now Gdansk and what was once East Prussia in now north Poland. The question of the Sudeten Germans? The Czechos solved it the same way the Soviets did with the Prussians.

    So all of those Germans, expelled in the most brutal way imaginable from places they had lived for centuries…. and what happened? No one cries for them, there are UN resolutions or organizations, or refugee camps. They were expected to abandon all hope, all irredentist dreams because after all they lost right? Don’t start none, there won’t be none. So what does that make Hamas? Nazis with better PR and bigger friends.

  11. I doubt that Biden / the Democrats are planning to transport millions of Palestinians by sea to the US. I do think they would be inclined to bring in a few tens of thousands in the hopes of improving their political power (congressional seats, electoral votes, and ultimately popular votes) in swing states and key cities.

    The port-building may well be about establishing a US military presence, or the highly-credible threat of one, in order to protect the Palestinians from what many Democrats see as Israeli aggression and genocide, and to enforce a two-state ‘solution’ whether the Israelis like it or not. Biden is probably already imaging getting his Nobel Peace Prize.

  13. Perhaps America should bribe the Haiti gangs to allow a limited, 2.3 million pop charter city with US troops temporarily there, preparing for new settlers (not colonizers.)
    Maybe, 2.3 million from Gaza, to escape those Jews.

  14. The pier scheme is obviously a terrible idea, a doubling down on the terrible idea of air-dropping supplies to the Gaza Health Ministry.

    The simple explanation is that the Democrats want the pier to improve their electoral prospects. Who knows if the project will even get started. The fact that anyone in our govt proposed it is bad enough.

    Biden made this war happen by continuing Obama’s policy of appeasing Iran. Biden made clear to the mullahs, as he had to Putin about Ukraine, that we would impose no price on them for starting a war. We have also been directly subsidizing Iran despite the mullahs’ continued hostility towards us and Israel. Now the war is on and Biden is trying to prevent Israel from winning.

    After Sept. 2001 there was much discussion about radical Islam’s threat to the West and the need for cultural and political reforms and alternatives to Islamism in the Middle East. Bush Jr. with broad political support invaded Afghanistan and defeated the Taliban and eventually bogged down, and invaded Iraq and defeated Saddam and the insurgents. Obama withdrew us from Iraq, doubled down in Afghanistan, ignored an Iranian popular uprising against the mullahs, and was weak in responding to the Syrian civil war. Trump defeated ISIS, looked for an exit from Afghanistan, and imposed effective economic sanctions on Iran. Biden canceled the sanctions, resumed Obama’s idiotic appeasement policy on Iran, and catastrophically bungled our withdrawal from Afghanistan.

    Since 2003 the Iranian regime has continued to attack Americans and American allies, to expand Iranian imperial control across the Middle East and to develop nuclear weapons. We have done little to thwart them; Obama and Biden have encouraged them. Israel has conducted sabotage campaigns but mostly hoped that the USA would stop the Mullahs’ bomb program.

    The West’s appeasement of Iran and of the Palestinians has been a colossal failure. The enormous cumulative western subsidies to Hamas, the PA and other Palestinian organizations are a running scandal.

    Israel’s appeasement of the Palestinians has also been a colossal failure. The Gaza population supports Hamas. The Palestinian Authority subsidizes the families of terrorists who killed Jews. Palestinian schools teach Arab children to hate Jews. Everyone knows this – Israeli conservatives have complained for years that their govt does little to discourage Palestinian incitement against Israel and Jews.

    Israeli representatives such as Michael Oren and Ron Dermer are promoting the idea that Palestinian society must be deradicalized before there can be any talk of Palestinian statehood. This is the same idea that American neo-cons and conservatives were promoting twenty years ago about Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The problem is not that deradicalization is bad but that neither the USA nor Israel has seriously attempted to implement it.

    The Israeli rapprochement with Egypt, SA and the Gulf states, all of whom are impelled by fear of Iranian expansionism, might be a model of what could be done to encourage the Palestinians. (One day, anyway.) The Abraham agreements happened under Trump, perhaps because he wasn’t personally on the take or otherwise invested in the old way of doing things.

    Interesting times.

  15. William Tecumseh Sherman has entered the chat.

    War is hell and you cannot refine it.

    The Palestinians have been making war against Israel for generations, to the best of their feeble abilities. Before the October 7th attack they’d never had enough success to make Israel go to war against them. Sure, they’d managed to kill plenty of Israelis- apparently enough to end political support within Israel for further appeasement- but Israel hadn’t been willing to pay the price in blood and treasure to end (in this case) Hamas.

    Maybe they are willing to pay that price now- other people here know and care more about that than I do- but in any case this is the first time in recent history the Jihadis have a paid a real price for their endless attacks upon non-Muslims. Invariably, in the West, the Jihadis will commit some murderous outrage, followed up by sniveling apologies for Islamophobia and yet more welfare payments for yet more migrants.

    Not in the Gaza strip, not this time. The Gazans have now spent the last few months watching their Mediterranean welfare paradise getting bombed into smithereens, without regular food, electricity, clean water, or medical care. I will guarantee that the Jew-hating inhabitants of the Gaza strip are less inclined to violence now than they were on October 6th, for the same reason Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan lost interest in war after having their cities burned to the ground. That is, they directly felt the impact of the war, personally.

    But are they less inclined enough to matter? One reason why the US Civil War and WWII in Europe ended with such finality was because so many enemy combatants had been killed in the fighting. Have enough Gazans been killed to convince the rest to surrender?

    I don’t think so. But it’s not over yet.

  16. The Israeli rapprochement with Egypt, SA and the Gulf states, all of whom are impelled by fear of Iranian expansionism, might be a model of what could be done to encourage the Palestinians.

    Might be.

    I think every sane person wishes the Palestinians weren’t such murderous vermin but alas. I recall watching a C-SPAN call in show in the early 1990s, with the Israeli ambassador to the US. He was quite taken aback at how many callers were pro-Palestinian.

    I was pro-Palestinians then too, for the same reasons those callers were, so I wasn’t surprised. Then came the various intifadas. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this anecdote here before, but I’m still shocked by it, because of later events.

    How could I have ever supported these terrorists? Ugh.

    Anyway, in a better world, the Palestinians wouldn’t have started murdering random Israelis and eventually I’d bet Israel would have forced by both American and domestic opinion to stop treating the Palestinians like enemies, because they wouldn’t have been.

    Alas, we don’t live in that world.

  17. Going through the various press releases and briefings, I find it beyond bizarre how poorly planned from an operational perspective this entire “pier” project is. No plan for security, no process for the food coming off the pier will actually get to the civilian population. Quite literally the plan is to have that done with “partners” and somehow figured out in the future. Back in the day whenever someone in a meeting would state that the painfully vague part of a plan would be done by “partners” someone would stand up an do the SpongeBob gesture and say “Magic” That would be too innocent for this environment, instead as with the maps of old pointing to unexplored parts of the globe we should instead point to those parts of the plan and state “Here be Monsters”

    After all that reading I still can’t point to what problem in the supply chain the problem is supposed to solve. Imminent famine? It will take months to build so that cannot be it. Insufficient throughput due to lack of transportation? Nope, we’re talking Gaza’s daily food needs as being about 4000 tons or 85 trucks; be a lot faster to go that route. So that means there’s a dirty secret that no one wants to admit… which is that the trucks are being held up because the food is being diverted to Hamas and to admit that is to remind people that Hamas is a genocidal, serial-raping terrorist organization that only sees the local civilian population as useful cannon fodder. Cannot admit that, that would be taking sides.

    So of course this is a political stunt, just something cooked-up in time for Biden to use at the SOTU just as the entire Afghan withdrawal was times to end before 9/11 so Biden could tout it in a speech,

    The harm is that a pier is not just a pier, even if no American lives are lost in building it. With the pier announcement, as with the airdrops, we have signaled that we are now the garuntaeers for the feeding of the Gaza population. In a war zone between two combatants who both see the war as existential, we have failed to identify and therefore cannot solve the critical bottleneck in feeding that population so we will be further drawn into that conflict whether that pier gets built or not. You cannot identify a problem worthy of your involvement and back out (at least at first) without the problem being solved. What Hamas just did by creating famine conditions among its own population (perhaps with connivance of our State Dept) is ensure its own survival and create a perhaps decisive wedge between the US and Israel

    Sounds conspiratorial but I’m running out of other ideas.

  18. well it puts them, right in the crosshairs of Hamas, the Egyprian branch of Islamic state, the Houthis Al Shahaab et al, no sane person would even entertain this,

    I remember in 94, was when CAIR had their big campus rollout, at my alma mater among others, I noted in the program how the lead figures like Awad came from Hamas, of course I didn’t really know the backstory that Steve Emerson and Yossef Bodansky had highlighted,

  19. A passing thought that goes along the line of asking forgiveness instead of asking permission.
    Had Israel kept going, into Gaza, and fumigated the place of Hamas and wannabe terrorists, the discussion would be over. Israel would have been pilloried for a while and called all sorts of names, but it would be done, finished, and over.
    I do not know the feasibility of what I am saying, but the world as a whole, and all the ‘civilized’ peoples tend to have short memories. It may be a brutal reality, but it could cost less lives should things have gone or go that way. Prolonging the conflict allows time for Hamas, etc to re-arm, re-build, and generally catch their breath. Not a good thing to allow, IMO. The cost to Israel of deposing Hamas and salting its fields so to speak may be less than listening to the ‘experts’ throughout the world sending advice and in some cases, sending orders, followed or not.
    It might be a lesson for the Mullahs in Iran as to what can happen should the leashes be loosened and in fact what could happen should they fail to listen to some of the advocates of skipping the Bomb. I see no upside in having a nuclear armed Iran throwing its weight around in the ME. I feel certain that the Israeli people realize the threat Iran is to their continued existence. Will they do anything to preclude a nuclear Iran? dunno. Hope so.

  20. The existence of Israeli hostages, plus the danger to their own troops of pushing the pace of urban warfare, are probably behind most of the Israeli reticence in Gaza. The Israelis are also exceptionally careful to minimize noncombatant casualties. Whether Israelis will eventually get to a point where they decide to disregard the safety of the hostages and of Palestinian noncombatants is an interesting question.

  21. where are the hostages, are most still alive, I doubt it, did they smuggle them into the Sinai, which was a base for the Lions of Fury, until they were wiped out some years ago,

  22. Why is it that in every article there is little or no mention of the American citizens being held hostage, probably tortured and most likely murdered by Hamas? Why is this not a major concern of the Biden administration, and of course, Biden himself?

    Of course, I actually know why – they’re Jews.

  24. “Why is it that in every article there is little or no mention of the American citizens being held hostage, probably tortured and most likely murdered by Hamas?”

    As a general statement, it seems that on a weekly (if not daily) basis some important social or political norm is transgressed. The fact that an American administration isn’t moving heaven and earth (with 2,000 pound bombs) to get a foreign criminal organization to free American citizens is a violation of the social contract. See also “Afghanistan, 2021, American citizens left behind” Hopefully we won’t have a similar situation in Haiti with this “Barbecue” fellow but who knows?

    There is of course was the Israeli response to the Munich terrorist attack. Also back in the 1980s when a bunch of Islamic radicals kidnapped some USSR diplomats, killing one of them, the Soviets not only captured and castrated a relative of one of the radical leaders but sent the severed testicles to the leader in question.

    My guess is that the American hostages are dead, or at least assumed so, and that the Biden Administration is sweeping the issue under rug because to acknowledge that fact would enrage the country against Hamas at a time when Biden is fighting for his political life in part by trying to mollify the pro-Hamas elements in his party and Administration.

  25. Even Carter attempted a rescue in Iran, as unfortunate as that was. Hell, Ross Perot as a private citizen hired a former military expert to get his people out of Iran.

    I understand that the situation in Gaza precludes any US attempt, but it seems to me that those high level Hamas leaders in Qatar are vulnerable to a snatch operation.

  26. Those high level Hamas billionaires aren’t in Qatar now. I assume that Israel hasn’t gone after them while they are pursuing “negotiations”. Once that charade ends, so will they, sooner or later, some way or other, some place or other.

  27. What about Americans left behind in Afghanistan?

    But let’s reelect President Elphinstone (as commenter Cervantes referred to him).

  28. While I was in Phoenix last November I saw many billboards along I-10/17 which showed pictures of various hostages. Given the contemporary stories of pro-Hamas cretins tearing down pictures of hostages, I thought using a 50-ft billboard to display an even bigger message was wonderful

    I was initially more than peeved when the Administration did not make a public stance on the release of the American hostages but a friend of mine familiar with such matters said that due to the different nationalities of the hostages to not mistake public silence with a lack of private action. You would think at the very least a very clear, if private, message was sent to Hamas that they were responsible for the safety and welfare of every American hostage

    Being a citizen of the United states should mean something in terms of protection by one’s government. Not just “no man left behind” but the other message we learned at the same time “no better friend , no worse enemy.” If you remember what Biden’s predecessor did with a certain Iranian thug Solemani. I had become so inured to the fact that the world treats us as a punching bag that for Trump to reach out over foreign territory and kill Solemani for the American blood on his hands was shocking. Keep in mind that Trump had nixed a retaliatory raid against Iranian installations the previous year over the shooting down of an American reconnaissance drone given that no American lives were lost. However once that line was crossed….

    We could sure use a man like Trump again in the White House

  29. thanks I don’t think I referrenced Elphinstone, in that particular context, meanwhile we are still sending billions to the Taliban Emirate, remit from Qatar,

    this regime, and which ever player holds the eye, like the scottish play, since Malley and Rice are out of the picture now, maybe Samantha Powers, seems to ‘play for the other team’ if there is something correct to do, they do the opposite,

  33. I listened to “Day of Wrath”, whose theme I take it is essentially the same as Schlichter’s. It’s not a hard case to make. Time will tell.

  34. @ Mike > “I find it beyond bizarre how poorly planned from an operational perspective this entire “pier” project is.”

    The answer was in your own comment: “So of course this is a political stunt, just something cooked-up in time for Biden to use at the SOTU just as the entire Afghan withdrawal was times[timed] to end before 9/11 so Biden could tout it in a speech”

    The Afghanistan debacle was “planned” by the same people “planning” the Gaza pier. It’s bizarre to sane observers, but it’s apparently the Biden Inc. (and current Democrat Party in general) modus operandi.
    1. State the desired outcome.
    2. ????
    3. Declare the operation successful, even it it was a colossal failure.

  35. Reading these comments, I wonder how many have read Kurt Schlicter’s book “The Attack?”

    I have. I love Schlichter’s optimism.

  36. from Larry Bond in the 90s, yes I remember that one there was also one from Chris Whitcomb, around 2005 or so,

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