Biden reveals his foolish hypocrisy by demanding immediate ceasefire in Gaza

It’s finally happened. After months of whispers that President Joe Biden is disgusted with Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday, America’s commander in chief demanded “an immediate ceasefire” during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. That halt in combat operations is “essential,” according to Biden, “to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians.”

This unprecedented crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations has been building throughout this war, which was started on Oct. 7 by Hamas with its brutal terrorist attack on Israel. That attack killed more than a thousand Israelis, most of them civilians. Netanyahu’s retribution has been fierce, with the Israel Defense Forces executing their biggest combat operations in over four decades in their assault on the Gaza Strip. The IDF’s intent has been clear from the start of Operation Swords of Iron: the destruction of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Since late October, Israel has made considerable progress toward destroying Hamas. The last remaining terrorist battalions are holed up in Rafah, in southern Gaza, amid many Palestinian civilians. The IDF has been waiting for weeks to enter Rafah to finish the job, as Netanyahu has promised to do. This is precisely what Team Biden doesn’t want to happen.

The White House’s squeamishness is understandable. The fight for Rafah will be costly for both sides. How many Gazans have already died is unclear, but the figure may exceed 30,000. Since the IDF a few weeks ago claimed to have killed 12,000 Hamas fighters, and Israel’s military is on record that they are killing two Palestinian civilians for every Hamas fighter, the number of Palestinian dead could now be well past 30,000.

Throughout this war, the IDF has striven to limit civilian deaths, but that’s challenging in a densely populated urban environment like Gaza. That’s particularly true when Hamas employs hospitals and schools for combat purposes. Hamas is acutely aware of the power of propaganda and employing dead Palestinian children to turn world opinion against Israel.

Biden faces a daunting political conundrum. The Democrats are split over this war. Biden needs wealthy Democratic donors, a fair number of them Jewish, to win reelection. His problem is that the party’s younger ranks are anti-Israel to an unprecedented degree. The recent Manhattan spectacle of Biden and two of his Democratic predecessors hosting a fundraiser that bagged $26 million from one-percenters while outside pro-Palestinian activists rioted offered a pitch-perfect metaphor for the political peril the Democrats face in 2024 over the Gaza war.

What sparked Biden’s turn against Netanyahu, whom he makes little secret he loathes, wasn’t thousands of dead Palestinian civilians, but the IDF’s killing on Monday of seven aid workers in Gaza. They belonged to World Central Kitchen, a nongovernmental organization founded in 2010 by Jose Andres. If you don’t know that name, you’re not one of the beautiful people in our nation’s capital, where Andres is a celebrity restaurateur and activist with close ties to the Democrats, including Biden. In other words, the president decided to cut Bibi off the knees because the IDF killed folks who worked for a friend of his. “Nobody f***s with a Biden,” as he told us himself.

Unanswered questions loom about the attack that killed the WCF staffers. IDF leadership claims it was a “grave mistake” and has promised a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the strike in a supposedly “deconflicted” area. Anyone familiar with the confusing realities of urban combat finds the IDF’s claims of terrible error plausible. But rather than wait for answers, Andres has accused Israel of intentionally murdering his employees “systematically” in “a direct attack.”

It’s difficult to miss a whiff of projection here since Andres hasn’t explained why he felt it was wise to put WCF staff into an active warzone. Four months ago, a Bloomberg profile depicted WCF as “a mess” thanks to Andres’s flawed, egotistical leadership, particularly regarding the safety of his employees. WCF is plagued by “pseudo-security,” putting its people into danger recklessly. The piece cited the “dirty yes” problem at WCF, meaning “saying yes to something even if there’s little confidence that it can be done safely” to please the boss. We need to ask questions beyond the IDF’s misconduct to understand what happened in this tragic incident.

None of this appears to matter to Biden. The White House didn’t read Israel the riot act when the IDF attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 Americans. Neither did it when Israel got caught running a traitor spy, Jonathan Pollard, in Washington. Nor did it when Israel was found to be conducting illegal political influence operations in Washington.

Biden went hard on Israel, however, when they killed people who worked for his buddy. Just don’t mention that Biden has similar blood on his hands. During Biden’s disastrous retreat from Kabul in August 2021, U.S. forces mistakenly incinerated a whole Afghan family, killing 10 civilians, seven of them children. That was a “tragic mistake” per the Biden administration, not a big deal. Then why is it a big deal when the Israelis make a similar mistake in the fog of war?

Joe Biden’s demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as Israel is on the cusp of strategic victory over Hamas is a mistake that will have long-term consequences, none of them positive for Western security. Not the least because Biden is making this error for the most feckless of reasons.

Continue Reading at The Washington Examiner.