Are the American Hostages American Enough for Biden?

By Nachama Soloveichik, COMMENTARY    8 April 2024

Joe Biden knows something about accusations of dual loyalty. In 2016, then-Vice President Biden delivered a speech at Dublin Castle heralding the “progress” Catholic Americans have made since John F. Kennedy made the trek to Ireland 50 years ago and was “attacked for being too close to a pope.”

Now, as five American-Israelis languish in Hamas captivity, Biden is turning his back on that progress.

This Sunday marked a grim milestone—six months since Hamas terrorists took hundreds of Israelis hostage on Oct. 7, including six American citizens—hopefully five still living—who remain in Gaza. But Americans can’t be blamed for forgetting. Joe Biden is more likely to call on Israel to accept an immediate ceasefire than to call on Hamas and Qatar to release our own citizens. We hear more about humanitarian aid for Gazans than about American citizens being killed and tortured in Gaza.

At a time when the president’s party insists we “Say his name!” or “Say her name!” Biden has not mentioned dual citizens Edan Alexander, Omer Neutra, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Sagui Dekel-Chen, or Keith Siegel. The president released a statement about Itay Chen on March 12, five months after the attack. This was only after his murder was announced, which supports Dara Horn’s poignant observation that dead Jews are more beloved than living ones.

The White House talks regularly about Evan Gershkovich (70-plus hits on the White House website), the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter being held on false charges in Russia, as it did about Brittney Griner (more than 200 hits), a basketball player imprisoned by Russia until she was released in a controversial prisoner swap.

The six Jews whom Hamas kidnapped are as American as Gershkovich and Griner are, which raises the question: Why does the White House ignore these Jewish U.S. citizens?

It seems that Alexander, Neutra, Goldberg-Polin, Dekel-Chen, Siegel, and Chen are only half-American. One of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in history is that Jews are only in business for themselves and their homeland. They just pass through countries without any sense of loyalty. They weren’t European enough in the Middle Ages, not German enough to the Nazis, and not American enough for the Biden administration to “say their names” and move heaven and earth to secure their release.

In today’s society, we like to pretend these disgusting sentiments are a relic of a less enlightened time. Stop pretending. The accusation of dual loyalty is a go-to attack on both the left and the right.

“They forgot what country they represent,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote on Jan. 6, 2019 of those opposing the anti-Semitic boycott-Israel movement. Less than two months later, Tlaib’s sister-in-hate Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said about AIPAC, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

In late December, Tucker Carlson said that Jewish podcaster and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro doesn’t care enough about the United States and is too “focused on a conflict in a foreign country as their own country becomes dangerously unstable.”

Carlson’s code words are not subtle. “Conflict in a foreign country” is Israel’s war against Hamas, which Washington has designated a terrorist organization for 27 years. In Carlson’s perverted mind, a proud Jewish American can’t simultaneously support defeating Hamas and worry about the immigration crisis on the southern U.S. border.

This canard is a tale as old as time. Century after century, it rears its ugly head. In 1894, Jewish French military captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of not being sufficiently loyal to France and was falsely charged and convicted with giving French military secrets to Germany. Nation of Islam leader and chief Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan questioned Joe Lieberman’s loyalty to America in 2000 when Al Gore selected him as his vice president pick.

If Alexander, Neutra, Goldberg-Polin, Dekel-Chen, Siegel, and Chen were American citizens only, Joe Biden would leave no stone unturned to bring them home for the simple reason that America would have demanded nothing less.

It has been six months since Oct. 7. Six months since Israelis and Americans were raped, tortured, burned alive, and taken hostage by Hamas. Six months since our fellow citizens were last heard from.

Joe Biden isn’t a president for some Americans and not for others. He is the president for Alexander, Neutra, Goldberg-Polin, Dekel-Chen, Siegel, and Chen, too. It’s time he started acting like it.