Biden is confused

By  Walter E. Block | 11-04-2024

President Joe Biden speaks during a presidential debate with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia | Photo: AP/Gerald Herbert

President Joe Biden is confused once again. He thinks he is the prime minister of Israel, not the president of the United States. When asked if the Israeli army should attack Iranian nuclear development, he said, “No.” Why should he feel he has the right to determine Israeli reactions to its enemies?

Suppose that Canada and Mexico, either alone or in tandem, had done to the US approximately what the Iranian proxy, Hamas, had perpetrated on Israel on October 7, 2023. Posit, further, that Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu had interfered with, ordered, and forbade the US response to the northern and southern neighbors of America. Now, Bibi is, of course, a chutspanick. He has a lot of nerve. He is outspoken to the nth degree. But even he would not have had anything like the temerity to do any such thing. He has, at least, some vestige of propriety. He fully realizes that he is the prime minister of Israel and not the president of the United States. It is too bad that Biden, as well, is so befuddled as not to recognize this primordial distinction.

Does Kamala Harris support Biden in this confusion? To ask this is to answer it. Of course. In her speech right after the announcement of the demise of Yahya Sinwar, she piped up calling for a pause, for a cease-fire, for peace, long before Israel has come anywhere near fully protecting its safety.

But this is only the tip of the Biden-Harris Monday morning quarterbacking. This administration was adamantly opposed to the IDF entering Gaza. Then, Biden bitterly opposed the Jewish forces entering Rafah (had they not, Yahya Sinwar would probably still be alive). Biden has been intent that the local conflict with Iranian proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis does not escalate into a wider war with the Persian state.

He has been bewailing the increasingly dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, shedding crocodile tears galore at the loss of human life in that unhappy part of the globe. He never once asks who is to blame for the perhaps more than 40,000 people (if we can credit the source of these statistics) who have lost their lives there. Is it Israel’s fault? After all, it cannot be denied that it is their bombs and bullets which have been the proximate cause of these deaths. Or is it the responsibility of Hamas, which started the conflagration on that day of infamy October 7, 2023, and subsequently uses these hapless people as shields, by placing rocket and drone launchers in hospitals, schools, Mosques, residential areas, etc.? This distinction never to have crossed whatever it is that remains of Biden’s mind.

Then there is the incursion of the IDF into Lebanon. Was this an untoward invasion of a friendly neighboring country on the part of Israel? Of course not. No other nation would endure what the Jewish state has experienced for the last year: thousands of rockets raining down on the northern part of their country. And the reaction of the Biden-Harris administration to this? Urging a cease fire for the thousandth time. One wonders how they would have reacted to an analogous series of bombings of the northern US from Canada.

It is time, it is long past time, that the US butted out of Israeli affairs. Does not the United States have problems of its own it has not yet solved? Inflation? Unemployment? Homelessness? A porous southern border? If the US wants to help its supposed Middle Eastern ally, it would take a far different position than it has. Threats, cajoling, slowing down of contractually obligated transfers of weapons, have been the order of the day. No mas! How about a little more actual help from this fair weather friend?