Who Is to Blame for the Massacre?

As the world watches the unfolding Israeli response to the Hamas invasion, serious thinkers on the American left are already hard at work on a more important issue. How can they spare Joe Biden from any responsibility for the massacre?

As you know, many commentators have taken the Biden administration to task for having given Iran-- the puppet-master behind it all-- $6 billion as something like a line of credit. This means that Iran cannot use the money just yet and that, if you believe Antony Blinken, they must use it for humanitarian purposes.

As I and everyone else with an ounce of knowledge about such matters has pointed out, money is fungible. If the $6 billion is used to buy food and medicine, this frees up other funds to arm and support Hamas and Hezbollah. 

This is self-evident, but administration flunkies like Blinken keep trotting out the lie, apparently because they know that they have to erase their fingerprints from the calamity that just occurred.

As noted yesterday, more serious thinkers have found someone else to blame-- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has been convulsed lately over the Prime Minister’s plan for judicial reform. This preoccupation apparently distracted far too much of the government, to the point where everyone missed the signs of a pending invasion.

Famed New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has been leading the choir blaming it all on Netanyahu. It makes a certain amount of sense. Friedman has been militating against the Israeli Prime Minister for months now. Ergo, the elected prime minister fractured the country. Anything to assure us that Tom was right.

He wrote:

As this column has been pointing out ever since he came back to power, Netanyahu’s politics of division have done terrible damage to Israel. Bibi prioritized a judicial putsch to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its power to oversee his government — over all other priorities. In the process he fractured Israeli society and its military. And people have been warning for months how dangerous this could be. Just this week I quoted a former director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Dan Harel, telling a Tel Aviv democracy rally that “I have never seen our national security in a worse state” and that there has already been damage to the reserve units of essential Israel Defense Forces formations, “which has reduced readiness and operational capability.”

Now, you may or may not like the proposed judicial reform-- currently before the Israeli Supreme Court-- but still, however bad you think it is, you should hesitate before you start pretending that it necessarily gave rise to a massive protest movement. 

In truth, people like Friedman and the foreign policy team of the Biden administration were fomenting the rebellion. You can call it natural and spontaneous, but it was incited and fed by American leftists. Doubtless they thought that Bibi was another Donald Trump.

Writing in Tablet, Liel Leibovitz explains that political leaders around the world have been stoking political division in Israel. They have been portraying the Israeli protesters as heroes for democracy:

A lot of it will have to do with people who should have known better—including former prime ministers and former and current high level security officials—abandoning the core commitment of defending Israel and instead entertaining themselves by cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism. Hysterics about your political opponents being the enemies of democracy may be fun in Kalorama; in Sderot and Ofakim, and even in Tel Aviv, there’s a price to pay for abandoning the real world and indulging in fetish play.

Since Iran is obviously behind the attacks, one must note that the American government has been playing footsie with Iran for more than a decade. The Obama administration and the Biden administration have worked long and hard to establish good relations with Iran, regardless of the cost. And they have also worked long and hard to save the Iranian economy and the Iranian regime.

As of Monday morning Barack Obama has not issued any statement about the attacks. Neither has Bill Clinton.

 As for how the Biden administration fomented chaos in Israel, Leibovitz explains:

Biden himself took to CNN to call Netanyahu’s government “the most extreme” he’s ever seen, and lost no opportunity to lecture his Israeli counterpart about democratic values. The former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, took the unprecedented step of intervening in the country’s domestic affairs, announcing ominously that he “think[s] most Israelis want the United States to be in their business.” And if words weren’t enough, the administration also sent American dollars to support the anti-Netanyahu NGOs organizing the protests that brought Israel to a halt for months. Netanyahu was famously denied an invite to the White House; his key opponent, opposition leader Benny Gantz, had no such problem.

The Trump administration went to work to subvert the Iranian economy and to make it more impossible for it to cause mischief in the region, but the Biden people returned to the Obama policy. In fact, as noted here and elsewhere, the Biden administration hired an Iranian agent to work on counterintelligence in the Pentagon.

The Washington Free Beacon reported on the Pentagon official:

Ariane Tabatabai, a senior Pentagon official with top-secret security clearance, was outed in a Semafor report this week as an alleged member of an Iranian-run influence network that reported back to Tehran's foreign ministry and helped push its policies among Washington policymakers. 

As for American policy in the Obama and Biden administrations, Leibovitz explains it:

For the better part of the last decade, the United States has pursued a foreign policy designed to strengthen Iran and enable it to form a strong sphere of influence in the region. This is the idea behind what Tony Badran and Michael Doran called “the Re-Alignment,” a vision of a new world order in which America partners with Iran in order to “find a more stable balance of power that would make [the Middle East] less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” Those words aren’t Badran and Doran’s; they’re Robert Malley’s, Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran Deal who, as Semafor reported this week, helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Biden himself, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, spoke of “an integrated Middle East,” using the phrase no less than three times to make clear that his administration was intent on pursuing his predecessor’s commitment to seeing Iran not as a U.S. foe but as our collaborator.

And that is not all:

And the Biden administration wasn’t just talking the talk. It was also walking the walk, from unfreezing billions in assets to make it easier for Tehran to support its proxy, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, to sending huge cash infusions used primarily to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of unvetted “security personnel.”

And while the previous administration halted all aid to the Palestinians—directly because of the “pay for slay” policies that support the families of those who slaughter Israelis—the Biden administration was quick to reverse the decision.

Lots of people argued that this was simply clear-minded realpolitik after decades of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bullshit. Here’s how you know this policy was, and is, motivated not by what’s best for America but by what would kneecap the Jewish state: Because it extended to inside Israel’s borders.

The singular ineptitude of the Obama and Biden teams has not only damaged Israel by empowering Iran. It has made the Trump team look very good indeed.

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