Biden Democrats break with Israel
When America won the Cold War, some Democrats suddenly found it expedient to pretend they’d always supported America’s efforts to break the totalitarian grip of the Soviet empire. But it wasn’t true. Anti-Americanism, poisoning the Democratic Party from the late 1960s onward, meant its adherents increasingly opposed U.S. global leadership and equivocated about the horrors of what President Ronald Reagan, with moral clarity, dubbed the “Evil Empire.”
Most Democrats concealed their fellow-traveling more than, say, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who vacationed in Moscow. But many were evasive about where they judged good and evil to lie in that conflict. This attitude became difficult to sustain when East Germans breached the Iron Curtain fleeing leftist oppression for Western freedom. Democrats tiptoed quickly away from ideological ground that had become politically untenable.
A similarly vast gulf is evident today between what Democrats say and what they believe in another key area of foreign policy. Indeed, it might be regarded as the central moral issue of American international relations, as the Cold War was last century. But the Democrats’ problem isn’t Russia anymore — it is Israel. President Joe Biden and his underlings say they’re staunch defenders of Israel’s democratic light in the Middle East’s engulfing darkness, but actions and rhetoric suggest otherwise.
Biden told Israel that taking the fight against Hamas’s terrorists in their last redoubt, Rafah, would cross a “red line.” But that is the only logical way of eliminating Hamas and ensuring that the pogrom it perpetrated on Oct. 7 can happen “never again.”
The latest weasel words of Democratic hostility to Israel, disguised as sympathy and support, came from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who called for Israelis to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of pursuing the war “over the best interests of Israel.”
This inspires the doubtless vain hope that Schumer won’t ever again denounce foreign interference in elections. More importantly, his speech casts light on the point at which the Democratic Party has arrived vis-àvis Israel. Schumer is a circumstantial moralist who sees political leadership as the art of monitoring where his followers are heading and then putting himself at the head of the column. So if he is willing to undermine Israeli unity and give aid to Hamas, as his speech did, it’s because he knows his party is now that radical.
Its capture by the militant Left and its eager embrace of crackpot intersectionalism have made it constitutionally incapable of genuinely supporting our democratic, free, and, most of all, successful ally. Its true sympathies in the Levant — just as here in America — are with those whose incompetence, dishonesty, depravity, and failure class them as “oppressed,” and the Left now simply sees Jews as oppressors.
When Democrats say they support Israel but don’t support what it is doing to defend itself, the key word is “but.” It gives the lie to all the others. They keep saying they support Israel, but it isn’t really true. Biden and the Democrats can stand with Israel in its hour of need or insist that the Jews live side by side with terrorists. But they cannot do both. ⋆