Biden equivocates on support for Hamas terrorists

“I condemn the antisemitic protests ...” President Joe Biden told reporters after days of anti-Jewish demonstrations at Columbia University and other Ivy League schools. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians ...”

Any morally clearheaded American already has a very good idea of what’s going on. Biden is bothsidesing the actions of keffiyeh-wearing terror cheerleaders on Columbia’s Gaza Quad – – who target American Jews who have absolutely no bearing on Israel’s actions – – with those who refuse to accept the blood libel of “genocide” in Gaza. It is the kind of odious moral relativism one expects to hear from a “Squad” member or clout-chasing far-right “influencer,” not the president.

Hamas, the governing authority in an autonomous Gaza – – still supported widely by the Palestinian people – – flooded over the border on Oct. 7, 2023, raping, murdering and kidnapping more than a thousand men, women and children in Israel, including American citizens. Afterward, Hamas retreated and hid among civilians to generate as many Palestinian martyrs as possible. The Israelis retaliated against this nihilistic death cult, keeping the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio lower than perhaps any other instance of modern urban warfare.

That’s what’s going on. But because a not-insignificant contingent on the contemporary Left is now both antisemitic and anti-”colonialist,” the president demanded Israel stop before the job was done. And he is willing to sell out a longtime ally and forsake the lives of American hostages to try to entice the votes in Jew-hating enclaves like Dearborn, Michigan, Yale University and The Washington Post newsroom.

A number of people have pointed out the similarities between Biden’s condemnations and former President Donald Trump’s post-Charlottesville, Virginia, march “very fine people” comment. It’s a good gotcha. After all, Biden has risibly claimed that Trump’s comments impelled him to run for president (for the third time).

There is, however, a key difference. Trump’s garbled line was almost surely not aimed at tiki-torch neo-Nazis. Believe what you like about Trump’s motivations, but he also later unequivocally condemned the white supremacists on more than one occasion. Biden, on the other hand, can’t even get himself to call out brownshirts without throwing them a bone.

Also, incidentally, unlike the nuts in Virginia, these people will be working at our top law firms, in media organizations and in the State Department. Oh, the president also wants you to pay their loans.

Earlier, The Washington Post, like most outlets, claimed that “Biden denounces antisemitism on college campuses amid Yale, Columbia protests.” While technically true, the framing ignores the president’s equivocation. The denouncement was a pro forma White House Passover press release that spent as much space prattling on about a two-state solution as it did the “protests.” For comparison, Biden’s Ramadan press release noted the “terrible suffering on the Palestinian people,” repeated fake Hamas causality numbers and condemned “Islamophobia,” but said nothing about the widespread outbreak of antisemitism.

Then again, Democrats are increasingly incapable of even talking about antisemitism without diluting any condemnation with mention of “Islamophobia.”

You might recall a few years back a certain Democratic congresswoman was going on about “Benjamin”-grubbing rootless cosmopolitans hypnotizing the world for their evil. After a handful of Jewish Democrats complained about her rhetoric, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally agreed to pass a resolution condemning Rep. Ilhan Omar. By the end of debate, of course, the resolution was teeming with platitudes and condemnations of a rainbow of thought crimes, with references to Alfred Dreyfus, Leo Frank, Henry Ford and “anti-Muslim bigotry,” but not Omar.

“We all have a responsibility to speak out against anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and all forms of hatred and bigotry, especially as we see a spike in hate crimes in America,” is how Sen. Kamala Harris whitewashed the rising anti-Jewish pronouncements of her party. Which is to say, for years now, Democrats have been downplaying antisemitism as it creeped into college campuses, Congress, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, and now the mainstream.

And now, here we are. We have a president who can’t make a moral distinction between bigots and their targets.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.