by Robert Spencer
Will anyone ask Blinken to explain himself?
[Order a copy of Robert Spencer’s forthcoming book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, by clicking here.]
I hate to say “I told you so” — well, no, actually I don’t mind saying it at all. On May 8, I wrote:
“Yes, we’re on Hamas’s side now. It’s as official as it can get without Old Joe Biden asking Congress for a declaration of war against Israel: the Biden regime has thrown the weight of the United States government behind the effort to save Hamas.”
If you thought that was hyperbole or hysteria, consider the fact that on Sunday, senior Biden regime apparatchik Antony Blinken made it unmistakable, issuing a demand to Israel that could have been spoken by Hamas top dog Ismail Haniyeh: “Get out of Gaza.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Blinken was not content to slam Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and demand that the Israelis “get out of Gaza”; he also accused the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of “violating international humanitarian law.” If you think that this isn’t the kind of language that the U.S. government has used with allies in the past, you’re right.
Blinken did couch his castigation of Israel in terms that made it seem as if it was just a bit of friendly advice about how best to conduct the war effort as if the secretary of state during the U.S.’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 would know anything about that, but it was a castigation nevertheless.
Blinken warned that “an Israeli military operation in Rafah” might have some “initial success,” but he said that the Israelis would not be able to sustain that success and would end up “holding the bag on an enduring insurgency.” The secretary of state in this era of America’s national humiliation explained that this was “because a lot of armed Hamas will be left, no matter what [the Israelis] do in Rafah, or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do. Then you’re going to have a vacuum and a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.”
And so the alternative that the State Department is offering to Israel is to refrain from entering Rafah. This would allow Hamas to regroup there and strike Israeli civilians again, as its leaders have vowed to do. The Israelis reject this because they have declared that their goal is the complete destruction of Hamas. All Blinken is offering in response is defeatism, the claim that the Israelis won’t be able to destroy Hamas completely, so they shouldn’t even try.
There is no reason why this must be so. There were numerous predictions in 1945 that National Socialism (that’s what “Nazism” means, folks) would continue as an insurgency in the ashes of Germany, but no one was saying that the Allies shouldn’t enter Berlin and end the war anyway. There was indeed a small-scale insurgency after the fall of Berlin and the end of the war, but it was overcome. As long as there are believers in Islam in Gaza, there will be jihadis, but the organized and persistent jihad force the Israelis have faced in Gaza since 2005 hasn’t always existed and need not exist forever.
Blinken’s warning is of a kind that is usually issued by one’s foes in a war, not by one’s friends. And the hard-left apparatchik made it even worse: Blinken added that “it was reasonable to assess that, in certain instances, Israel acted in ways that are not consistent with international humanitarian law.”
Blinken’s timing couldn’t have been worse. The UN just cut in half the number of women and children it claims that the Israelis have killed in Gaza — figures that anyone could have seen were unreliable in the first place, since they came from the Gaza Health Ministry, which Hamas runs. There is no serious case that Israel has violated international law; if there were, it would already have been made in the International Criminal Court when Israel had to defend itself against bogus charges of “genocide.”
So why is the Biden regime so anxious to prevent Israeli forces from going into Rafah? Is it afraid of what the IDF might find there? Has U.S. support for Hamas not been confined solely to “humanitarian aid” to Gaza? The immense anxiety in the White House over this military operation is, to use a word that the media likes to use of Israel, “disproportionate.”
It’s too bad we only have leftist propagandists and not journalists in this country anymore. Someone should ask Blinken to explain himself. But no one will.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 28 books, including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, The History of Jihad, and The Critical Qur’an. His latest book is Muhammad: A Critical Biography. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-top-dog-antony-blinken-sends-a-stern-demand-to-israel/
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