Welcome to 2024, the year where each week brings a new batch of fresh insanity, especially on Israel.
While Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee in the upcoming presidential election, sits in the dock and unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens flood across our borders, elites are turning on Jews and demonizing Israel, apparently forgetting that the Jewish state is merely responding to the worst pogrom since the Holocaust.
A brief refresher, since the world apparently needs reminding: On Oct. 7, 2023, members of the terrorist group Hamas invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip and began slaughtering innocent civilians. They killed 1,139 and took another 200 or so hostage. More than 30 of the victims were U.S. citizens.
The Hamas terrorists attacked a music festival, targeting young women. They raped these women to death and paraded their naked bodies. They killed babies. They called their parents to brag about slaughtering Jews.
Iran, which funds Hamas, reportedly had a role in the terrorist attacks. Other proxies of Iran’s Islamist regime have also taken action against Israel and the U.S. in the wake of Oct. 7, and Iran directly attacked Israel last month.
Israel responded to Oct. 7 by formally acknowledging the war that Hamas had already declared through its vile invasion. The Jewish state made known its intention to wipe out Hamas’ military capabilities in order to prevent another pogrom.
Hamas, for its part, declared the terrorist attack a victory and promised it would carry out similar terrorist attacks. While Hamas has freed some hostages in cease-fire deals, it remains a threat to Israel.
This week, Israel closed in on some of the last Hamas holdouts in the adjacent Gaza Strip, which is governed by the terrorist organization. The Jewish state’s prosecution of the war has not been perfect, but Israel Defense Forces worked hard to minimize civilian casualties, warning about strikes before they take place and urging evacuations of cities before invading.
In any morally sane world, people should celebrate Israel’s pending victory in a clear war of self-defense. Instead, we are treated to a carnival of topsyturveydom.
Biden’s Quid Pro Quo Moment
On Wednesday, the day after he commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Joe Biden threatened to withdraw aid to Israel if the Jewish state started its military operation in the Gazan city of Rafah.
Although Biden had occasionally called earlier for pauses in the fighting, this represented the first time he threatened to remove aid to Israel, and the threat came shortly after Congress had approved more military aid to both Ukraine and Israel.
Biden had said of Israel after the Hamas terrorist massacre on Oct. 7: “We will not ever fail to have their back.”
The day before Biden threatened to withdraw aid to Israel, his administration issued a sanctions waiver to enable arms sales to Qatar (where some Hamas leaders reside) and Lebanon, where Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, another terrorist group, enjoys broad sway over the military.
House Republicans filed articles of impeachment Friday, citing House Democrats’ 2019 impeachment of then-President Donald Trump. The House voted to impeach Trump over a phone call in which he appeared to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he would hold back military aid unless Zelenskyy investigated corruption related to Biden’s son, Hunter.
Some Democrats, notably Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, have spoken out against Biden’s move against Israel.
Hate in the Schools
Meanwhile, antisemitism is rearing its ugly head, not just on college and university campuses, but in K-12 classrooms. House Republicans pressed the leaders of three major school districts on their responses to the growing harassment of Jews after Oct. 7.
Students at Berkeley Unified School District in California reportedly heard other students say, “Kill the Jews.” Some asked Jewish students what “their number is,” referring to the numbers tattooed on Jews in death camps during the Holocaust.
The Anti-Defamation League argued that the school district failed to curtail the hostile environment.
When pressed Wednesday on the issue, School Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel essentially just said, “Trust me, we’re dealing with it.” In doing so, she appeared to infantilize her K-12 students.
“You can be confident that I am there in my schools every day, in the schools, in the classrooms, with the babies,” Ford Morthel said.
The Berkeley school superintendent later defended a curriculum that taught students a positive spin on the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That slogan, the official motto of Hamas, calls for eradicating the Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, thus “freeing” the land now known as Israel from non-Palestinian influence.
Berkeley’s curriculum stated: “For some Palestinians, ‘From the river to the sea’ is a call for freedom and peace.”
Rewarding Palestine After Oct. 7
On Friday, the representatives of 143 countries that belong to the United Nations voted to declare the Palestinian Authority “peace-loving” and to extend certain rights and privileges to the so-called state of Palestine in the U.N. The resolution expresses “deep regret and concern” that the U.S. voted against admitting the Palestinian Authority into the U.N. in April.
As Brett Schaefer, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, explained, the Palestinian territories lack key characteristics of statehood and both the extremist organizations that rule the West Bank and Gaza reward and encourage terrorism against civilians.
The U.N. resolution also opens an interesting can of worms because U.S. law forbids funding to U.N. bodies that give the Palestine Liberation Organization (the political party that controls the Palestinian Authority) the same standing as member states.
Although only the Palestinian Authority represents “Palestine” in the U.N., this attempt to induct “Palestine” into the global body seems a reward for terrorism and an intentional rebuke to Israel’s attempt to defend itself from that terrorism.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., shredded a copy of the U.N. Charter to demonstrate how the resolution undermines it.
In what world does it make sense for the president of the United States, 143 countries in the United Nations, and American schoolchildren to take the side of proven terrorists against the country trying to defend itself against those terrorists?
