Taking the podium at an event in Boston last Tuesday, Joe Biden wasted no time taking aim at a leading progressive’s hemming and hawing when asked to condemn Hamas’ mass rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7. Two days earlier, Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal had tried to duck journalist Dana Bash’s questioning about Hamas’ atrocities, which included rapes so violent that they broke women’s pelvic bones before Hamas gunmen shot their victims in the genitals and the head.
Biden summoned reporters into the closed session precisely in order to broadcast his repudiation of Jayapal to the world. “Over the past weeks,” he began, “survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty. Reports of women raped – repeatedly raped – and their bodies mutilated while still alive, of women’s corpses being desecrated, Hamas’ terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It’s appalling.”
Calling out Jayapal while ostentatiously not mentioning her, Biden continued: “It’s on all of us to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation.” Just to punctuate who and what he was talking about, Biden repeated: “Without equivocation, without exception,” before turning to other subjects, point made.
For all of the facile derision of Biden that abounds, the president has repeatedly shown that he can be pretty steely. The master class he has put on since Hamas’ October invasion of Israel has triggered the trigger-happy anti-Israel regulars on the left no end.
On Friday evening, the Biden Administration stood alone in the Security Council, vetoing a resolution calling for a “cease-fire” in Gaza, a fine-sounding idea which would simply guarantee Hamas’ ability to massacre Israelis again, which its leadership has pledged to do. Calls for a cease-fire are as mindless as they are fashionable. The proof, if any were necessary, is that Hamas, whose murderous rampage violated a cease-fire already in place, is demanding one. The left’s call for “Cease-fire Now!” so that a “just and peaceful solution” can be reached is sweet inanity, appealing to the unthinking and especially to those who wouldn’t be greatly troubled if Israel disappeared.
But inanity is what Biden faces from a vocal slice of his party, and with some threatening political retaliation against him if he doesn’t bend their way, he has politely told them “No.” In response to allegations that Israel, which hardly wished to have 1,200 of its citizens slaughtered by a genocidal Hamas regime committed to the genocide of Jews, was actually the party guilty of genocide, Biden Administration spokesmen have repeatedly and forcefully snapped that this is nonsense.
Last week, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization with long documented links to Hamas but long indulged by the media, praised the Oct. 7 murder of Israelis. “We condemn these shocking antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” responded a spokesman for the White House, which then removed CAIR’s name from an official listing of organizations involved in a White House effort to combat hatred.
Shortly after three university presidents called to testify in Congress about the rampant intimidation of Jewish students on their campuses refused to state that calls for the genocide of Jews violated their institutions’ policies, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff took the opportunity at a White House ceremony to take them to task. These leaders were, Emhoff said, “unable to denounce calling for the genocide of Jews as antisemitic.” They were smugly evasive, their evasions indicative of the poison indulged on their campuses and others, and the Biden administration did not simply let it go. “The lack of moral clarity is unacceptable,” Emhoff said.
Some on the left, addicted to vapid rhetoric which, if adopted, would hand Hamas a victory that would grievously harm Israelis and Palestinians alike, keep hurling political fastballs at Biden’s head. They hope to pressure him into leaving Israel on its own in what amounts to a fight for more than just Israel. In a display of leadership that history will remember, the president has refused to be brushed back.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.