[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Brendan O’Neill has been of the few British journalists not to have joined in the widespread Israel-bashing that characterize the reports on the Gaza War by such major media outlets in the UK as the BBC and The Guardian. He takes a whack at Biden, and the President’s desire to prevent an Israel-Hezbollah war, in order to ensure his re-election, here: “The lethal narcissism of Joe Biden,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, June 21, 2024:
What is more important: Joe Biden winning the votes of America’s entitled coastal elites, or Israel protecting itself from an army called the Party of God that has sworn itself to the eradication of the ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East? This would have been a no-brainer a few years ago. Most people – aside from Israelophobic hotheads on the far right and hard left – would have agreed that defending the Jewish State from fanatics who view Jews as ‘evil’ and ‘blasphemous’ is of greater moral import than a president’s longing to get back in the good books of woke voters. And yet today, such simple moral clarity is in alarmingly short supply.
Right now, nothing fills the Biden set with greater dread than the prospect of war between Israel and Hezbollah. And it’s not because they’re peaceniks. Biden voted in favour of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was vice-president to the drone-happy Barack Obama, who dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. In Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. If Biden is now of an anti-war bent, it’s been a recent conversion. No, it is self-preservation, not anti-militarism, that underpins Biden’s fear of an Israel-Hezbollah war. It’s the potential death of his presidency, not potential death in the Middle East, that keeps him up at night.
An Israel-Hezbollah war would bring out in even greater, and louder, numbers than to date the monstrous regiment of anti-Israel protesters, who would demand that Biden “stop Israeli aggression in Lebanon” by withholding all American weapons deliveries to the embattled Jewish state. Biden won’t do that; it could end his support among many American Jews, though not, of course, among the small groups of Jewish left-wing Israel-haters, such as those in Jewish Voice For Peace. The numbers of Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, supporting Israel are likely to be even higher in a war against Hezbollah, which is a much more formidable enemy than Hamas, with an armory of 100,000-150,000 rockets and missiles supplied by Iran. Should an Israel-Hezbollah war break out, Biden will lose support no matter what policy he adopts toward Israel. The “woke” young will not vote for Trump, but will either not vote, or will vote “uncommitted.” In battleground states — among them Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — that might spell defeat for Biden So he’s determined to prevent a wider war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, at least until after the election.
Back to Brendan O’Neill:
Tensions have exploded between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terror group whose name means Party of God. Unsurprisingly, the West’s ‘anti-war’ activist class has had little to say about Hezbollah’s blitz on northern Israel. Hezbollah, which is allied with Hamas, has been firing rockets into Israel almost every day since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, with the aim of ‘pulling Israeli forces’ away from Gaza. That is, with the aim of aiding the anti-Semites of Hamas in their holy war against the Jewish nation. Entire ‘swathes of northern Israel’ have been engulfed by fire as a result of Hezbollah’s rockets. Tens of thousands have been evacuated….
In northern Israel, Hezbollah’s near-daily barrage of rockets has forced 80,000 Israelis to leave their homes. After eight months, these people still cannot return home, but are displaced persons within their own country. This intolerable state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue, for it shrinks Israel’s habitable area. This is why the IDF is preparing for war with Hezbollah, a war many Israelis now believe is not a question of “if,” but of “when.”
If Biden were not laser-focused on his re-election, he would take a clear position in support of the beleaguered Jewish state, no matter how the anti-Israel youth and “woke” voters would react. He would announce the lifting of the one delivery of weapons he had previously halted in a failed attempt to prevent the IDF from entering Rafah, and order the Pentagon to “speed up as quickly as possible” all of the weapons deliveries that previously had been slowed down as a way to pressure Israel. In addition, Biden would announce that several more aircraft carriers, and battleships with anti-missile defense systems, are now being moved into the eastern Mediterranean, just off the Lebanese coast, thereby semaphoring to Hezbollah that American forces are now in position both to attack Hezbollah weapons depots and to supplement Israel’s anti-missile defenses, given that Israel’s supplies of Iron Dome batteries at this point are running low, and could be overwhelmed by the huge number of rockets and missiles Hezbollah has available to launch at the Jewish state. That’s what Biden should do. But he won’t. At most, he will move one more ship into position off the Lebanese coast, and hope that he can keep the peace on Israel’s northern front until after the election.