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Netanyahu and Biden -- Avi Ohayon, Israeli Government, via
Associated Press |
To celebrate the landing of U.S. forces at Normandy – D-Day,
June 4, 1944 – President Joe Biden traveled to France and remarked on the
courage of U.S. troops and the resolve of U.S. politicians to take the war to
Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In the course of his remarks, he mentioned the present
war of Russian aggression against Ukraine, but not Israel’s aggressive war
against that country’s terrorist Iranian proxies.
The war on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been,
during the last two years of the Biden administration, a defensive war. Until
recently, the supply of money and weaponry to Ukraine by the United States has
been conditioned by an agreed upon pledge that Ukraine would not engage in an
offensive campaign upon Putin’s aggressive forces outside the borders of
Ukraine. To put it in military terms, only a defensive war would be allowed.
Ukraine would be permitted to defend its castle, but any aggression outside the
castle walls would be frowned upon by the Biden administration. Putin would be
permitted to broaden his war – indeed he has already broadened it to
incorporate into Russia Crimea and eastern portions of Ukraine– but Ukraine
must not respond by recovering lost territory.
This is, any responsible war historian would agree, a recipe
for total defeat. D-Day was an aggressive attack by the forces of light against
the forces of darkness, an unmistakable signal that what Victor Davis Hanson
calls The World Wars, plural because there was more than one, would no longer
be a defensive war.
For various reasons, those in the Biden administration
overseeing the war in the Middle East from their safe perches in Washington DC
have, since the outbreak of the war -- occasioned by a horrendous attack by
Hamas terrorists on innocent Israeli civilians -- supplied Israel with weaponry
and assurances of unquestioning support. Early in Israel’s existential struggle,
following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration of war against Hamas
-- both the government of Gaza and an Iranian supported terrorist organization
pledged to destroy Israel root and branch -- Biden fulsomely pledged his
support for Israel on behalf of his countrymen.
What was Biden supporting, if not the military destruction
of Hamas?
The looming presidential election and pro-Hamas supporters
on benighted college campuses across the United States caused Biden to alter
significantly his pledge of support for Israel. The Biden administration now
supports a “pause in the fighting” so that food and medicine supplies may reach
Gazan citizens. Such a pause would benefit Hamas – pirates who steal such
supplies, diverting them to its own purposes -- satisfy Iran’s anti-democratic
Supreme Leader, and put a break on the destruction of Hamas’ remaining battalions
located in Rafah.
The campaign for the presidency has softened Biden’s resolve.
His refashioned campaign position is that Hamas has been sufficiently
rebuked, and the government of Israel, impudently resolved to continue the war
to its appointed end, should yield to the United States, the United Nations,
and other peace loving groups, in a collective effort to cut short the war and reimpose,
as quickly as possible, a so called “two state solution” in the geographic
heart of Israel that has for the past few decades been a murderously proven
failure.
Commentators in our mainstream left of center media have not
yet called attention to the ironic
parallels between the D-Day landing at Normandy and Netanyahu’s increasingly
lonely war against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemin, all supported by
Iran and other anti-democratic regimes that are, in the precise sense of the
words, genocidal anti-Semites.
It should be noted in passing that the term “genocide” was
coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe. The word is a combination of the Greek γένος
(genos, "race, people") with a Latin suffix (caedo "act of
killing")
In his research of Nazi occupation policies in Europe,
Lemkin asserted that Nazi atrocities against Poland consisted of five policies
which exposed their "intent to destroy" the Polish nation. These
included 1) mass-killings of Poles, 2) the infliction of serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group, 3) the planned deterioration of living
conditions calculated to bring about a nation’s destruction, 4) the implementation
of various measures intended to prevent births within the group such as the promotion
of abortions, the burdening pregnant women, etc., 5) the forced transfer of
Polish children to German families. Each of Lemkin’s five markers revealed the
Nazi plan to eliminate Polish identity.
If Iran had its way with Israel, it would without hesitation
vigorously deploy all five policies listed by Lemkin.
There are profound differences between aggressive wars that
set the terms of peace following the war and genocidal attempts to kill a
nation, despite all the cries issuing from U.S. university protestors, staff
and administrators condemning Israel’s continuing fight for existence as
“genocide.” Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book, The
End of Everything, describes several instances of genocide or
nation killing.
Then too, one cannot help but wonder how a pause in the
fighting between the forces of light and darkness would have been received in
the United States during and immediately after D-Day. It is certainly
significant that the contemporary forces of light in Normandy, 80 years after
the D-Day landing, did not prominently mention Israel.
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