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One of President Biden’s top advisers told fuming Arab and Muslim American community leaders in Michigan this week that the administration has made “missteps” in its support for Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
“We are very well aware that we have missteps in the course of responding to this crisis since Oct. 7,” Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer said during a Thursday meeting in Dearborn, Mich., with Muslim and Arab Americans, including state and local Democratic elected officials, according to the New York Times.
“We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians,” Finer added.
As if the rest of his surprise press conference Thursday weren’t disastrous enough, President Biden went back to the podium near the end to throw Israel under the bus. Ironically, given that he was there to insist his memory was just fine, it seemed he’d been meaning to slam Israel all along, but had almost forgotten.
“I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in the Gaza Strip has been over the top,” he announced. And: “I’m pushing very hard now to deal with this hostage cease-fire. There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s gotta stop.”
Why did he decide this was the moment to slam Israel’s justified and humane counterattack against Hamas? Probably because what was most on his mind was the issues that could lose him the election: Not just his mental acuity, but the obsessive fear that supporting Israel too hard will alienate Arab-American voters in Michigan.
Biden’s “executive order imposing severe sanctions” on allegedly violent West Bank Israeli settlers, argues Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, largely relies on data presented by Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who serves as US Security Coordinator to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But “every claim presented by the USSC” seems “lifted directly, sometimes verbatim, from the websites of highly partisan pro-Palestinian organizations,” repeating the same casualty “numbers provided by Palestinian and radical leftist Israeli organizations.” (These often include terrorists killed after striking.) Fenzel also reportedly scrubs “any mention of the daily violence directed by Palestinian terror operatives against Jewish civilians living in the West Bank.” “By rewarding and excusing Palestinian violence,” Biden “is rapidly making it illegal to be Jewish in Judea.”