River News: Our View

The recent horrific invasion of Israel and the subsequent massacre of innocent Israeli citizens, as well as of Americans and those from other countries, is gut-wrenching, producing a feeling in many, if not most, Americans of the way we felt following the 9/11 attacks.

There simply is no describing the anger or the disgust — those words don’t adequately capture the feeling — with the savage attack on innocent people. Savage attacks, we should constantly remind ourselves, are carried out by savages.

Some have called the tragedy Israel’s Pearl Harbor, or Israel’s 9/11. In reality there is no comparison. Every terrorist attack carries its own unique depth of pain. For Israeli citizens and for the collective nation, the attack on a sovereign and free people represents an existential evil that must be vanquished at all costs, not merely to preserve the physical borders of Israel’s homeland but to preserve the soul of the nation and to honor the dignity of the fallen.

There are two things that need to be considered. As liberals cry about the plight of the Palestinians and the need for a Palestinian state, let’s not forget first and foremost that the Jewish people are themselves a historically oppressed people, victims of a massive holocaust in World War II and of an ongoing and recently revived anti-semitism that constantly seeks to exterminate the entire population.

Always in history there have been — and are — nations and peoples plotting Jewish annihilation. As Biden himself said, Hamas’s stated purpose for being is “to kill Jews.” Israel this morning fights not merely for its existence as a nation but as a people, as it always does.

The second point to remember, the reason a Palestinian state does not exist along with Israel is because Arab nations rejected the 1947 UN partition that would have enshrined both nations and a neutral Jerusalem, as none other than Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas admitted in an interview more than 10 years ago: “I know, I know. It was our mistake. It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole,” Abbas said in an interview reported by Reuters, of the Arab rejection of the partition plan, which the U.S. had endorsed.

But mistakes are not remedied by slaughter and butchery and nonhuman acts of war, which happened in Israel on Oct. 7. Nothing captures the barbarism more than the slaughter, rape, and hostage-taking that went on at an Israeli music rave for peace near the Gaza Strip. To witness this extermination of at least 260 people, and the treatment of hostages as no more than spit-roast meat over the Palestinian fire, is to be sickened as a human being.

True freedom fighters do what they must to win their freedom and cause no more human suffering than the fight against oppression takes. It is liberty they seek and liberty only, not suffering but liberation from suffering for all. On the other side, fake freedom fighters who parade naked bodies in the streets as propaganda props seek only the glory of the modern media and reveal their true narcissistic nature as oppressors and butchers.

To be sure, it is important now to remember that not all the residents of Gaza are terrorists or members of Hamas or even sympathizers. As the Israeli army invades to reclaim this territory from the hands of murderers, and as the thunderous air attacks continue, many of those innocents will suffer pain and death.

That is another tragedy. But, despite the cries of Israeli massacre, already heard in the corporate media and in liberal enclaves in this country, this too falls on the shoulders of those who planned the attack on Israel — Iran and Hamas — and who now use hostages and the Palestinian people themselves as shields and fortress walls, while they hide like the rats they are in the tunnels below Gaza.

These tragedies owe to Hamas and to Iran, which financed and helped plan the attack and then applauded it. These tragedies belong to them and to them only.

All of which brings us to our own tragedy in the United States — the tragedy sitting in the White House, a man who on some level is slightly aware that he is president and who had a direct hand in the events of Oct. 7, if an unintentional one.

To his credit, Joe Biden is and always has been a Zionist, and in the days since the attack he has not only not called for a ceasefire but has firmly let the world know the United States has Israel’s back in its coming onslaught against the savages.

Also to his credit, he has called out as “repugnant” those in his own party who have publicly sided with the terrorists, specifically, the so-called squad of socialists whom the corporate media love.

The problem is, while the attack cannot be blamed on Biden, his foreign policy has directly created the conditions for it to happen, and it has created a situation that leaves the U.S. less than prepared to help fight for the cause of freedom in the Middle East.

For starters, there is Biden’s ongoing appeasement of Iran, and the quintessential symbol of that appeasement is the release of $6 billion in that nation’s frozen assets — frozen precisely because of its actions as a terrorist state. 

The administration can whine all it wants that the money is not yet spent and must be spent for humanitarian purposes anyway, but the Iranian leaders have already publicly stated that they will spend the dollars anyway they see fit, and knowing that $6 billion in gravy is coming its way allowed the regime to turn loose cash it already had for the attack.

As The Wall Street Journal and others have reported, the Iranian government was deep into the plot, helping with planning and training and funding the invasion, and it makes the United States look absurd.

What kind of nation helps to fund an attack on another nation — as we did by unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets and by not enforcing oil sanctions — and then helps the attacked nation fight the attacker?

A delusional one is the answer. President Biden and those who puppet him must now surely realize once and for all that no how much they appease Tehran, Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and to the extermination of all Jews, and, after that, it is, as they say, Death to America.

Since coming to power, Iran has told the current administration just that in so many words. It turned down the administration’s offer to reopen a nuclear deal. It gave nothing in return for the non-enforcement of oil sanctions. And for the $6 billion? We got five hostages. On the other side of that equation, thousands on both sides have and will lose their lives in the current war. 

Iran is our enemy, and the Biden administration should treat it that way. History is not kind to those who try to futilely and continually appease their enemies, especially when they are pathological ideologues.

Beyond the outright help the Biden regime has given Iran to undermine and help kill us all, the administration’ s foreign policy of Weakness First and Appeasement Forever has helped to embolden our enemies and the enemies of our allies such as Hamas. 

From the shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan — where we gifted the Taliban $7 billion in armaments, some of which has no doubt found its way to Hamas — to the failure to confront China to Biden’s fist-bumping embarrassment in Saudi Arabia, where he pleaded like a beggar for oil only to be told no, the president has embraced policies of weakness to match his own frail comportment.

Add to all that our woke military, and the U.S. has become a laughingstock around the world. No one is afraid to attack us or our allies. 

And it must be said: None of this would have happened under President Donald Trump. Democracy is weaker since his departure.

Finally, Biden’s reckless attempts to cut military spending in strategic areas, not to mention the insane funding of billions of dollars to Ukraine has stretched the nation’s military capabilities perilously thin.

We are exhausting our own arsenals and weaponry on behalf of a two-bit thug and dictator in Ukraine who has nationalized the media, canceled elections, raided churches opposed to the war, and banned political opposition. Democrats call this — along with trying to jail Trump and censor Americans — saving democracy, which apparently must be smothered alive to survive.

Meanwhile, a people who practice real democracy are fighting for their survival. It is fair to ask, given the circumstances, Biden claims to have Israel’s back, but does he and can he?

The world watches. There is now a true war for freedom on the world stage — a war that those who back freedom did not want but must engage — and it is not being fought by Ukraine and its rag-tag fascist army but by the courageous Israeli people.

Will the world stand for freedom? Will the United States stand for freedom, for once? 

The war must be fought. The war must be won. The terrorists who control Gaza and who have slaughtered so many innocent people must be destroyed. Hamas must be obliterated completely, and there must be no cease-fire until that mission is accomplished. Finally, Gaza must be disarmed and incorporated into Israel. 

Time may not be on freedom’s side in this globalism world, but the Israeli army and the Israeli people are. 

We stand with Israel.