Tag: United States

Et tu, Biden?

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The backstabber-in-chief strikes again.

The past months have seen a slow, but steady turn against Israel in the White House. Criticism of Israeli policy and warfighting has increased, the already-soft treatment of Iran and its regional proxies has somehow grown even limper, and fruitless negotiations meant to stall Israeli advances have helped entrench Hamas behind Gazan civilians in Rafah. The Biden team has floated sanctions against IDF units, legally penalized individual Israeli settlers for stoking violence in the West Bank – most of which has been driven by Palestinian terrorism – and stated that a necessary Israeli advance into Rafah to defeat Hamas would be a ‘red line’ not to be crossed. None of these actions have been applied to Hamas, the terrorist entity that caused this war, nor to its sponsor in Iran, which just a few weeks ago launched a direct barrage of ballistic missiles and suicide drones at Israel proper. The White House forced Israel into a mere symbolic strike in response, which does nothing to truly deter Iranian belligerence and further endangers both Israeli and American lives. In short, Israel is treated like an adversary, while Hamas and Iran are dealt with as akin to allies.

Rhetorically, the Biden administration is sounding more and more like Bernie Sanders or the Squad every single day; it would be unsurprising to hear the president use the genocide smear in the coming weeks. Its spokespeople have lambasted Israel for everything under the sun, including failing to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, which is not only false, but demonstrably so. Almost nothing, however, has been said about Hamas’s blatant theft of that aid for its own use. Israel has been told to ensure civilian populations have safe areas to evacuate to, but the White House has treated Egypt – the nation that ran Gaza for decades and has plenty of space for a temporary influx of Gazan refugees into the Sinai – with kid gloves. Hamas is assumed, against all extant evidence, to care deeply for the Palestinian people under its charge, while Israel is deemed to care so little about its hostages in Gaza that it would sacrifice their potential release for Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future.

Whether it is a response to rampant leftist protests on college campuses, the potential for Israel to actually win the war it is fighting – something America seems desperately allergic to – or Biden’s flagging poll numbers ahead of the November election, the outcome is the same: turning on our closest regional ally.

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A Modest Proposal – Students for Palestine Edition

Mike Coté1 Comment

** This is the third in a recurring series, in which I offer some modest proposals – in the venerable tradition of Jonathan Swift – for American and international politics. **

For the past several weeks, pro-Palestine protests have been roiling American college campuses. These have been appearing on and off for the six-plus months of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, but they have reached an apex of annoyance since early April. Protests have hit institutes of higher education in nearly all states, from public universities like UT Austin and the University of Colorado at Boulder to elite private colleges like Princeton, NYU, and, most infamously, Columbia. These demonstrations blur the lines between students and outside agitators, as both sets cover their faces with keffiyehs, shout the same antisemitic slogans, and jointly engage in illegal acts.

The newest strategy for these petulant children involves creating pseudo-permanent encampments on university quads, taking them over with demands for a self-imposed Israeli defeat in Gaza and a full divestment of their specific colleges from Israel-related companies, among other more banal requests like making classes Pass/Fail for protesters. They’ve occupied university buildings – creatively renaming them, including as “Intifada Hall” – accosted Jewish students, invited famously antisemitic speakers like Linda Sarsour, and, I kid you not, praised totalitarian states like North Korea that have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. All of this falls under the organized movement calling itself the Popular University for Gaza. These demonstrations have disrupted university life during finals season (really choice timing there, guys), but most professors seem perfectly fine with that. Some even have gone so far as to either allow these truant students to receive good grades simply for protesting or to participate in the protests themselves – including attacking cops and learning the hard way what that brings in response.

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(Flyover) America, the Beautiful

Mike Coté1 Comment

Some thoughts on an All-American cross-country road trip.

Our family recently took a multi-day cross-country – well, 2/3 of the country, at least – road trip as part of our relocation from New Jersey to Colorado Springs. We packed the baby, the dog, and as much of our stuff as possible into our Hyundai Palisade and took off from the East Coast for the long drive to our new abode in the Mountain West. That drive, ironically enough, was exactly 1,776 miles, a fact that got me thinking about the history, people, and incredible beauty of this amazing country as we started the three-day sojourn across eight states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. Over the course of the approximately 28-hour drive – with plenty of stops for baby breaks and dog defecations, naturally – I pondered those ideas and saw them reflected in the places we passed through. I also took away one key lesson that will remain with me for the rest of my life: the pejorative coastal elite label ‘Flyover Country’ is an absurd misnomer.

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Tick-Tock for TikTok

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The clock may finally be running out on the Chinese espionage and propaganda app, revealing many who are unserious about the reality of confronting America’s foes.

TikTok, the extremely popular social media video app, may, at long last, be meeting its proverbial maker. After years of controversy and various threats of bans or forced sales, the app’s incredibly successful run in America may be ending in the coming months. A new bill that was introduced and rapidly passed through the House of Representatives would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app or face what would amount to a nationwide ban. This is excellent news for those of us who have been driving the anti-TikTok bandwagon for nearly 5 years now. I have written quite a bit on the subject already, mostly in the summer of 2020, when the Trump administration first mooted the ban idea. Since that time, the case against TikTok has only gotten stronger.

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Biden’s Pier to Nowhere

Mike Coté1 Comment

The Biden administration’s plan to build a temporary port to receive aid in Gaza is the worst in a long line of bad decisions with respect to the Israel-Hamas war.

If anything is true about Joe Biden, it’s that he has, in the words of the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” To give just one representative example, then-Vice President Biden argued against the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 – one of the few signal foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration. So his failures with respect to Afghanistan, Iran, China, the Houthis, and Ukraine are entirely fitting with this personal history. But perhaps the most disappointing foreign policy issue during the past few years has been his approach to the Israel-Hamas war.

I say disappointing because his initial response to the Hamas barbarities was actually quite good. The administration rhetorically supported Israel to the hilt, ramped up military aid and sales, and sent carrier groups to the region to deter a broadening of the conflict by other Iranian proxy groups. Over the past few months, however, that early resolve has steadily eroded under consistently increasing left-wing and international pressure. We have seen it with the steady push for a ceasefire that would only serve Hamas’s interests, the choice to work closely with Qatar (a primary sponsor of Hamas) on negotiations, the constant badgering of Israel about civilian casualties (which are quite low for an operation of this scale and complexity), and the drawing of a ‘red line’ on Israel entering Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas in Gaza. Still, the most frequent refrain the administration uses against Israel in this conflict revolves around its obsession with humanitarian aid.

The White House and its Democratic supporters have pushed for increased aid to Gaza, blaming Israel for the parlous state of the Gazan population. This runs counter to the facts – that Israel has allowed a large number of aid trucks through border crossings that are sitting in Gaza awaiting distribution by NGOs, that Hamas and other armed gangs are stealing much of this aid, and that in no other war situation is the outside power responsible for the basic needs of the populace whose government began the conflict. Still, the administration has repeatedly upbraided the Israeli government – unfairly and inaccurately singling out Benjamin Netanyahu, who is but one member of a triumvirate War Cabinet – over this issue and has gone out of its way to insinuate itself into it. This was evident when the White House insisted on airdropping aid into Gaza, a tactic that gained the administration few plaudits, resulted in some of the food being thrown away out of anti-American spite, and caused the deaths of several people from falling aid with faulty parachutes.

Now, the Biden team has landed on an even worse idea that they’ve rushed to implement after its announcement during the State of the Union address last week: a floating pier in Gaza meant to deliver humanitarian aid by sea.

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