It took days for former President Barack Obama to comment on Hamas’ barbaric terror attack in southern Israel this month, but now his cup overfloweth with convictions.
Obama shared a much lengthier statement Monday than his original, three-sentence lament.
This new manifesto, puisblished on Medium, spends a similar amount of space restating his horror at Hamas’ targeting, kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of civilians before moving on to a passion that comes more naturally to the ex-prez: lecturing Israeli Jews about how far they can go in their confrontation with the ancient, existential evil perpetually knocking at their door.
“But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters,” Obama writes.
“In particular, it matters — as President Biden has repeatedly emphasized — that Israel’s military strategy abides by international law, including those laws that seek to avoid, to every extent possible, the death or suffering of civilian populations.”
He issued the country responding to an unprovoked massacre a warning: “The world is watching closely as events in the region unfold, and any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire,” he writes before parroting Hamas’ claim that “thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the bombing of Gaza, many of them children.”
President Joe Biden sent the same message on X Sunday when he briefly noted that “Israel has the right to defend itself” before penning a short story about how “Israel must operate by the laws of war” and “we cannot ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace.”
Has anybody in Israel’s camp suggested otherwise?
More galling still is Obama’s assertion that “it is possible for people of good will to champion Palestinian rights and oppose certain Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza without being anti-semitic.”
These sentiments, on their own, in a vacuum, might be unobjectionable.
But in the context of powerful actors’ — mostly concentrated within the Democratic Party — blatantly antisemitic explanations for Hamas’ attack and disproportionate, often lie-ridden focus on Israel’s response, as well as the plain facts surrounding the Gaza conflict, it is indefensible.
Has he taken a look at photos from the rallies many of his allies have marched at in recent days and seen the signs people have been holding up?
By devoting the bulk of his statement not to an expression of solidarity with America’s close, multiethnic, liberal and democratic ally but a rebuke of it, Obama (and to some degree Biden, too) is sending a message to his fellow liberals: The time has come to shift focus from rooting out the evil forces responsible for the Oct. 7 attack to meticulously scrutinizing Israel’s effort to do so.
The implicit assumptions of Obama’s words, in particular, are not just regrettable but insidious.
He does not acknowledge Israel’s prodigious efforts to avoid civilian casualties, despite the fact the Israeli military has been calling Palestinians to warn them to evacuate buildings ahead of strikes and urged Gazans to move south, away from the concentration of their bombings.
He does not properly grapple with Hamas’ attempts to “hide” among Gaza’s civilian population and, worse, its intentional effort to put civilians at risk and exaggerate the civilian casualties incurred.
Consider Hamas’ efforts to keep civilians in the north and the blood libel — eagerly repeated by Obama’s and Biden’s admirers in the media — it leveled at Israel over an explosion at a hospital last week.
And most damningly of all, Obama does not seem to understand the important and inescapable moral truth that follows from this fact pattern.
The responsibility for all — not “some” or “most” — civilian deaths in Gaza lies with Hamas.
It is the terrorists who cruelly dragged an unwilling Israel into this war.
It is the terrorists who have sought to maximize the suffering of both Israeli and Palestinian civilians.
And it is the terrorists who are to blame for the horrors to come.
Israel will doubtlessly make tactical mistakes as it prosecutes this war, and innocent people will die as a result; that’s the tragic, inevitable nature of war, even just war.
Those mistakes can and must be evaluated and learned from in time.
Yet Obama’s morally confused essay at this moment is not indicative of a clear-eyed commitment to universal principles.
Biden and his former boss are making an ignorant attempt to peddle a false nuance that empowers evil, handcuffs good and ultimately endangers more innocents than it protects.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
