The Uses of Assassination

The Assassination of six abducted Israelis by Hamas last weekend was intended to be provocative. Those provoked were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli army, the so called “friends of Israel,” presumably including the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration, silent friends of Israel and, if not in every circumstance, a sizable portion of US reporters and commentators.

Immediately following the assassinations, Time reported, “Abu Obaida, a spokesperson for Hamas’ Al-Qassem Brigade’, said that the new instructions came into place after Israel conducted a rescue operation in June that freed four hostages but resulted in the deaths of dozens of Palestinians, including women and children.

“‘Netanyahu's insistence to free prisoners through military pressure, instead of sealing a deal, means they will be returned to their families in shrouds. Their families must choose whether they want them dead or alive,’ he said.”

The new instructions, Obaida said, were issued “to the Mujahideen assigned to guard the prisoners after the ‘Nuseirat incident,’’ a reference to a June operation in which five Israeli hostages were rescued from Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. Obaida said in a statement, "We say to everyone clearly that after the Nuseirat incident,” during which 300 refugees were killed, according to Hamas figures, “new instructions were issued regarding dealing with them [the hostages]”

To put the matter in simple terms, Mujahideen guards were instructed to assassinate their hostages in the future should any attempt be made to rescue them.

Netanyahu said that if Hamas were serious about a pause in fighting, it would not have murdered the hostages. He is, of course, right. The Biden-Harris administration, winking at the slaughter of the innocents, continues on its fruitless road to a negotiated peace, while Iran laughs behind its hand at the stupid Americans. Apparently, no indignity will provoke the anti-Netanyahu crowd to adopt a sane foreign policy, especially those sporting PHDs in an academic university environment gone to seed whose ill taught students support a deracinated and murderous Hamas.

As usual, the Biden-Harris administration is playing it coy. The two figures most responsible for foreign policy for twelve years, counting the Obama administration’s eight years, have been playing both ends against the middle. This is more than political confusion. It is a paralysis of the will occasioned by moral confusion, spiced with an increasing anti-Semitic network of nitwits.

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has been for some time an anti-nitwit operation.

“Hamas’ execution of U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages shouldn’t go unanswered,” the Journal noted. “After President Biden pressured Israel’s Prime Minister—even though he accepted the hostage deals and Hamas rejected them—many Americans asked: What about the killers?”

On Tuesday, the Biden administration “unsealed criminal charges against six Hamas leaders” very late in the game: “The U.S. move is minor, and it isn’t even new. The U.S. filed the charges in February, and their unveiling now looks all too much like a political gesture … As our friends at the New York Sun note, a criminal court is the wrong venue for the likes of Mr. Sinwar. Hamas jihadists aren’t committing street crimes, and Israel isn’t fighting back with police. Israel is fighting a war for survival against illegal enemy combatants. What matters is winning the war, not arresting suspects. The criminal charges risk confusing the stakes … If the Biden Administration had the will, it could follow up these charges with large bounties on Hamas leaders’ heads and a campaign of charges against Hamas’s material supporters in America. But it hasn’t.”

Ah – the will – that is the sticking point, is it not?

Hamas leaders are allowed to roam freely without fear of arrest: “Hamas’s Mr. Meshaal traveled last week from Qatar to Turkey, a NATO ally, where he called for West Bank suicide bombings. There was no effort to arrest him. If Mr. Biden wants to squeeze Hamas, he has options other than the symbolic gesture of U.S. criminal charges for a trial in an American courtroom that the defendants are never likely to see.”

Thus far in its presidential campaign the Biden-Harris administration has been full of solemn tears and shouts of the joy to come when the twelve years of the Obama-Biden administration is stretched to a possible eight further years under the administration of a secluded, media shrouded and ambivalent President Kamala Harris.

A dangerous paralysis of the will is what follows political and moral confusion. This confusion arises from attempts to bestride irreconcilable goals -- such as an attempt to destroy Israel by Iran directed terrorist agents and a too placid US arrangement with Iran that is centered on fruitless negotiations rather than justifiable assertions of force.