The last time we spoke was right after the October 7 atrocities, and you were pretty pleased with President Biden’s response. Have things changed since then?
Things have changed radically—not unpredictably, but certainly radically. In his initial speech on October 10, as well as in Tony Blinken’s remarks when he visited Israel on October 13, they both said that they expected Israel to act in accordance with international humanitarian law. Not many people paid attention to that, but I made a point of singling it out on the Israeli news, saying, “This could become a problem as the civilian casualties mount.” Well, now it’s a problem, and the reason has to do with the upcoming presidential election.
It’s been months already that the issue is no longer Gaza; the issue is Michigan and the very large Arab American and Muslim vote in that state. Just recently, we saw Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer going to Dearborn to meet with these people who have been very supportive of Hamas. He apologized for the administration’s position, saying openly that the administration has no trust in the Israeli government. That’s quite extraordinary. And I will add that it’s not just politics; it’s also an obsession with the Palestinians. These same decision-makers didn’t shed a tear over the massacre of over half a million Syrians or the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of Afghanis, but Palestinian casualties cannot be abided.
It seems that instead of the compassion and sympathy one would expect in the aftermath of October 7, we have seen the exact opposite. Does that come as a surprise to you?
No, it was expected. The United States has stopped us in every single conflict going back to 2006 with the claim that we were killing too many civilians. There’s a tremendous amount of hypocrisy involved, because in terms of the civilian-combatant ratio, the ratio in Gaza is a quarter of what it was in America’s battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were killing four civilians for every combatant, while here it’s about one for one.
So when Tony Blinken comes out and says, “Entirely too many Palestinians have been killed,” the question I want to ask him is, “How many would have been okay?” The answer is that there is no answer, because as we found out, it’s always too many. It’s kind of a fixed field. It was always a matter of time before the American administration would change its position. I guarantee that over the next couple of weeks—if not days—they will start demanding a ceasefire and cutting back on the supply of ammunition. It happens like clockwork.
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