Hamas’s invasion of Israel. . . means the Biden-Obama approach to Iran has failed catastrophically.
One hopes the Obama-induced Middle East turn to Iran died October 7. Hamas, the Barbaric equal of ISIS, is not a shadow government-in-waiting, but rather a terrorist force seeking Israel’s destruction with Iran’s full backing.
Ashley Rindsberg traces America’s turn from Israel to Tehran back 15 years to Obama’s lunched presidency.
Wrote Rindsberg:
The Iran deal, in whose name the administration twisted itself into a moral pretzel, was . . . predicated on a wholesale restructuring of the Middle East. [A]n ascendant Iran would be a counter-balance to Israel. It would force Israel’s hand in dealing the Palestinian situation in the way that Obama and his foreign policy circle believed was the [right] way.
Rindsberg added Iran as a counter to Saudi Arabia would create a “triangle of tension” maintaining a regional balance, doing so by bringing Iran to the edge of a nuclear breakout, as the Iran deal explicitly did. But to Rindsberg, Obama’s supposed “realism” was in fact a contorted idealism rooted in Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism, including the notion that Western liberal democratic values deserved primacy in any part of the world. Local equilibrium, in Obama’s view, was better than the destructive influence of American intervention.
I have followed over the years Obama’s bent toward Iran. Early in his presidency in 2009, I quoted Newsweek’s Evan Thomas’ evaluation of Obama addressing the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims in Cairo as him “standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.” Thomas saw Obama as a God who could generate the right outcome in Iran’s presidential election which took place 9 days after Cairo.
Instead, the candidate Obama preferred lost as students rioting against the election’s fraudulent result were put down. Obama did nothing, apparently hoping to negotiate directly with Iran’s true boss, Ayatollah Khamenei.
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| Obama with closest confidante, Iran-born Valerie Jarrett |
In 2012, I became aware of Valerie Jarrett, then described in New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s biography The Obamas, as a very important person in Obamaland. Kantor remarked that Jarrett touched every coalition base: African American, unmarried (divorced), from an elite family, born in Iran, a graduate of Stanford and Michigan law school, and Barack and Michelle Obama’s closest confidante.
Born in Iran!
Jarrett bonded with Barack Obama, telling Kantor,
he and I shared a view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young children. [We] viewed America as one country among many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience.
“One country among many.” Obama’s words from the first three months of his presidency.
In 2014, I noted that Jarrett believes with Obama (quoting Walter Russell Mead):
that a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran offers the best hope for regional stabilization. From the campaign trail back in the Democratic primary season in 2008 right up through the current round of negotiations with Iran, President Obama has done his best to steer American policy toward some kind of arrangement with the government in Tehran.
And away from Israel.
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| Hamas’s military chief Saleh al-Arouri |
"What hath Satan wrought,” paraphrasing Numbers 23:23.
Let’s not forget, as written by Victor Davis Hanson, that Hamas’ invasion of Israel was
designed to execute noncombatants, grab Jews for bargaining leverage, and to shock Israelis through their pre-civilizational desecration of the bodies of the dead. It targeted first a youth concert near the border, on the theory the cowardly killers could gain maximum media traction and Arab solidarity by sensationally butchering and kidnapping helpless adolescents. The sheer horror of their methods, and the cowardice shown by focusing on teen-aged girls and children rather than the [Israel Defense Force], means Israel now knows there is no living with a pre-civilizational Hamas.
Former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross similarly reminded us that
on October 7, Hamas created the bloodiest day that Israel has seen in more than five decades. The vast majority of [those] killed were civilians—gunned down in their homes or burned to death as their houses were set on fire. Scores of hostages were taken, including grandmothers and mothers with young children, in an act of deliberate terror and brutality. This unprecedented assault has left Israel [resolved] to end Hamas’s ability to threaten Israel again, and it will inevitably produce an extraordinary response.
Ross added that Hamas specializes in making Palestinians pay, having provoked conflicts with Israel in 2008–9, 2012, 2014, and 2021. To Ross, Hamas’s main agenda is building its own military infrastructure and arsenal — dozens of miles of underground tunnels — to protect its fighters and weapons, not working above ground to develop poor, densely populated Gaza. “Hamas’s priority is destroying Israel.”
Ross believes Hamas has shown “it is governed by violence alone and has no vision of the future.” Israel therefore is “determined that Hamas will never again be able to threaten the Israeli people. . . Hamas must be destroyed [and] Gaza must be demilitarized.”
Time the U.S. stopped wooing Iran’s terror-supporting regime.
Please see this video. The video shows a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran, applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel.
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