The 2024 election-cycle postmortems by political pundits will assign blame for the Democrats through thumping to a variety of players, policies and events. The Biden, Harris, Obama and Clinton camps are all receiving and casting blame for the train wreck that cost Democrats the presidency and Congress.
The landslide landscape offers the analysts a rich set of targets for their explanations. To add to the myriad hypotheses of what went wrong, a good case can be made that the nauseating reaction by liberal elites to the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel played a major role in President-elect Donald Trump’s crushing defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris.
For months, we watched out-of-control, pro-Palestinian campus encampments on college campuses, keffiyeh-wearing street rioters and the sanctimonious congressional testimony from the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious universities. The street demonstrations and the mealy-mouth explanations from the university executives, intersectional and woke justifications were made for the terror—ignoring the reality that thousands of Israelis were injured, murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped.
The Biden administration inadequately responded to the antisemitic and anti-Israel actions while educators and others hid behind the cover of the First Amendment and the right to free speech.
As these dystopian scenes were broadcast 24/7, Americans who support Israel were sickened. They were baffled by the progressive narratives that flipped the script, making the aggrieved Israelis into bad guys and Hamas monsters into freedom fighters. Many Americans were sorely pained and struggled to deal with the images of kidnapped men, women and children, as well as the bloody and burned-out homes of Israeli kibbutzniks.
While Biden’s initial support for and travel to Israel after Oct. 7 were rightminded, it soon became clear that Israel’s prosecution of the war was hindered by politicized White House nagging about proportionality, its ceasefire suggestions and the administration’s attention to faulty reporting on civilian causalities in Gaza by the collaborationist United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
Time after time, Israel proved the United States’s demands to limit combat misguided. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in Rafah despite the Biden-Harris team demanding that the area be untouched by the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel’s battles with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis began many months before the official Republican and Democratic Party nominations of Trump and Harris. The war also preceded the disastrous Trump-Biden debate that outed Biden’s difficulties, leading to the palace coup elevating Harris to her party’s nominee for president and, ultimately, Trump’s election victory.
While voters said domestic issues—southern border invasion, inflation, crime, education and abortion access—were foremost in their minds, we can be sure Americans drew some connections between the righteousness of supporting our allies and Harris’s career-long support for the woke agenda, critical race theory and the oppressor-oppressed philosophy.
Israel’s defense of Western values and her status as an American ally was on the mind of voters at many of the Trump rallies. At the Madison Square Garden rally in New York just days before the election, which Democrats falsely characterized as paralleling a 1939 German American Bund event, Israeli flags were quite visible, and support for Israel was called for.
Trump’s exemplary first-term accomplishments supportive of Israel and American Jews were arguably superior to Harris’s ambiguous postures on Israel’s prosecution of the ongoing war and the antisemitism on American campuses.
Despite the early post-Oct. 7 support for Israel by Biden, Harris would have been Obama 3.0 with former President Barack Obama’s biased acolytes placed in positions of power pursuing their perverse obsession with placating Iran. The Islamic Republic’s funding of Hamas’s Oct. 7 bloodbath can be linked back to the Biden-Harris elimination of financial sanctions against Iran that Trump put in place during his first term in office.
The Harris campaign chose to use toxic accusations of Hitler, fascist, racist, deplorable and garbage to demonize Trump. Yet it was the Republicans who chanted “U-S-A” at their political rallies, and when Trump spoke about Israel, his audiences always reacted with applause.
The Biden-Harris policies that led to open borders, the defunding of the police and softness-on-crime policies could well have been viewed from the perspective of the pogrom against Israel’s Gaza Envelope. Israel’s democracy needs staunch allies who appreciate Western, Judeo-Christian values and understand the necessity of sovereign safety.
