Andy McCarthy calls this "September 10 counterterrorism." It's actually worse than that.

Yesterday, the Department of Justice and the White House finally addressed the murders of 43 Americans in Israel and Gaza, including one executed by Hamas cowards a few days ago, by actually focusing on Hamas rather than Israel. They unveiled an indictment for murders that charged mainly people who are already dead, except for the one person that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris insist that Benjamin Netanyahu treat as a serious partner for peace. 

I bet this has Yahya Sinwar shaking in his boots:

Federal prosecutors charged Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and five senior members of the group with planning and carrying out years of terrorist attacks in Israel, including the Oct. 7 massacre, according to a sweeping complaint unsealed on Tuesday.

The criminal complaint, originally filed in New York in February, implicated two other senior members of Hamas not previously thought to be directly involved in the attacks. It also listed the number of Americans believed to have died at 43.

The other leaders named are Ismail Haniyeh, who had overseen Hamas’s political office in Qatar; Muhammad Deif, the commander of the group’s military wing; Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of the group’s military wing; Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut; and Khaled Meshal, a former political leader of the group who remains a top official. Mr. Deif and Mr. Issa were killed in Israeli airstrikes during the fighting in Gaza. Mr. Haniyeh, a top negotiator in cease-fire talks, was assassinated in Iran after a bomb was covertly smuggled into the guesthouse where he was staying.

Perhaps no cinematic parallel explains this better than this one from 1984's Ghostbusters. Call it the Ray Stantz Method:

That oughta do it. Thanks very much, Merrick.

This indictment expresses nothing so much as utter impotence. In the first place, the October 7 massacre was an act of war, not a crime. It was an act of war against both Israel and the United States. The proper response to acts of war is disproportionate military retaliation on a scale that not only destroys the perpetrator but also serves as a deterrent to other like-minded states and terror groups.

This indictment does nothing to deter, or even to seek justice in a civil sense. Why? Because at the same time Merrick Garland, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris indicted Sinwar and some dead guys, Biden and Harris simultaneously insist that Netanyahu offer concessions to Sinwar to pay him off for not doing a few more murders in the short term. How seriously does anyone think Sinwar will take this indictment while Biden and Harris maintain Sinwar's position as a critical part of their Middle East strategies?

How seriously should we take it? The DoJ will never try Sinwar because (a) Sinwar will never come to the US to face trial, and (b) neither Biden or Harris will lift a finger to capture him and force him to do so. It's the prosecutorial equivalent of virtue signaling, only with an extra soupçon of incoherent duplicity. It's a PR statement that contradicts everything Biden and Harris have been saying about which side needs to make concessions in talks with terrorists.

McCarthy puts this in broader perspective about American seriousness in fighting terrorism, and calls it "lunatic." It's a return to the same lawfare approach to terrorism the US used before 9/11, he argues, and it is "utterly unserious":

Jihadist organizations operate in foreign safe havens outside the United States, where the writ of our court does not run and where our law-enforcement agencies do not operate, much less exercise any authority. They can’t be reached by American criminal prosecution. Who is going to help the FBI execute arrest warrants against Hamas in Gaza? The “government” in Gaza is Hamas. The “government” in the West Bank would be Hamas if the Palestinians there were permitted to vote.

Under the circumstances, it’s just as well that the lead defendant in DOJ’s complaint is Hamas’s recently “martyred” emir. In making arrests, the FBI is apt to get about as much from the 40 virgins that Haniyeh’s confederates imagine he’s cavorting with as it will from the “Palestinian Authority,” or from the Biden-Harris administration’s favorite “major non-NATO ally,” Qatar (Iran’s cat’s-paw, which was hosting Haniyeh and other Hamas heavyweights in luxury on 10/7).

Despite being among the first groups ever designated as a foreign terrorist organization when our government began that process almost 30 years ago, Hamas has scoffed at the United States, holding five Americans hostage for nearly a year before killing Hersh Goldberg-Polin in cold blood last week to prevent his rescue (and that of five other hostages) by the IDF. The jihadist organization has been confident that, far from taking serious measures against it, the Biden-Harris administration would continue negotiating with Hamas’s enablers and hectoring Israel — the only actor actively fighting to get the hostages back and defeat Hamas — to stop its combat operations.

We learned the hard way on 9/11 that criminal indictments against overseas terror-network leaders neither stop terrorist attacks nor deter others from waging war against the US. Unfortunately, we only learned that lesson for a few years, and have fallen back into lazy old habits that allow politicians to vent without actually doing anything effective against those who make war against us and our enemies. And now, even worse, we have two lazy old politicians not just preventing the US from doing anything effective, but attempting to prevent our ally from doing anything effective in order to appease the terrorists and the terror-sympathizing domestic radicals that Biden and Harris want to woo for electoral gain.

It's sheer lunacy.