War resumed in Gaza over the weekend, a war that never truly paused as Hamas continued to conduct attacks on Israelis and launched rockets throughout the four-day hostage release window. The odds of the conflict expanding into a much wider regional war have only increased as Yemeni Houthis, armed, trained, and controlled by Tehran, used drones to launch missiles at multiple Israeli-flagged commercial ships. The drones were taken down by one of our destroyers in the Gulf.
“Today, there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea. These three vessels are connected to 14 separate nations,” U.S. Central Command confirmed in a statement Sunday.
The American warship seems to have initially shot down a drone from Yemen that was fired in its direction in the Red Sea, with a missile subsequently fired in the direction of the Unity Explorer, a commercial ship in the area, according to an official at the U.S. Department of Defense. The USS Carney shot down another drone fired in its direction as it moved to assist the Unity Explorer, the official said, noting at the time that an exchange of fire was ongoing.
Meanwhile, in Dubai, the COP28 took place, ostensibly to deal with climate change. I’m sure the subject came up, but that’s not what was on everybody’s mind in the Middle East. Just to demonstrate that God does indeed have a sense of humor, here’s the private jet that was supposed to take the German contingent to Dubai from Munich.
Meanwhile in Munich ❄️✈️
📹 schoko131 pic.twitter.com/RHemPHNGk3
— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) December 2, 2023
Alas, Joe Biden could not make the trip. He was too busy hosting the latest class of Kennedy Center honorees, including Queen Latifah, whom he credited as a primetime enemy, er, um, Emmy winner. The truth of the matter is Dubai is a long, long plane ride away, and Joe Biden is not responding too well to long flights anymore. Joe Biden is not responding to much of anything well these days. Every trip the octogenarian president has taken of late has been nothing short of disastrous.
In his stead, Biden looked around at his stable of foreign policy intellectual firepower. He could have chosen Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who just failed at conducting an emergency ‘save the pause’ mission. It would have been a ‘get back on your horse’ trip. That’s not the direction he went.
Biden could have sent National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who still believes in the two-state solution, that the Middle East has been quieter than it has been in decades, and the tooth fairy, apparently. No, that’s not what entered into the thinking. Since the Israel-Hamas conflict is really the big story, not the climate, at the climate summit, Joe sent along his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris. What harm could she possibly cause? As it turns out, quite a lot.
So if you dissent from the climate church’s scientific conclusion that climate change is happening, it’s bad, it’s going to kill us all, and it’s all because of humanity consuming fossil fuels, and the world must do more to quash your ability to dissent, the vice beacon of democracy says.
Now imagine if she used that same logic and applied it to dissenters of a Jewish state in Israel, dissent that calls for genocide in Philadelphia outside of a Jewish deli, corners Jewish students in a library at Cooper Union, or in Hamas’ case, kills, rapes, stabs kidnaps, and tortures Jews wherever and whenever possible, and has vowed to never stop trying to kill Jews. Does VP Harris want the world to join with her to drop the hammer on that? No. Let a thousand anti-Semites voices flourish.
I’d try to give her the benefit of the doubt and tell you this was a trick question, but with Kamala Harris, an abject moron, all questions are trick questions. Citing the Hamas Health Ministry for data is like asking PETA for a steakhouse recommendation. The correct answer by Harris would have begun by saying Hamas is a terrorist organization that is evil, uses innocents as shields, and has always lied about casualty counts for propaganda purposes. Then, Harris could have offered an answer to the underlying question. Instead, she uses the question not to condemn Hamas for continuing to try to kill Jews, but to criticize Israel for responding as any other nation in the world would if attacked in similar fashion.
Harris got a question about a proposed buffer zone between Israel and Gaza. It’s nonsense, really, but a question that a politician allegedly briefed on the region should be able to field. She had no idea what the first reporter was talking about, and ignored it by answering a question that wasn’t asked. The next reporter redirected the question, and when she had the reporter repeat it for a third time, finally had to admit she had no clue what she was talking about.
Ah, the hostages, an issue she has never shown competence on, nor any track record of intellectual heft to be forward looking on the subject. So what do you get? The Kamala Harris stock and trade word salad. Every time she offers pablum like this, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has to think a residual check is in the mail.
Actually, that’s precisely the last thing that’s needed. The Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, which basically are interchangeable entities, are the anti-Semitic terrorist organizations that used to run things, more or less, before Hamas, the current anti-Semitic terrorist organization, took over Gaza in 2006. The charter for the Palestinian Authority called for elimination of Zionism in Palestine, which is all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and called the creation of Israel an illegal creation. Israel never had the right to exist in their worldview.
Western leaders for decades have tried to get Palestinians to walk back and amend that charter, and championed their success convincing them to reform at Oslo, and then again at Wye River, claiming that peace and a two-state solution was now within grasp because the Palestinian leadership was finally recognizing Israel. The reality is that since 1999, Palestinian Authority agencies never made mention of Oslo or Wye River, and the charter, despite all the claims to the contrary, has never amended. Harris is basically calling for the United States, and the rest of the free world, to revitalize, meaning to strengthen, renew, restore to power, and even invest financially in an entity that ideologically is no different than Hamas. It’s absurd.
The piece de resistance from Harris here looks at the region after war concludes. Five planks – the first four trying to contain and force Israel into a more vulnerable position than any other country would never accept, and one perfunctory throwaway line at the end about Gaza not waging terror. She does not say a thing about how to go about making sure terror does not emanate from Gaza. She does have lots of things to say about what Israel can’t do once they stop fighting, and that a terrorist group with a long history of being so is to take over in order to uphold the aspirations of Palestinians. These same Palestinians have already voiced their aspirations since the October 7th attacks began. Three out of four of them, the Jerusalem Post reported, support the attacks, and would vote Hamas back into leadership again today if there was an election. She has either been briefed on all this, but insists on trying to Jedi mind trick her desired reality into becoming actual reality, or she’s making it all up as she goes along. Neither is particularly helpful or useful right now, and double downing on the stupid isn’t going to make things any better.
I honestly have no idea what Kamala Harris thought she was going to achieve. I only know that nothing good came out of it. Palestinians are Hamas. Hamas are Palestinians. They are more in lockstep with their stated goals than Donald Trump is with the Republican Party, yet Harris is trying, like others in the administration before her, to pretend that Hamas is a pariah among their own people. They aren’t. They’re being cheered on, both in Gaza and here in the U.S. among the Rashida Tlaib wing of the Democratic Party.
Joe Biden is old, infirm, and corrupt. Kamala Harris, though, is our national embarrassment. She vacillates between incompetence and ignorance, at best trying to placate the growing anti-Semitic wing of the Democratic Party, and at worst, demonstrating that the concept of no daylight between the United States and Israel is not only no longer valid, but the gap of daylight that does now exist is expanding…rapidly.
