Fourteen and a half jackasses, to be precise.
After months of American vetoes of “ceasefire resolutions” calling on the Israelis to stop fighting and let Hamas carry out its vow to exterminate the hated Jews unimpeded, the 14 other members of the UN Security Council finally crafted a form of words that the Biden administration could abstain on.
For those unfamiliar with the convoluted structure of the United Nations, the Security Council comprises five permanent members—the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia—and ten rotating member nations. The permanent members were originally the five victorious powers at the end of World War II—the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China. The “People’s Republic of China” was allowed to take over the Chinese seat in 1979, displacing Taiwan, where the Nationalists had fled after losing the Chinese Civil War 30 years earlier, and Russia was allowed to take over the Soviet seat after the Socialist Future of Mankind dissolved into thin air at the end of 1991. The current grab-bag of other nations in the Security Musical Chairs is headed by Algeria, where about 100,000 people were killed in the civil war of the 1990s, in which the “socialist” dictatorial mustaches managed to defeat the would-be totalitarian Islamist beards. As for the permanent eminences grises, Russia has to date killed about half a million people in its unprovoked war of aggression on Ukraine, arguably a war of genocide, while China is behaving like a typical “have-not power” threatening war with Taiwan and potentially with the United States, while engaging in uninterrupted genocide against the Tibetans and the Uyghurs.
Why these powers and the likes of Malta should have any standing to say anything about the Israel-Hamas war is a mystery, and the fact is nobody cares what they say, nor is it news. The news is that the Biden administration let pass the demand that Israel stop fighting and that all the Israeli hostages be released unconditionally (heh-heh-heh, you know we don’t mean it, Hamas). It’s a matter of principle, of course: the principle that Biden desperately needs Michigan’s electoral votes and therefore must do what he can to mollify the angry, angry Arabs of Dearborn and Hamtramck, who are not to be appeased because they were driven from their Iraqi and Syrian homelands by the filthy Zionists. (Nota bene, antisemitic trolls, that last bit was sarcasm, not a recounting of actual events.)
Sorry, Mr. President, but Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her constituents have their principles too, and the morals and logic of suicide bombers—they will stage violent demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 1968 redux, and get Trump elected just to show how very much they hate the Jews—and never mind that six months later, The Donald is liable to display his gratitude by sending the black-shirted secret police he successfully tested in Portland, Oregon four years ago to kick in their doors and drag them off to concentration camps or cram them onto the first flights back to Fallujah and Aleppo.
And while we’re on the subject of self-destructive behavior, here’s some friendly advice for President Biden: Do not threaten Israel that if its citizen army goes into Rafah to free the remaining Israeli hostages and finish off Hamas as a threat in Gaza, the country will be isolated. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who delivered this message to Netanyahu last week, is Jewish, and Biden is a faithful Catholic and a longstanding supporter of Israel, so both should know that this warning has a very different resonance for Jews than it might for another people. In the Torah, Book of Numbers, the story is told that Balak, king of the Moabites, asks the pagan prophet Balaam to curse the enemy Israelites. Instead, God commands Balaam to bless them, and he complies, saying among other things:
הֶן-עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן, וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב
“Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” (Numbers 23:9; the language is echoed in Deuteronomy 33:28).
Even non-religious Israelis learn the Bible in school, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in God; two thousand years of anti-Jewish persecution confirms this prognosis. Moreover, Israelis have already endured many years of isolation, especially after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and emerged even stronger. If Biden wants to rally Israelis around Netanyahu, who is loathed across the Israeli political spectrum right now for his catastrophic dereliction of duty in allowing Hamas to build itself up until it could unleash the October 7 atrocities, he can do no better than issuing this type of threat.
Emanuel Goldstein 