A ceasefire will not bring calm to the Middle East.
Blinken, Biden, and other Western leaders are deceiving us. As long as Iran and its proxies are enabled, no less empowered, the battles might temporarily end — but the war will continue to rage on.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, backed by his boss President Joe Biden and the rest of his high-level administration, continues to obsess over a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war.
What Blinken, Biden, and other Western leaders should be obsessing over is how to help their much-needed ally Israel remove Hamas from governing and military power in Gaza and ensure the terrorist organization never poses a threat to Israel or the Palestinians again, and that Hezbollah quickly finds a new home not named southern Lebanon, or else… But I digress.
Apparently, after Israel informed the U.S. immediately following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh that it was behind the killing, Biden administration officials were livid about the decision to take out Haniyeh, agonizing that it could jeopardize months of careful negotiations toward a truce in Gaza.
Haniyeh was a Hamas (i.e. Jihadist death cult) leader who celebrated the October 7th massacres and stole millions (billions?) worth of so-called humanitarian aid from the “poor” and “uninvolved” Palestinians — while purposely keeping them impoverished in order to generate even more “humanitarian aid” that he hijacked — so there should no remorse or mourning over his killing.
And yes, while the assassination’s timing made surrounding circumstances more complicated, there is never a “perfect time” to assassinate a high-profile person like Haniyeh.
But there is a far bigger, more unsettling issue here: Joe Biden, his administration, and other Western officials implicitly believe that Israel is primarily to blame for not reaching a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war — which, again we have to remind many in the audience, Israel did not start.
We can postulate about whether Israel should have prevented the October 7th atrocities and kidnappings in the first place. Most everyone in Israel concurs that this was a colossal failure by the Israeli defense and security establishments, as well as Israel’s leadership.
But most everyone in Israel also does not get caught up in the “would have, should have, could have” game while we are being incessantly attacked from multiple fronts, all of which are sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and at least some of which are endorsed by Qatar, a supposed ally of the United States and NATO.
And yet, the Biden administration and other Western leaders equate Israel — the only democratic country in the Middle East and a long-time, staunch ally of the Western world — with truly nefarious actors such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran.
“Everyone in the region should understand that further attacks only perpetuate conflict, instability, insecurity for everyone, and further attacks only raise the risk of dangerous outcomes that no one can predict and no one can fully control,” said Blinken on Tuesday.
“We are engaged in intense diplomacy, pretty much around the clock, with a very simple message — all parties must refrain from escalation,” Blinken also said, this time after a meeting with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Yet these “further attacks” and “escalation” are overwhelmingly driven by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran — not from Israel. And, in defending itself, Israel has shown more restraint than the U.S. and any other world power would ever show by a long, long, long, long, long shot.
Heck, Israel could literally write the playbook on how to defend yourself against Jihadist death cults while not sparking a regional war that could have global ramifications on oil, natural gas, shipping, supply chains, and so forth.
America and Europe, on the other hand, are too busy being paid off by Qatari and Iranian sources to realize the obscene subversion that these two countries are enacting within the United States and Europe. Either that, or many American and other Western leaders are too incompetent to understand that these Jihadists aspire to infiltrate their countries, for they already are.
Enthralled by value-less capitalism, America and Europe are charmed by the literal biggest bidders, a game that can easily be manipulated by the Arabs who have one-sixth of the world’s wealth despite being one-sixteenth of the world’s population.
If America and Europe were actually doing what is best for their countries — and, by extension, the overall Western world — they would staunchly stand by Israel and very clearly make it known to all other actors, both terrorist organizations and countries, that an attack on Israel is an attack on the West, and the West will respond alongside and in support of Israel and its other interests.
Indeed, an American airbase in Western Iraq was attacked by rockets this week, injuring seven U.S. personnel, in yet another display of “further attacks” and “escalation” by Iran and its proxies against Western interests in the Middle East.
Yet all U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said was the U.S. “will not tolerate” attacks on its personnel, and “we’re still investigating to determine” who conducted the attack. You can bet your bottom dollar that the U.S. will not do anything (or at least anything of substance) in response, which means the Iranian-enabled attacks will keep on keeping on.
The problem with equating Israel and the truly nefarious actors of the Middle East, and the problem with overlooking attacks both on Israel and other Western interests in the region, is that these weaknesses greatly embolden Jihadists and their annihilistic attitudes that have resulted in thousands of Islam-inspired terrorist attacks across the world. Hence, this is not just a “Middle East problem.”
If you care about your and your family’s safety as Islam (which is both a religion and a political doctrine) becomes more pervasive in Western countries, and if you do not want our education systems and other institutions to be infiltrated by radical Islamist ideologies like we are already seeing in much of the West, this is your country’s problem as much as it is for Israel and the more moderate parts of the Middle East.
Instead, Western leaders are using the “moral equivalency” lens to try and impose a ceasefire on Israel, knowing that Israel will respect the terms while Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah (i.e. Iran and Qatar) will violate them, because they have done so for the last many years. No amount of financial or economic incentives will propel these Jihadist death cults and their state sponsors to abandon these perverse worldviews.
And yet Blinken — echoing the thoughts and opinions of many Western leaders — blabs on and on about how it is “critical that we break this cycle by reaching a ceasefire in Gaza,” he said this week, adding that a ceasefire “will unlock possibilities for more enduring calm, not only in Gaza itself, but in other areas where the conflict could spread.”
This is beyond complete and utter nonsense, because the exact opposite is true: A ceasefire in Gaza will not break this cycle and it will not unlock possibilities for more enduring calm in Gaza itself and in other areas where the conflict could spread.”
Indeed, the conflict started in Gaza and spread to other areas because, from the first few days after October 7th, Biden, Blinken, and other Western officials started to both-sides this conflict — instead of being clear that there was one side which attacked (Iran and Qatar via Gaza and Lebanon) and another side which was attacked (Israel, both on the Israeli-Gazan and Israeli-Lebanese borders).
Effectively putting Israel in the same breath as these Jihadists demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the Middle East. In other words, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not determine what happens in this region. Quite the contrary: Major actors in the Middle East determine what happens in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I learned this from Avi Melamed, a career Israeli security official who probably knows a thing or two more than you and I on this topic.
According to Melamed, the Palestinians are used as pawns in greater, more robust geopolitical games, and they always have been. First it was the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Syrians who perceived the relatively liberal Jews as a threat to their authoritarian regimes and societies, and wanted the land known as the State of Israel for themselves.
Then it was the Soviets who saw the Palestinians as another target to disseminate communism and fight a proxy war against the U.S. as the Americans’ relationship with Israel exponentially warmed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran and more recently Qatar have wrapped their arms around the Palestinians, not because of “brotherhood” but because Iran has a hegemonic vision to take over the Middle East and establish a Caliphate in true Islamist fashion, while Qatar (among other reasons) wants more real estate to build pipelines for selling and sending their vast oil and natural gas to Europe.
And yet, Western leaders continue to square both the attacker (Iran and Qatar via Gaza and Lebanon) and the attacked (Israel), which only enables the attacker to keep attacking both now and in the future. The reality is that Israel has always been on the defensive in the lead up to its declaration of independence in 1948 and thereafter, and the Palestinians’ leaders have always been incentivized by others to not make peace with the Jews.
Of course, in today’s climate of political expediency (especially in the West), much of this is irrelevant. Few leaders have any real foresight, nor are they held accountable for long-term consequences to their short-term calculus.
This is one of the collective Western world’s weaknesses which often gets overlooked: high political turnover and variety (i.e. inconsistency) as a result of relatively short governing cycles, compared to low political turnover and variety (i.e. consistency) via relatively long governing cycles in authoritarian countries like Russia, Iran, China, and Qatar, among others.
Hence, dictators simply play the long game, knowing they can outlast most Western leaders. Yahya Sinwar, one of the Hamas masterminds behind October 7th, will be no different. He was just elevated from Hamas’ leader in Gaza to the terror group’s outright leader after Ismail Haniyeh’s death.
Knowing that the U.S. in particular is up against a presidential election clock, and that failing to achieve a ceasefire within the next couple of months will not bode well for the incumbent Democrats (including Biden and Blinken), Sinwar knows that he can play hardball to get Hamas-friendly terms.
This would be disastrous for the Middle East, since it would further inflame the gross desires of Jihadists like him, no less his chief sponsors Iran and Qatar, the region’s two greatest destablilizers.
Why, then, does it seem like Biden, Blinken, and other Western leaders keep blaming (both implicitly and explicitly) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for preventing a ceasefire deal?
Netanyahu might be playing hardball as well, but there is a profuse difference between Netanyahu and Sinwar: one is a mega-terrorist who uses human shields and other wicked methods to conduct his business, while the other is the democratically elected premier of a country which regularly provides great value (e.g. economic, security and intelligence, geopolitical stability) to the Middle East and many other parts of the world.
As long as Western leaders conduct themselves through this warped prism that Israel is largely to blame for the region’s chaos and volatility, they can preach about a ceasefire until tomorrow — but it will not bring calm to the Middle East (if that is indeed their goal).
Until Iran, Qatar, and their proxies are truly disabled, the battles might temporarily end, but the war will rage on, exacting an exponentially higher price every time it is reignited by the region’s bad actors and their hypocritical enablers.
Joshua, you are so right. Israel can’t depend on these weak appeasers! You must do what you have to do. They haven’t lived the nightmare, so know nothing of your hell!
Israel must do whatever is necessary whenever and however to protect its citizens and eradicate Islamic terrorism