Tony Blinken seems on the surface to be a mild-mannered bureaucrat. Under the suit though is a political assassin.
One has to go back to October of 2020. The New York Post had the scoop of the election cycle with all of the sordid details from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” The left’s politisphere went into overdrive to limit the spread of information (Twitter, Facebook) and discredit its contents. But what could they do to counteract lewd pictures of the younger Biden and emails confirmed by the other parties involved? There were graphic pictures of the younger Biden and detailed emails about business dealings that included the “Big Guy,” who was the sitting vice president of the United States when many of those business deals were taking place.
The Biden camp needed to make the October Surprise disappear. Only a year ago we learned that Tony Blinken, in his senior role in the Biden campaign, was the one to get the ball rolling by asking Michael Morell to organize a letter to blunt the impact of the laptop’s revelations. And sure enough, Morell got fifty-one former senior intelligence officials to disgrace themselves, their service, and their country by implying that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Their letter was key to Biden’s getting past the explosive contents of the laptop that Hunter forgot to pick up. Go back and see the beginning of the only Trump-Biden debate, where Trump mentions the laptop, and Biden quickly invokes the Blinken-Morell letter to say that the material was false and was from the Russians. That was enough to end discussion and give all of the mainstream media cover to ignore the laptop’s contents until two years after Biden was safely ensconced in the White House, when they could finally admit the veracity of the laptop’s content. They never went back to question the fifty-one signatories as to their motives in signing an obviously false document.
Blinken, now secretary of state, is back to his “save the Biden campaign from Trump” mode. The biggest threat to Biden should be the economy and the out-of-control border. The Biden campaign does not see it that way. They clearly believe that supporting Israel is turning off the young and progressive branches of the party. Those kids on campus are identifying as Hamas, calling for the death of Jews, and throwing in "Death to America" here and there. Not supporting Israel enough may risk losing the majority of Jewish voters that Democrats have enjoyed since the days of Roosevelt. So what can Biden and by extension, Blinken do? Put the clamps on Israel to give up on the war against Hamas.
Their thinking is that if the war ends soon, the election is far enough away that the younger Democrats and the far-left progressive wing will forget about the support and military aid for Israel and simply vote for Biden. As the war will be over, Biden will not have to risk doing or saying something further about Israel that would hurt his standing in the non-Orthodox Jewish community. Orthodox Jews, a minority of the larger American Jewish community, are solidly behind Trump and Republicans.
Biden and Blinken have no leverage over Hamas. They try to push it via Qatar, Egypt and the media to cut a deal with Israel, but the jihadi braintrust in Qatar does not seem to be listening. So Blinken’s only option is to lean on Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu. Blinken returned for the seventh time to Israel this week and the obvious point of his trip was to pressure Bibi to a) not go into Rafah to finish off the remaining Hamas brigades and b) accept Hamas’ terms so as to get the war in the rearview mirror. Hamas’ publicly stated terms, one must remember, include all IDF soldiers out of Gaza, the return of displaced Gazans to their nonexistent homes in the north of the Strip, unlimited aid entering the Strip, and an end to all attacks—until Hamas decides to break the ceasefire as it did so bluntly on 10/7. Hamas’ terms are extreme and they have said repeatedly that they will not budge from them. Blinken has said that Hamas should accept Israel’s “very generous” terms; they have refused. So he has taken to expressing the administration’s opposition to a Rafah operation, though it is the only way to further weaken Hamas, gain control of the one border not currently in Israel’s hands, and direct Gaza Strip’s physical and political reconstruction.
Just as with the Russian disinformation letter, Blinken does not care about the truth or the effect of his actions. His job is to get Biden reelected, and if it means keeping Hamas intact enough to guarantee another future slaughter of Jews, so be it. I speak from experience. When we and nine other American families won a $655 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and PLO in the southern district of New York, it was Tony Blinken, an undersecretary to John Kerry, who wrote the letter to judge asking for financial leniency for the PA, for fear of their going broke. He added some empty words about our deserving to see justice. The PA got a 98% discount and we got shafted. He never lifted a finger to help us get a settlement from those found guilty on every count by a New York jury.
There is no one here in the state of Israel that does not want the remaining hostages to come home. But there are many, like yours truly, who remember that the leaders of the Second Intifada were generally those who had been released (1,000 for 3) in the Rajub deal, while the leaders of the 10/7 massacre were mostly those released (1,000 for 1) in the Schalit deal. Israelis want Hamas destroyed and the Gaza Strip neutralized. They have been periodically shooting rockets at southern Israel again and that practice has to end for good.
Israelis are not interested in Joe Biden’s election timeline or in Tony Blinken’s moves to get his boss reelected. They want quiet borders and no more threats of mass murder, not from Hamas nor from Hezbollah or Iran. It is my hope that the Blinken fails this time and that Israel crushes Hamas. The Russian disinformation campaign did great damage to the US; we do not need Blinken's current efforts to save Biden to do further damage to Israel.
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