As literal pro-Hamas demonstrations spread from Columbia University to other allegedly "elite" institutions in the U.S. and Jewish students continue to face physical violence and calls for their murder for merely existing at such colleges and universities, President Joe Biden chimed in on the chaos over the weekend with a ham-fisted statement that utterly fails to meet the moment.
First, Biden's comments on the disgusting anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence erupting at Columbia and spreading to other campuses came buried at the end of his statement on Passover. Here's the relevant portion of the statement released by the White House on Sunday:
The ancient story of persecution against Jews in the Haggadah also reminds us that we must speak out against the alarming surge of Antisemitism – in our schools, communities, and online. Silence is complicity. Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.
In the earlier paragraphs of Biden's statement, however, the president argues for at least one of the same demands being issued by the unhinged lunatics at Columbia and elsewhere assaulting Jewish students and calling for Hamas to carry out more October 7-style massacres of innocent Jews.
Specifically, Biden echoes the morally bankrupt demand for "an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza" that would allow Hamas to survive and reconstitute to be able to continue launching attacks on Israel. The Iran-backed barbarians have pledged to repeat the terror of October 7 on which they slaughtered the most Jews in any single day since the Holocaust.
The president also pledged to "work toward a two-state solution that provides equal security, prosperity, and enduring peace for Israelis and Palestinians," a vapid talking point that fails to acknowledge there is no government-in-waiting for a Palestinian state that would not make the elimination of Israel its goal. Still, Biden thinks he can force Israel and its citizens to tolerate coexistence with a country that would not acknowledge the Jewish State's right to exist.
As our friend Ed Morrissey noted over at HotAir on Monday, Biden's attempt to appear serious about addressing appalling antisemitism is baseless bluster. While Biden's statement claims that his administration "will continue to speak out and aggressively implement the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism," there's nothing to "continue" as Morrissey's "search of the White House's official website shows that this is the very first mention of anti-Semitism on college campuses in a public statement by Biden since October 7."
Morrissey hits the nail on the head:
Biden has ignored this wave of progressive Jew-hatred for six months, until the ugliness at Columbia got so bad that he was forced to finally say something. Rather than address the issue directly, Biden buried the scolding of his radical-Left activists in a mainly-boilerplate Passover observation statement, and put it below his support for their ostensible main policy demand of a cease-fire in Gaza.
Even worse, Biden is engaging in such idiocy all in a transparently political bid to win support from a group of anti-Israel voters in Michigan and other states who have been caught on video chanting both "death to Israel" and "death to America."
In a confounding move we've seen before, the White House's Andrew Bates issued a statement himself on Sunday specifically condemning "calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community" as "blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous."
Bates said such displays "have absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States of America. And echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable," his statement continued. "We condemn these statements in the strongest terms."
Why couldn't Biden say that in his statement? Why did a strong condemnation have to come from one of his press aides? The same playbook was used after those aforementioned Michigan voters were caught chanting "death to America" as Biden desperately seeks their votes ahead of November, with Bates swooping in to condemn the ghastly chants to seemingly keep Biden himself off the record.
As Morrisey rightly concluded in his report, "Joe Biden is a craven moral idiot."