Opinion
Biden’s pier is subsidising Hamas and impeding Israel
The Biden administration’s washed up aid effort was built as a sop to false claims in the media
May 30, 2024 15:50
2 min read
The Biden administration’s washed up aid effort was built as a sop to false claims in the media
May 30, 2024 15:50Monday was Memorial Day. On this sacred day of national memory, Americans honour their war dead with parades, barbecues and, if you’re a Princeton student who supports Hamas, blocking the street to stop the parade.
Most of the students do this out of a perverted humanitarianism — which is to say, ignorance and self-love. Some do it knowingly. For the Islamists, it is part of their war against the Jews, wherever they are. Their partners in the old-fashioned left also do it strategically, but without knowing where that partnership and its tactics will lead them.
Since October 7 even liberal Jews can peer into the future and see where all this is pushing them: out of the American mainstream in which they have swum so pleasantly, out of the elite universities that are gateway to the good life and out of the family of nations.
All this has happened under the aegis of the Democratic Party. This is not an opinion. It is a historical fact. And there’s more to come.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, addressed the People’s Congress for Palestine in Detroit. The fingerprints of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine were all over the congress.
The keynote speaker was Sana’ Daqqah, the widow of a People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who abducted, tortured and murdered an Israeli soldier. The PFLP’s Wisam Rafeedie spoke too.
You can imagine the rest: celebrating terrorists, calling for “armed resistance”, praising Hamas’ assault on civilisation as a blow against the Zionists and the “US empire”, etc.
The US government designates the PFLP, which has bases in Gaza and Damascus, as a foreign terrorist organisation. Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, thought it a good idea to give a video address.
Also on Memorial Day weekend, the pier that the Biden administration has built off Gaza came loose in a storm. Parts of it came ashore near Ashkelon. At least one part seems to have sunk. The pier cost $320 million.
A tugboat washed up on the beach at Gaza. American soldiers stood around on the sand. The Biden administration promised the American public that there would be no “boots on the ground”. Yet there they were, within range of more than half a dozen types of Hamas rocket.
Hamas shelled the pier in April before it opened. As soon as the first deliveries left the Israeli-controlled landing stage, the Gazans looted the trucks. If the pier was ever needed to supply food, there are now sufficient supplies coming overland via Israel, and now Egypt too, to make it unnecessary.
No doubt the pier will be rebuilt at further expense. This is what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy”: you’ve spent too much and failed to get a result, so you spend more, hoping that repeating the experiment will get a different result.
The pier’s effect is that the Biden administration is subsidising Hamas and impeding Israel’s attempt to defend itself. Is that the intent too?
The administration built the pier as a sop to false claims from the media and the Democrats’ Tlaib tendency that the Gazans were starving — more perverted humanitarianism. The pier also serves as a wedge, inserting the Biden administration into Gaza just as it has inserted itself into every stage of Israel’s war, and even into Israeli cabinet meetings.
Pier into the future and you can see where this is going. The road to hell is paved with bad intentions.