Biden’s anti-Israel policies have failed to capture the Dearborn vote
Ever since October 7, Biden has been doing his best to put the brakes on Israel’s efforts against Hamas. By doing so, he turned what should have been a short war that destroyed a tyrannical enemy and probably freed the Gazans as much as it did the Israelis into a long war with a higher-than-necessary death toll on both sides. He did this to placate the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat party, especially the voters in Dearborn, Michigan. However, his deadly efforts have failed. Dearborn hates Biden.
You cannot negotiate with or placate evil. The go-to examples, of course, are both the Nazis and the Bushido Japanese (who were as insanely evil as the Nazis, although their death toll was lower). The only way to end the evil they wrought was to destroy them completely. Doing so not only ended a brutal war and freed the nations they’d invaded but it also freed their own people.
There are two things to remember about tyrannies: The first is that the populace is a mix of those enthusiastically complicit in the regime and those who are passively or forcibly complicit in the regime because of fear. They face death as surely as a foreign enemy if they don’t get with the program. (The Soviet Union’s gulags tell the same tale, as do the concentration camps in North Korea.) War frees them as surely as it saves the more obvious victims of a tyranny that rampages beyond its borders.
Image: January protest in Dearborn. X screen grab.
The second is that the only thing that ends a tyranny is to destroy its leaders in government and the military. I always go back to the Exodus story. Angry atheists insist that God was a sadist to inflict plagues on the Egyptian people rather than only on Pharaoh. They miss the point, which is that Pharaoh, in his palace, didn’t mind that his people were suffering. He relented only when he suffered—that is, when the reciprocal killing of the firstborn took his own child.
Hamas is evil from the top down. It’s a death cult openly dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish people in the most brutal ways possible. It’s also a money laundering scheme, which sees its leaders rake in billions from abroad, with only minute amounts trickling to the ordinary people. And as October 7 showed, many in Gaza are voluntarily complicit, whether participating in the attack, celebrating after it, or holding hostages to the present day.
The way the war should have been fought—and the way Israel wanted to fight it—was to strike incredibly hard and fast at Hamas, destroying it from top to bottom. A clean, fast war results in many fewer deaths, both civilian and military, compared to a long, drawn-out war.
But Biden was having none of that. He wanted peace talks and ceasefires. He built expensive, fragile piers that brought supplies that Hamas instantly whisked away before the Mediterranean whisked away the pier itself. And most significantly, he withheld weapons systems that Israel had already bought and paid for. Everything Biden did slowed the successful Israeli offensive and gave breathing room and supplies to Hamas.
The reason Biden treated an ally this way in the face of an acknowledged terrorist organization can be summed up in one word: Dearborn.
Dearborn, Michigan, which has Rashida Tlaib as its representative, is the most Muslim city in America. According to the 2000 census, Arab Americans were 29.85% of the population. By 2020, Dearborn was at least 54% Arab, with some estimates going as high as 70%. This is the city Biden views as essential to his 2024 victory. (Anyone stepping into Biden’s shoes during the campaign will feel the same.)
Making Dearborn happy is proving to be a problem for the Biden cabal. Democrats govern by trying to balance the needs of special interest groups rather than looking to benefit Americans as a whole. With regard to the Israel-Hamas war, this means that Biden couldn’t abandon Israel entirely. Doing so would have offended the Jewish voting bloc and the remaining old-style Democrats who still support the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
However, what the Biden cabal didn’t realize is that while the Jewish group (stupidly) can be placated with soft words, the pro-Hamas group is made of stronger stuff. Its members want Israel gone, and Biden isn’t making that happen.
So, in one of the great ironies of modern politics, Biden’s shameful efforts to hamper Israel’s abilities to destroy a genocidal terror organization and free the people it controls have lost Dearborn. (The report comes from the Guardian, which takes at face value Hamas’s “data” about the civilian death toll.)
On a scorching Saturday afternoon in Dearborn, Michigan, the feeling of despairing resignation over the war and the role America’s political leaders are playing in enabling the suffering in the besieged territory is near-omnipresent – and so is a sense of apathy over the coming presidential election.
[snip]
As the death toll continues to mount in Gaza with little sign of a political solution forthcoming, the mood in America’s largest Arab American community in recent months and weeks has decidedly changed. While flags and protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has now killed more than 38,000 people, drew fervent energy and anger to Dearborn’s streets when the city became a protest hub around the state’s presidential primary, the sense today seems one of resignation and anger at America’s political leadership.
For Joe Biden, who won the key battleground state of Michigan in 2020 by just 154,000 votes, that could be deeply damaging come November.
[snip]
According to a poll conducted by the Arab American Institute in May, Biden has the support of less than 20% of Arab Americans – down from nearly 60% in 2020. The poll estimates he could lose 91,000 votes in Michigan alone.
In some ways, the above report is funny in an ironic way. But mostly, it’s incredibly tragic that Biden’s blind pursuit of electoral votes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths, all while achieving nothing. And that’s because you can’t negotiate with evil.
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