One of the things that’s been fascinating to watch, as Israel is being attacking by Hamas on Joe Biden’s watch, is who the folks on the left are blaming for the implosion.
Are they blaming Hamas? No.
Are they blaming Joe Biden? Most definitely not.
They are, through a process of twisted pretzel logic, blaming Jared Kushner: the bête noire of the left.
I touched on this before in my story about Never Trump David Frum trying to fault Kushner. But it isn’t just Frum; it’s a big theme on the left.
Here are a few samples:
The one positive thing to come out of the Trump administration was Kushner’s brilliance in bringing peace to the Middle East.
— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) May 15, 2021
Two things are certain. Jared Kushner left a mess in the Middle East. And he’s probably gleeful at how the current awful situation pits progressives and liberals against one another.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) May 16, 2021
One thing I think we can all agree on is that Jared Kushner is a failure.
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 15, 2021
That last guy, by the way, is a former Obama Ethics office guy, and now calls himself a Senior Ethics Fellow at a lefty think tank on ethics. He’s totally ethical.
Yet, this is utter nonsense. If Kushner had “failed,” why is the Middle East blowing up under Biden and not under President Donald Trump? I realize this is a hard question for them because, logic. But it’s a simple one they can’t answer.
Kushner was amazingly successful with what he set out to do with the Abraham Accords. He realized that tagging everything to the Palestinians had always failed in the past, because they’ve always blown up every effort. So he went around them, even after those wise sages like former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry said it couldn’t be done, that you couldn’t make a separate peace. Kushner achieved exactly that because unlike the Obama folks, he wasn’t always being led around by the nose by the Iranians.
So, Kushner helped achieve peace between Israel and Arab countries like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates that saw the benefit of that relationship. And that helped isolate Iran still further. Meanwhile, there was a relative period of peace, in part, because President Donald Trump had cut off the millions in aid that went to the Palestinians through the U.N. Those two things were not coincidental, in my opinion. Pretty hard to buy weapons if you don’t have the money.
Had Trump remained in office, we probably wouldn’t have seen any real change in that period of relative peace. But, the aim of the Accords hadn’t really been the Palestinians directly, to begin with. It was basically to get to everyone else around them, while isolating them and Iran. And it was working.
But after Joe Biden came in, he decided to reinstate the millions that Trump had cut. Why would he do such a stupid thing? To undo what Trump did, to play to the left? Perhaps thinking this was somehow “compassionate”? So how’s that working out now?
Pro tip? Probably not a good idea to cut money that will ultimately end up in the pockets of Hamas for weapons. Anyone with sense could have told Joe that. But apparently, neither he nor any of his people have that sense. The Palestinians then knew that the easily manipulated folks were in charge again, that they could basically get what they wanted.
So, has Biden learned a lesson from these recent Hamas actions in attacking Israel? Apparently not. He’s still cutting them more millions, as we reported.
As the conflict intensifies despite U.S. calls for restraint, the administration notified Congress on Thursday that it will provide $10 million to Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza to support exchange and reconciliation projects with Israelis. The recipients of the aid were not named.
The State Department said Friday that the money is part of more than $100 million that the administration allocated to the Palestinians earlier this year, reversing a near total cutoff in support under former President Donald Trump.
They claimed that cutting them more money would go to support “people-to-people efforts to bring together conflict-affected groups to address divisions that may be rooted in group differences such as ethnicity, religion, status, class, or political affiliation in areas affected by conflict and civil war.”
So, yes, let’s funnel even more money to folks who want to obliterate Israel, because we think that money is going to make them more compliant? I feel think we’re in such a stupid part of history that anyone could really be dumb enough to think or say this.
Head of Public Diplomacy at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, Yaki Lopez, put it to George Takei plainly: what was bad with what Kushner achieved?
The Abraham Accords crated peace between Israel and two Arab countries (and later two more also came on board). This is something that hasn’t been achieved in almost 30 yrs (since peace with Jordan. How is this a bad thing?
— Yaki Lopez 🇮🇱 (@YakiLopez) May 16, 2021
Of course, it wasn’t, no matter how much folks on the left want to spin it. Trump and Kushner achieved amazing things for peace in the region. Maybe if Biden had simply stood on what Trump had done, rather than try to screw it up, much as he also messed the border, we wouldn’t be where we are today with the Middle East blowing up.
