Karine Jean-Pierre is a disgrace.
“We have not seen any credible threats,” she muttered when asked if the administration was concerned about rising antisemitism after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Then the White House press secretary launched into a callous soliloquy about how it’s actually Muslims and Arab Americans who “have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks . .
“President Biden understands that many of our Muslim, Arab, Arab American and Palestinian American loved ones and neighbors are worried about the hate being directed at their communities.”
In denial
Too late. We saw her instinct, as with her fellow travelers, to downplay Hamas’ depraved slaughter of more than 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians, and to deny the immediate anti-Jewish mania that engulfed campuses and town squares, in the United States and abroad.
Chants of “Gas the Jews” fill the air. Swastikas are painted on a beloved Manhattan Jewish deli.
Protesters wave the Hamas flag in Minnesota. Posters of the hostages held in Gaza are ripped down with an oddly defiant fervor. Take that, little kidnapped baby. An old genocidal hatred has been unleashed on the world, under the benign gaze of the likes of Jean-Pierre.
The nation’s most prestigious news outlets joined in, under the guise of dispassionate professionalism, to manufacture a moral equivalence between the Israeli military and the Hamas psychopaths.
Even knowing exactly what Hamas had done, news outlets like The New York Times suspended their journalistic judgment, as they always do when it suits them, and trusted Hamas’ lies about a hospital parking lot fire started by its own allegedly misfired missile.
The Times placed a misleading image on the front page of a random bombed-out building miles from the hospital over a headline that credulously repeated the fake news that hundreds of hospitalized Palestinians had been killed by an Israeli missile.
The newspaper’s backtracking days after the fact is meaningless. It “relied too heavily” on Hamas propaganda. No kidding. The damage is done.
The once impartial Associated Press wire service insisted on calling the Hamas terrorists “militants,” as do so many others in the media. Why not “freedom fighters”? You know that’s what they are itching to call them.
You get the sense that, not far under the surface, is the relish expressed by Cornell professor Russell Rickford when he said he was “exhilarated” by the news of Hamas savages defiling young women, butchering terrified children, burning innocents alive and hacking off their heads.
Instead of admitting their relish, most terror apologists just pretend the Israelis made it up.
The newly minted “wartime president,” in his preening Oval Office speech after the attack, reserved his emotion and personalization for his gratuitous themes of Islamophobia and Russia’s actions in Ukraine. When talking about Israel and antisemitism (only twinned with Islamophobia) he was dispassionate and numerical, cautioning Israel’s government’s “not to be blinded by rage.”
Cynical assessment
Biden also cynically tried to equate Russia with Hamas, which again downplays the depravity of the mass slaughter in Israel that targeted civilians with psychopathic torture of children, the rapes, the grotesque and painful deaths, the burning alive, the desecration of corpses, the glee.
This is the guy who keeps telling us that he was driven to run for president by his revulsion for what he falsely claimed was Donald Trump’s support of antisemitism in Charlottesville. Like his press secretary, Biden loves to jabber about antisemitism, but only when it can be wielded as a weapon against blameless Republicans.
Well, here it is, the ultimate antisemitism, the real deal, not an innocent OK sign by an army recruit, not a dishonestly parsed Trump quote. And the administration is out to lunch, its moral compass awry, unable clearly to distinguish between evil and innocence.
Denial of the horrors of Oct. 7 has been so widespread and socially acceptable around the world that the Israel Defense Forces reluctantly were forced this week to show a horrendous snuff video to foreign journalists.
Even just reading the journalists’ dispassionate accounts of footage gathered from Hamas terrorists’ GoPros, victims’ cellphones and kibbutz security cameras should haunt your dreams.
Follow along with The Post’s coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas
Here is one nightmare vignette reported by various news outlets from one of the videos. A father in his pajamas, woken from sleep, scooping up his two young sons, wearing only their underwear, and running into an outdoor bomb shelter.
The terrorist tosses a grenade inside before the door shuts, the father is killed, the little boys are injured and covered in blood. The next clip shows the boys in their kitchen, crying out for their mother. The younger brother appears to have lost an eye.
“Dad’s dead, it wasn’t a prank,” the older boy tells his brother. “I know, I saw it,” says the little boy, who then screams: “Why am I alive?”
The terrorist ignores their anguish, pulls a Coca-Cola from their refrigerator and takes a leisurely sip.
Making excuses
There is no moral equivalence between evil and a military forced to defend Israel against a genocidal neighbor.
Anybody who tries to claim moral equivalence is making excuses for Hamas. Anyone who makes excuses for Hamas is a monster.
So, no, we don’t buy Jean-Pierre’s claim that she misheard the question.
She heard it all right, and she answered it exactly the way her president and his incompetent circle have approached this crisis from the start.
It is an administration determined to hang onto its demented Iran deal, pettily ideologically hostile to Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, lecturing about proportionality from some imaginary moral high ground, plotting how to sneak thousands of Gaza’s unwanted future terrorists into this country without inflaming the wrong voters, all the time calculating how to extract maximum political capital to prop up this disastrous presidency.