It’s September 2021 and Joe Biden has just pasted on his best outraged squint while promising to punish his own agents whom he accused of whipping Haitian invaders with their horse reins at the United States border with Mexico. Apparently without checking the video to determine the facts, the usual suspects in the Administration immediately and breathlessly piled on with the condemnations.
Perceived racism is always a good reason to yell, regardless of the facts. At the top was Joe Biden who growled: “It’s outrageous - I promise you those people will pay!” The problem with all this well orchestrated and mega-televised outrage was that it was hastily based on a lie that could have been easily dismissed with a cursory look at the video by anyone who has ever ridden a horse.
It took nine months and 511 pages to tell us that… ummm, welll… actually there was no whipping. Biden and company apparently thought it would look really good to broadcast outrage for Haitian invaders while throwing their own agents under the bus, thus proudly flashing their liberal bonafides to their left-flank as well as to the equally deranged horse-ignorant media. When someone likely told them within hours that expert horsemen use reins like that to expertly maneuver their horses, they likely decided it made better political sense to bury their stupidity in an endless commission even if it meant leaving those agents under the bus for nine months.
No apologies were heard and if the agents were pulled out from under the bus, it was done quietly and on a weekend night.
Bottom line: Virtue signaling by the venal trumps truth and justice regardless of who gets thrown under buses.
What is the connection between Whip-Gate and Jewish 'settlers' in Judea and Samaria? Joe Biden has worked to show himself in certain respects to be a friend of Israel at a time when there aren’t too many of those. Not so much by threatening to veto a stand-alone Israel aid package or by pushing for a post-Gaza war state of Arab Palestine, which aren’t very friendly at all, but by sending Israel munitions and casting vetoes in the UN.
In the immediate wake of the October 7 Islamic Nazi pogrom, a tsunami of revealing but unsurprising antisemitism is sweeping the world, making it unfashionable to publicly support Israel. Joe Biden thus finds himself in a quandary knowing he must support Israel insofar as it is the morally correct thing to do and that most Americans support it - but also that it is costing him voters in an election year where he cannot afford to lose any. The fact that they are vicious antisemites who have chosen to remain comfortably ignorant of Hamas atrocities or deny the filming of them by Hamas itself matters less than the fact that they might vote.
So what’s a politician to do in order to square a circle and dance at two weddings?
As usual it’s the media who rode in to his rescue (on toy horses of course - no Marlboro Men over there). The sheer and unprecedented magnitude of the evil of 10/7 forced the media to depart from its ancient comfort zone of hounding Israel and thus express the required de rigueur shock and sympathy.
But those who know the historical mendacity of these hacks knew their outrage and support couldn’t last. Indeed, as the weeks went by and the reported Gazan death toll climbed (never attempting to differentiate between civilian and terrorist deaths, of course), shock and sympathy gave way to endless stories about the human suffering of Gaza’s Arabs and rehashed outrage at putative Israeli excess.
The activist media ideologues never ask why the Biden administration is not enforcing the Taylor Force Act against the Palestinian Authority which still pays Arabs generous salaries for the unholy work of killing Jews.
They never ask those suffering Gazans if they regret what Arabs did to Jews on 10/7 or about the 85% popular support Hamas enjoys in Gaza and the ‘West Bank’.
They never show the extraordinary means Israel employs to reduce civilian casualties despite Hamas forcibly embedding itself amongst civilians.
But now they have figured out how to return to their usual self-righteous anti-Israel zeal through the handy blood libel of ‘Increased Settler Violence’. The supposed plot of this Sovietesque propaganda flick is that in the wake of 10/7, Jewish settlers have surged wanton attacks on innocent Arab civilians including murder and driving them from their “ancestral lands”. (I would urge you to read Shai Ben Tekoa’s book ‘Phantom Nation’ to understand why those words are in quotes.)
This is all quite the worst sort of hogwash and articles here and here show that mostly imagined ‘settler violence’ has actually dramatically lessened from the minimal levels it was already at in the past years. Every population sector has a few who do not keep the law, like in Tel Aviv or New York, perhaps.
But when you have an election to win, making much ado about nothing via dramatic but isolated anecdotes is a small price to pay, especially when you can make Jews pay it, and even more especially when those Jews are 'settlers'.
Biden has loudly and angrily imposed personal sanctions on Jewish 'settlers' and is blindly calling, again, for the creation of a peace-killing ‘Palestine’ in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza for the vague sake of ‘peace’. He does so knowing any sane Israeli leader must reject the insane idea. This wanton virtue signaling has encouraged shrill calls to both defund the 'settlements' and harass many more Israelis, and Jews around the world, with both warfare and lawfare.
Once the Administration publicly blessed the blatant blood libel of ‘rampant settler violence’, the fact that it can get Jews killed and is also a demonstrably empty myth doesn’t matter. Just like Whip-Gate, it offers venal politicians all the cover they need to leap on their virtue signaling steeds and race to see who can throw the most expendables under the bus. If recklessly endangering Jews is necessary to solidify their left-flank before the election, there’s more than enough room under there right next to those border agents.
What’s clear from these seemingly completely disparate stories is that the Administration’s goal is not virtue. Nor is it truth, justice, or the American way. Their uniquely craven form of virtue signaling is meant solely to lead others to perceive them as ‘good’, real-world consequences be damned.
When Biden and his handlers attack either their own agents or Jewish settlers to signal their virtue, they are revealing their true nature. When they repeatedly call for the Two State Solution, they conveniently ignore the existential certainty this entity would aim to complete The Final Solution, thus revealing even more of that venal nature.
When delusional politicking trumps truth, there will never be enough buses and evil will continue to smugly chuckle over the opportunities the would-be virtuous class keeps serving it on silver platters.
Daniel Winston is a writer, therapist, therapy teacher, and lecturer in Israel and can be reached via his website at DanielWinston.com.