The Patriot Post® · Reprehensible Moral Equivalence at the UN

The Biden administration has been somewhat strong in backing Israel after Hamas jihadis launched a surprise attack on October 7, wantonly slaughtering 1,400 Israelis. We’ll get back to what we mean by “somewhat.” But first, the United Nations has, unsurprisingly, been a bit less eager to back Israel in its military response. In fact, the UN secretary-general was downright disgraceful.

Antonio Guterres addressed the 15-member Security Council Tuesday, which he noted was “United Nations Day, marking 78 years since the UN Charter entered into force.” Part of the UN’s reason for being was to ensure “never again” remained reality for the Jews after the Holocaust. Yet after helping reestablish Israel as the Jewish homeland in 1948, the UN has increasingly become remarkably antagonistic toward Israel and often anti-Semitic.

Indeed, while Guterres reiterated his condemnation of Hamas’s attack, he qualified it with morally reprehensible moral equivocation and lies.

“Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians — or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” Guterres said. But then he kind of justified it. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

He then went back to not justifying the attacks — albeit with an added implied condemnation of Israel: “But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

Guterres said much the same in his original October 9 statement about Hamas’s attacks.

Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan called his remarks “shocking” and demanded that Guterres “resign immediately.” The UN secretary-general “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder,” said Erdan. “The Secretary-General is completely disconnected from the reality in our region and … he views the massacre committed by Nazi Hamas terrorists in a distorted and immoral manner.”

Guterres isn’t the only globalist “citizen of the world” pontificating about the need for Israeli restraint. “It’s understandable that many Israelis have demanded that their government do whatever it takes to root out Hamas and make sure such attacks never happen again,” wrote Barack Obama yesterday. He acknowledged that Hamas’s “leadership seems to intentionally hide among civilians, thereby endangering the very people they claim to represent.” Yet he added, “Still, the world is watching closely.”

And we wouldn’t want to upset Rashida Tlaib over any hospitals.

Like Guterres, Obama also morally equivocated, saying the Palestinians have been “forcibly displaced” and despite being “willing to make concessions for a two-state solution have too often had little to show for their efforts.”

Let’s go back to Guterres’s comment about how Hamas’s attack “cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” which is in the same vein as Joe Biden’s recent assertion that “Hamas does not represent the Palestinians.”

To steal another of his lines, that’s a bunch of malarkey.

The Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas before and after its October 7 atrocities. “Civilians” in Gaza participated in that assault.

Andrew McCarthy, who’s been studying jihad since before the 1993 World Trade Center bombings he helped prosecute, says Hamas is just a symptom of a broader disease. “The terror group was elected by Palestinians in Gaza precisely because it wants to destroy Israel and murder Jewish people,” he notes.

To further this goal, Hamas deliberately endangers civilians in part for the propaganda effect, as even Obama admits. “How many more killings [of Palestinian civilians] is enough for you?” shrieked Ilhan Omar recently. “How many more Palestinians would make you happy if they died?”

For Hamas, the answer is however many it takes. Hamas chairman Khaled Mashal effectively said “millions.” That’s why jihadists hide in hospitals and mosques and totally intermingle with all manner of “civilian” targets.

As for Obama’s complaint that the Palestinians “have little to show for their efforts” at peace, that’s just a BIG lie. “‘From the river to the sea’ is not a Hamas battle cry,” observes McCarthy. “It is a Palestinian battle cry.” In other words, eradication of Israel in favor of a single Arab state has been the decades-long goal, not just of Hamas but of the Palestinians, fabricated people group that they are. Their schoolchildren are taught with maps that do not include Israel, and Jew hatred is inculcated from the youngest age.

A recently publicized phone call illustrates this point. A Hamas jihadist made a call to his father using the phone of an Israeli woman he’d just murdered, and a recording of it was released by Israel Defense Forces. “Look how many I killed with my own hands!” the terrorist excitedly told his dad. “Your son killed Jews!”

In response, the father wept … with joy. His mother praised him, saying, “May god bring you home safely.” (Note: We lowercase “god” here because the god Islamofascists worship is not God.)

That doesn’t sound like victimhood to us. It sounds like demonic evil. Yet Guterres and Obama and their ilk want us to sympathize with them.

Which brings us back to the Biden administration. Also on Tuesday at the UN, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointedly warned Iran regarding any attack on American forces by Iran or its proxy terrorists, which he cast as standing strong with Israel. “The United States does not seek conflict with Iran,” Blinken said. “We do not want this war to widen. But if Iran or its proxies attack U.S. personnel anywhere, make no mistake. We will defend our people.” And we’ll do so “swiftly and decisively.”

We hate to be sticklers, but that’s another phony leftist red line. Iran’s Hamas proxies did kill more than 30 Americans on October 7, and its clients have launched rocket and drone attacks on American assets in the Middle East numerous times in the past week alone. White House spokesman John Kirby acknowledged Monday that Iran is “actively facilitating these attacks.”

Not only has the U.S. done nothing, we’d argue that Team Biden has facilitated Iran — in part by unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets. The administration has since tried to act tough about that money, but Biden has been working for his entire term to reinstate Obama’s foolish nuclear deal with Tehran and generally appease the mullahs. That includes removing any mention of Iran in a draft UN resolution on the Israel-Hamas war.

Will Biden switch gears and actually deter Iran for a change? Don’t count on it. Yet that equivocation on top of the moral equivalence coming from Obama and the UN make Israel’s entirely justified defense all that much harder.