By Ben Johnson

After Hamas terrorists finished raining their first deadly volleys onto civilians on October 7, they took more than 200 Israelis hostage. Not to be outdone, President Joe Biden took the entire nation of Israel hostage on Thursday night, binding military aid for Israel to a far larger package fueling his unpopular war in Ukraine. In his short speech, Biden resurrected the “Axis of Evil” ideology that mired the U.S. into pointless wars, downplayed the terrorists’ religious and genocidal motivation, and turned a speech about the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust into a scolding sermon against alleged U.S. “Islamicphobia.”

Biden’s speech, only the second he’s delivered from the Oval Office, came to promote an “unprecedented” aid package for Israel and Ukraine. Although he did not detail the terms in his address, Biden’s $100 billion budget request is expected to include $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, $14 billion for the U.S. border, $10 billion classified as humanitarian relief, and $7 billion for Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific coalition against China.

“When America experienced the hell of 9/11, we felt enraged,” said Biden. “While we sought and got justice, we made mistakes.” Presumably, Biden meant the invasion of Iraq, which had no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” or ties to al-Qaeda (and which Biden supported to the bitter end). Yet Biden repeated George W. Bush’s mistake by tying the terrorist assault against Israel to Ukraine.

Ignoring Islamist Genocide

Biden pivoted to Ukraine just two minutes into the speech and spent far more time discussing Kyiv than Tel Aviv. “[T]he assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine,” he asserted. In reality, the October 7 attack echoes 75 years of armed hostilities and targeted murder of civilians between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Biden also regurgitated Iraq-era rhetoric by claiming both Hamas and Russian President Vladimir Putin seek to “completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.” Democracy motivated neither invasion: Putin’s aims at the irredentist retrieval of a lost empire; Hamas intends its intifada to exterminate the Jewish population of the Middle East (for starters).

Hamas has made little secret of its genocidal aims. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” proclaimed the original Hamas Covenant of 1988. Nor did Hamas hide that its genocidal ideology flowered from its adherence to fundamentalist Islam. The 1988 Hamas Covenant quoted an Islamic hadith (religious text) for its faith-based motivation:

“[T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.’ (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).”

Instead of pointing out the connection between ethnic cleansing and Islam (of which he is doubtless unaware), Biden distanced Gaza from Hamas and railed against American “Islamophobia.”

“Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people,” Biden insisted. Certainly, Hamas does not represent Palestinian Christians, who saw a Baptist hospital and an Orthodox church hall leveled within days. But Palestinians in Gaza democratically elected Hamas in place of the more secular Fatah Party in 2006, and 64% of Gaza residents still have a popular opinion of Hamas. The coming war may be the greatest proof of the phrase, “Elections have consequences.”

Axis of Evil 2.0?

Biden papered over the terrorists’ ideology in an effort to convince voters that “making sure Israel and Ukraine succeed is vital for America’s national security” (a combination even MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan described as “Axis of Evil-y”).

“What Biden is doing is disgusting. He’s using dead children in Israel to sell his disastrous Ukraine policy to skeptical Americans,” said Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). “They are not the same countries, they are not the same problems, and this effort to use Israel for political cover is offensive.”

Biden leveraged sympathy for Israel to support Ukraine, because the American people have had enough of his ever-intensifying proxy war. A CNN poll found 55% of Americans oppose sending any further aid to Ukraine, and 51% believe we have done enough to help the Ukrainian war effort.

“Let’s secure our border. Let’s help our ally, who is under attack. And there doesn’t need to be any more money to Ukraine: End of story,” said Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Hawley also rejected Biden’s bid for a $100 million taxpayer-funded “humanitarian” grant for Hamas-controlled Gaza and other territories — resources he said are certain to fall into the terrorists’ hands.

Trickle-Down Terrorism

Simultaneously funding Hamas and Israel represents one of the “numerous idiocies” in U.S. foreign policy that fueled Middle Eastern violence, argued Hawley on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Wednesday. Chief among these is “the chaos in Afghanistan” upon his poorly executed withdrawal, which the usually pro-Biden legacy media compared to the fall of Saigon.

Hawley’s colleague, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), added the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama-Biden administration. A provision of the JCPOA, which released Iranian assets frozen overseas since the Ayatollah came to power, “transferred over $100 billion to the largest state sponsor of terror, Iran” in 2016, Johnson told “Washington Watch” Thursday. “Where do you think they spent that money? Not for the benefit of the Iranian people.”

Candidate Biden criticized President Donald Trump for pulling out of the JCPOA, calling U.S. withdrawal “a profound mistake,” and has since signaled his desire to reestablish “a credible path back to diplomacy” with Tehran. This September 11, Biden released $6 billion and five Iranian prisoners “at exactly the time that Hamas was planning this terrorist attack on Israel and this hostage-taking,” said Hawley.

Although Biden pronounces himself an opponent of “trickle-down economics,” he has facilitated the flow of funds from Iran to the terrorist organizations which act as its cat’s paw. Iran gives Hamas $100 million annually, and the Islamic republic funds the other major force threatening to attack Israel: Hezbollah. “Iran’s annual financial backing to [Hezbollah] — which in recent years has been estimated at $700 million — accounts for the overwhelming majority of the group’s annual budget,” the State Department reported in 2020. This has consequences for Israelis and Americans alike. Israel has rushed IDF troops to its northern border with Lebanon in anticipation of an incursion by Hezbollah. The Biden administration has considered using U.S. military force if Hezbollah attacks Israel, Axios news reported on Wednesday.

Hawley branded Biden’s latest Iranian pay-off “one of the most idiotic decisions by an American president in recent memory. And this guy has a lot of those.”

Paying the Palestinians

Joe Biden has directly funded the Palestinians, insisting that funding pro-terrorist organizations would fight terrorism. In April 2021, the Biden administration released $235 million in Palestinian aid cut by President Donald Trump, saying the funding would “restore credible engagement” in Palestinians’ peace negotiations with Israel. Biden’s 2024 budget proposal, released in March, requested $259 million in “critical assistance” for the Palestinians — an increase of $40 million. This funding, the administration said, expressed its “commitment to advancing security, prosperity, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians” and “in support of a two-state solution with Israel” (a solution Biden again touted on Thursday night).

The Biden administration “has been giving hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to the Palestinian leadership for the last three years,” said Hawley. “Look how that has worked out.”

“It’s absolutely true that the Biden … administration [has] helped fund this level of terrorism,” agreed Johnson. “And they need to be held accountable for what they’ve done.” But instead, Biden hopes to make Americans pay for his foreign policy blunders, doling out $14 billion to Israel and $100 million to Hamas.

Forcing Americans to finance both sides of a war when we’re $33 trillion in debt? That’s Bidenomics.

Americans pay in a far more deadly way for the Obama-Biden foreign policy team’s misguided policies. Since the outbreak of hostilities in Israel, “multiple Americans have died now: 31 Americans have been killed, including from my home state of Missouri,” Hawley noted.

Those foreign policy missteps emerge from misplaced priorities. “We made human rights for LGBT around the world a top priority of my foreign policy,” Biden boasted last Saturday night to the Human Rights Campaign, a far-left LGBTQ pressure group committed to teaching extreme transgender ideology to preschool children. “I’m sure the president was telling the truth about that,” said Hawley. “He is focused on trying to get biological men into women’s bathrooms and into women’s locker rooms and playing women’s sports all around the world, not just in America.” That may, in part, explain Biden’s fixation on Ukraine, which recently reinstated an American man who identifies as female, Michael John Cirillo (who goes by the name Sarah Ashton-Cirillo), as spokesperson for the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF).

“That’s his priority, not keeping America safe,” said Hawley. “And now we are paying the price for that.” Biden’s foreign policy is proof, said Johnson, that “what radical leftism does around the world is destroy things. Name something that radical leftism has ever built. It just destroys.”

The smoldering rubble and lifeless children of God lining streets in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Ukraine highlight the destructive nature of the radical left-wing ideology guiding U.S. foreign policy. The wisest course for America, ideologically and spiritually, is simple: “Repent therefore, and turn back” (Acts 3:19).

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.