As the Biden Administration starts to go wobbly on the Israel-Hamas War with its efforts to turn four-hour temporary pauses to multiday pauses, New York Times columnist and PBS NewsHour’s supposedly conservative Friday pundit praised Biden, saying “he’s done quite well.” At the same time, Brooks mourned people don’t differentiate between the types of terrorism Hamas and Fatah have historically engaged in as if that matters.
On the need to defeat Hamas and deal with the humanitarian situation in Gaza, host Geoff Bennett wondered, “What's your assessment of the way in which President Biden has navigated these competing interests and competing pressures?”
Brooks had nothing but praise for Biden, declaring him to be more pro-Israel than the people who work for him, “Yeah, I think he's done quite well. I think the clarion call that Hamas has to be defeated, Hamas is a threat to the region, I think he — frankly, he might be alone in his administration in feeling that so strongly, not quite alone, but he's certainly been a force.
Another way Brooks praised Biden was how he distinguished between various Palestinian factions, “And so I think he's put America and rallied the West into an idea that Israel, there was a — there was relative stability. And Hamas is not like Fatah. Hamas is something different. And I think one of the tragedies of what's happened over the last month is, in a lot of people's minds, that difference between Hamas and Fatah has been elided.”
Brooks tried to explain that, “Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, they recognize the state of Israel. They have been trying, you know, to get to some sort of two-state solution. They play rough and, you know, even in the Yasser Arafat days, there was terrorism, but often it was terrorism with the purpose of building leverage to get to a better settlement.”
Even if one ignores the ludicrous idea that somehow Arafat’s terrorism was better than Hamas’s, the idea that “they play rough,” is a misreading of the situation. The PA is a corrupt, inflexible, and impotent organization that couldn’t make a deal even if Benjamin Netanyahu was replaced with the Israeli version of Barack Obama because it is either too scared to have to actually take responsibility and govern a prospective state or of the dead-enders or it actually agrees with them as it still subsidizes terrorism.
As for Hamas, “Hamas is not like that. Hamas is about homicide. And it's about genocide and it's about mass murder and I think the president's been very clear about that. And it's because he's been doing this in the region for a long time. So I think this is a case where his age has really paid off.”
Public broadcasting: where “conservative” pundits argue Joe Biden is great and try to add nuance to Yasser Arafat's terrorism.
Here is a transcript for the November 10 show:
PBS NewsHour
11/10/2023
7:34 PM ET
GEOFF BENNETT: What's your assessment of the way in which President Biden has navigated these competing interests and competing pressures?
DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I think he's done quite well. I think the clarion call that Hamas has to be defeated, Hamas is a threat to the region, I think he — frankly, he might be alone in his administration in feeling that so strongly, not quite alone, but he's certainly been a force.
And so I think he's put America and rallied the West into an idea that Israel, there was a — there was relative stability. And Hamas is not like Fatah. Hamas is something different. And I think one of the tragedies of what's happened over the last month is, in a lot of people's minds, that difference between Hamas and Fatah has been elided.
And Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, they recognize the state of Israel. They have been trying, you know, to get to some sort of two-state solution. They play rough and, you know, even in the Yasser Arafat days, there was terrorism, but often it was terrorism with the purpose of building leverage to get to a better settlement.
Hamas is not like that. Hamas is about homicide. And it's about genocide and it's about mass murder and I think the president's been very clear about that. And it's because he's been doing this in the region for a long time. So I think this is a case where his age has really paid off.
