Bibi’s Choice

by G. Murphy Donovan (May 2024)

 

I say let’s own who we are and use it as a strength. –Gal Gadot

 

Lawyers, jurists, and professional politicians often claim that Democracies are nations governed by laws, not men. In practice, humans are more responsive to passions, emotions, and tribal dogmas than we are ruled by the cold logic of statutes. After all, if we can put aside notions of divine law and the laws of nature; all laws are written, interpreted, and ultimate enforced by humans; men really, who seek to control or influence individual and collective behavior.

Ironically, the myth of justice is a shapely woman wearing a blindfold and holding a balance scale upright. In fact, justice is neither female, nor blind, nor balanced. Law, such as it is, ultimately reflects the character of the men who write statutes. Success or failure of nations is much more a function of the character of men than it is the justice assumed to define the law.

If law alone were sufficient, lawyers would be redundant—and paid a lot less. Clarity for “democracies” is, if nothing else, very expensive.

We say rule of men because, for good or ill, most politicians, of all stripes are male lawyers. The political imbalance between male and female, lawyers and other trades, in the world of governance and jurisprudence, says volumes about the reality of so-called fair, equal, or enlightened institutions, especially in democratic republics—where “choice” is the probative value on a host of cherry picked issues.

At the moment, two of the world’s most prominent, and—some would argue—successful, democratic republics are at loggerheads; Israel and the United States. The proximate issue is the war in Gaza, but the larger issue is global, indeed a clash between religious fascism in the 3rd World and cowering “democratic” republics in the West.

You could argue, and many do, that this “clash of civilizations” has been with us for over 1400 years.

Clearly, there’s little or no compromise to be made between religious and republican law as such. The difference between success and failure then is ultimately the character and quality of national leadership. Ironically, the problem for the West at the moment is not Islam. Islam has a fairly consistent toxic totalitarian grip in the Ummah, even within the arcane matrix of the Shite/Sunni schism.

The West doesn’t seem to have much of a grip on anything these days, least of all the values that made the Renaissance and the Age of Reason possible.

The immediate threat to the West is a self-inflicted wound, the conflict between Israel and the so-called democratic world—especially between Israel and America. Indeed, the personalities and character of leadership in Jerusalem and Washington matter today more than at any other time in world history.

 

Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu is now Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister.

As such, his career, for good or ill, parallels the history of the modern Jewish state; a democracy which enjoys the distinction of being the only free country in a very bad neighborhood. And it’s no coincidence that Israel is the most successful educated, cultural, scientific, economic, and socially progressive society in the Middle East.

Alas, Israel is surrounded by Egypt, a military janissary; Jordan, a totalitarian Islamic kingdom; Lebanon, a failed Shiite surrogate, and two Palestinian proxies for Muslim terror worldwide, the West Bank and Gaza—warring Palestinian tribes which have produced more anti-Semitic Islamic terrorists than any other radical demographic in the Ummah.

 

 

The fact that Israel has survived for nearly a century, must be due in part to the leadership of men like Bibi Netanyahu.

Indeed as a lad, Netanyahu was an honors graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He interrupted his studies to serve in combat with Israeli Special Forces. Bibi’s brother, Yoni, leading the same Sayeret Matkal team, was killed in that successful raid to rescue the Entebbe hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists in 1976.

Just the other day, President Joseph Robinette Biden referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “asshole.”

 

Joseph Robinette Biden

President Joe Biden is an accident of history.

His only real accomplishments in 50 years of public service are tenure and survival. He caught the brass ring in 2020 because, frankly, Democrats are still a political majority and they successfully weaponized Donald Trump, the Covid panic, and Russophobia.

A partisan politicized media provides cover for Biden as we speak. Joe Biden is a living tribute to the mediocrity that dominates the leadership of both American political parties into the 21st Century.

Biden has spoken for the state of Delaware in Congress for most of his career. Delaware is arguable the most corrupt state outside of Illinois and Ukraine; providing tax havens, shelters, and pollution sanctuaries for some of the America’s worst offenders. Joe Biden is the perfect compliment, misrepresenting his personal vitae in college, his law school performance, his dead son’s military record, and most recently, rationalizing his surviving son’s influence pedaling, drug, and sex preoccupations.

Biden’s lame attempts to use son Beau’s military service, as a lawyer no less, to steal real valor from real heroes, offends every military veteran on the planet.

Beyond a distinction as worst White House father ever, Biden is also arguably the most notorious plagiarist in American history, in a profession replete with all manner of theft.

It’s difficult to believe that a man, who was never able to govern his own foibles and household, is now the putative “leader” of the free world. Nevertheless, Biden abides, indeed relishes his role as America’s favorite Bethany beach boy.

If Bibi Natanyahu is an “asshole,” how should we describe Joe Biden?

Obviously voters somehow rationalize the American president’s failures as man, father, and politician. Unfortunately, personal peccadilloes seem to have masked Biden’s more consequential failure as a national or world leader.

 

The Big Fail

The American president’s failure as a leader is a sin of omission. Unlike Netanyahu, Biden does not think for himself. Biden inherited an American political trope about the Middle East, probably dating to the Clinton era, where the West grants moral equivalence to political Islam—and by implication justifies Islamic terror exported from Gaza today as “resistance.”

Team Biden has doubled down on the moral equivalence canard by endorsing statehood for Palestine—an affirmation or reward that would assure the survival of Hamas and other terror surrogates, like Hezbollah.

As if terror needs yet another protected sanctuary.

For Washington and Brussels, the Gaza war may be just another tactical episode in the ongoing clash of cultures. Indeed, fifty million Arabs and two billion Muslims can afford to lose a hundred small wars.

The eight million Jews of Israel can only afford to lose once.

Netanyahu understands that the absolute defeat of Hamas, at whatever cost, is existential for Israel. Biden, in contrast, understands little about Islamism, national, or global security. Bibi Netanyahu is a man of his times, a pragmatist doing what he must for Israel. And if the truth be told, doing what NATO and Europe should be doing with the global threat of imperial religious Islamic fascism.

Unlike Joe Biden, Bibi Netanyahu is the right man, in the right place, at the right time. Whither Israel, so goes Europe and America.

Leadership matters.

 

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security.

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