New York Times’ Kristof’s antisemitic blues

By Lev Tsitrin

Let me channel President Biden for a few seconds, and reply on his behalf to an imaginary question posed by “a 7-year-old Lebanese girl who lost 15 members of her family in an Israeli strike a few days ago” in a punchline of New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on Biden’s presumed haplessness against Netanyahu’s presumed perfidy, “Biden Sought Peace but Facilitated War:”

“Why did you provide bombs that kill families like mine?”

“I wonder how Biden, a good man who never wanted this war to happen and yet enabled it, would respond,” says Mr. Kristof, apparently enjoying a “gotcha!” moment.

Not so fast, Mr. Kristof. President Biden would likely say “because, child, your father, and uncles, and brothers, and neighbors all joined together, arming themselves with rockets and missiles, to hurt 7-year-old Israeli girls — and as many others as they could hit — on the other side of the border, by shooting those rockets and missiles at them, and they needed to be stopped. They were very bad people, those relatives and friends of yours — people called ‘Hezbullah’.”

It is rather basic — but Nicholas Kristof does not get it. To read him, there are only nice people on the other side of the Israeli border, people like “Issa Amro, an activist who has been described as a Palestinian Gandhi lamenting that “Palestinians in the West Bank are losing hope in the prospects for peace and losing faith in the two-state solution.”” In Kristof’s reading, the war boils down to this: people seeking peace with Israel unfairly get hit by American-made bombs. Hence, his solution: “use the leverage of weapons transfers to Israel.” Hence, his lament: “Biden has ensured that American weapons continue to shatter lives without clearly advancing American, Israeli or Arab interests.”

Which reveals Mr. Krisof’s folly — or should we say, malice? In reality (rather than Mr. Kristof’s foolish imagination), Hamas and Hezbullah are not a bunch of cute 7-year-old girls, nor they are a crowd of Gandhis seeking peace with Israel via a two-state solution. They are thugs out to destroy whatever they find on the other side of the border, and kill and torture and rape whoever they find there. Only the force of Israel’s arms can keep them in check — and we saw on October 7 what happens when that force fails. Mr. Kristof prefers not to see any of this; the degree of his willful blindness is evident in how he characterizes the infamous Iran “deal” that granted legitimacy to Iran’s nuclear project in return for a mere 15-year hiatus in producing the bomb — in Mr. Kristof’s view, it “dismantled much of that country’s [nuclear] program until Donald Trump withdrew from it”!

Luckily, Biden is no Krisof. He sees on the other side of Israeli border not only traumatized Lebanese 7-year-old girls and Palestinian would-be Gandhis, but also Hezbullah, Hamas, and Iran, all hell-bent on Israel’s destruction — and realizes that it is vital for Israel (and for America) that they be at least held in check — and ideally, defeated. This is why, Mr. Kristof, President Biden sends arms to Israel. He does not want to see you and your ilk gloating, on the pages of the New York Times and elsewhere, over Israel demise.

Israel’s demise of which you dream will not happen, Mr. Kristof. Hard as it if to swallow for you, live with it. And if you can’t, than choke on you antisemitic bile.