Israel: If not Iran, who funded the attack and why does President Biden refuse to say it?

To his credit, the President delivered a moving speech on the atrocities, even as some in his own party openly support the Palestinians and believe the slaughter in Israel was justified, but no one in his administration has yet to clearly identify Iran’s pivotal role.

“You know, there are moments in this life — and I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world,” President Joe Biden spoke from the State Dining Room on Monday afternoon in solidarity with Israel following the worst attack on the Jewish people since the holocaust.  “The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend.  The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas — a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.  This was an act of sheer evil. More than 1,000 civilians slaughtered — not just killed, slaughtered — in Israel.  Among them, at least 14 American citizens killed.  Parents butchered using their bodies to try to protect their children.  Stomach-turning reports of being — babies being killed.  Entire families slain.  Young people massacred while attending a musical festival to celebrate peace — to celebrate peace.  Women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.  Families hid their fear for hours and hours, desperately trying to keep their children quiet to avoid drawing attention.  And thousands of wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and the shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured. You all know these traumas never go away.”  The President, especially in recent years, is not known as a powerful or eloquent speaker, but here he manages to capture at least some of the nature of the atrocity that occurred last week and the anguish that followed in its wake.  It is always difficult to place events occurring thousands of miles away on terrain one is not familiar with, in cities whose names we barely know, between players that are little more than headlines in the news in the proper perspective and context.  This task becomes even more difficult in the Middle East, which most Americans are only familiar with in the vaguest terms, as a hotbed of strife, the launching pad for 9-11, and a war torn region in general.  Rightly or wrongly, it’s seen as a place where bad things of varying degrees generally happen, from beheadings and kidnappings to improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.  Most probably remember the journalist, Daniel Pearl, beheaded on video, the Benghazi attacks, or even the fall of Afghanistan in 2021 when 13 Americans were killed.

Hamas’ unprovoked attack on Israel, however, stands completely alone among anything we have witnessed in decades.  The terrorists came by land, sea, and air, hundreds of them backed by thousands of rockets.  They slaughtered with abandon on a scale that is difficult to capture, either in numbers or depravity.  They gunned down innocents in groups, killed families house to house, slaughtered babies in their cribs.  They raped, pillaged, and dragged some of the bodies through the streets.  They took an unknown number of hostages, and what became of those poor souls we do not yet know, might never know.  Some have described it as Israel’s 9-11 for obvious reasons, but even that doesn’t truly come close, either in scale or horror.  This is not meant to minimize the destruction of the Twin Towers, much less the loss of thousands of lives, but it is one thing for 17 hijackers to pilot a plane into a building, unable to see the vast majority of their victims and ending their own lives in an instant.  It is quite another for hundreds of people to descend like a barbarian horde and slaughter people in the streets over the course of several hours, maiming and killing over and over again, hacking up one body and immediately looking for the next target in a bloodthirsty, animal, almost alien rage.  I think most people can imagine killing someone in self defense or the defense of a loved one.  We can even imagine a rage so fierce we keep beating the dead body afterwards, unaware of when to stop.  It is almost impossible to imagine doing it over and over again to people you do not know, who have never harmed you, and you hate only because of their race.  This is not the indifference of a racist that refuses to acknowledge another human being’s suffering.  It’s not even the cruelty and vindictiveness of a mob seeking misguided revenge for some perceived wrong.  It’s pure savagery, beyond anything in most people’s experience.  That hundreds of people participated in this slaughter at the same time is almost unheard of, close-to impossible to imagine.  Think of what this looks like in practice, dozens of people roaming the streets killing everything in sight in the most awful ways, try to imagine if you saw it in a movie.  Would you believe it?  The scale is also difficult to conceive.  Israel is home to less than 10 million people.  Eleven hundred dead is the equivalent of more than ten 9-11s, some 31,350 people killed at the size of the United States population in 2001.  Let that number sink in for a moment, over 30,000 civilians minding their own business wiped off the face of the earth in a single morning.  Catastrophic doesn’t begin to describe it.  At the risk of repeating myself, it’s unimaginable.

It is almost equally unimaginable that anyone of sound mind and body could possibly justify this kind of wanton bloodshed whether or not they sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people.  It is one thing to believe that Israel itself bears some or even all of the responsibility for the ongoing conflict, but quite another to openly support this kind of horrific brutality as a justified response.  The same way we might sympathize with the father whose wife was killed or daughter was raped, demanding justice for the perpetrator, while stopping short of believing the father had a right to torture and kill that perpetrator, we can believe Palestine is the aggrieved party, but that nothing could possibly justify barbarism.  Sadly, that is not the case, especially in progressive circles, from Black Lives Matter to college campuses, where there has been something disturbingly close to a celebration of the slaughter of Jewish people.  Black Lives Matter Grassroots, for example, claimed “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”  Support in progressive circles, of course, requires solidarity with the aggrieved and this chapter of BLM cannot avoid seeing parallels between racism in America and the Middle East.  “We, too, understand what it means to be surveilled, dehumanized, property seized, families separated, our people criminalized, and slaughtered with impunity, locked up in droves, and when we resist they call us terrorists.”  They do not actually come out and say it, but what exactly are they recommending for America?  The wanton slaughter of white people?  What else if the situation is the same and they are in desperate need of self defense?

Black Lives Matter Chicago might’ve been even more offensive, posting an illustration of a paraglider of the kind used to descend on young people at a concert in Israel and slaughter hundreds along with the caption “I stand with Palestine.”  It was much the same in academia, where 31 Harvard student groups expressed their support for the Palestinians.  “Students for Justice in Palestine unequivocally supports Palestinian Liberation and the right of colonized people everywhere to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means necessary,” read a letter in support from a group at the University of Virginia.  “In an unprecedented feat for the 21st Century, resistance fighters in Gaza broke through the illegitimate border fence, took occupation soldiers hostage, and seized control of several Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law.”  Trinity College Dublin’s Student Union also cited their commitment to “stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people” and “there can be no peace without justice.”  Perhaps the most shocking was a professor of American Studies at Yale, a contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and others.  In other words, a serious person, who is supposed to express sober, reasoned, enlightened opinions.  Instead,  Zareena Grewal posted on X, “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”  Later, she claimed “Settlers are not civilians.  This is not hard.”  To be sure, some have tried to backtrack or claim they were misunderstood, but the bullet had already left the barrel of the gun to use a harsh metaphor.

Progressives, of course, are a critical part of President Biden’s base and in that sense, he should be applauded for speaking out so accurately and aggressively on the evil Hamas has unleashed, but in another, what he has not said overshadows everything else, namely the outright refusal to identify Iran as playing a pivotal role in the massacre.  At least so far, all the administration will admit is that the Islamic Republic might have “a degree of complicity,” but we have not yet discovered “hard, tangible evidence” of their involvement to quote White House spokesperson, John Kirby.  Secretary of State Antony Blinken said much the same, claiming “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship” on CNN’s State of the Union.  This might technically be true – though The Wall Street Journal and others have reported otherwise, claiming there are specific links – but it is a distinction with no meaningful difference, like saying Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is not responsible for what Google does.  The only relevant fact is that Hamas would not exist at all without Iran, much less be able to carry out such an attack.  Iran provides about 70% of its funding, some $100 million per year.  Hamas is a vassal to Iran, effectively owned by them.  They have no economy of their own, no ability to manufacture vehicles and weapons, barely any infrastructure to speak of to the point where much of the Gaza Strip doesn’t even have running water.  They cannot make missiles themselves, and yet they showered Israel with thousands of primitive devices in a few hours. Where did they come from, if not Iran?

As CNN reported, “experts say the Islamic Republic has long been Hamas’ main military supporter, smuggling weapons into the enclave through clandestine cross-border tunnels or boats that have escaped the Mediterranean blockade.”  “Hamas has received arms from Iran smuggled into the (Gaza) Strip via tunnels. This often included longer-range systems,” explained Daniel Byman, a senior fellow with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  Even setting aside the weapons used, the attack itself was far too sophisticated for Hamas on its own.  “The coordination of multiple penetrations of Israel’s barrier – the border fence that had been created – the ability to penetrate it in multiple places, possibly with the help of a cyberattack,” noted Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst for the Treasury Department and the senior vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  “All of this points to a sophistication that we’ve not seen by Hamas.”  Moreover, the relationship between Hamas and Iran is not some new, hitherto unknown development that has taken the world by surprise.  Iran has been sponsoring Hamas for decades, funding them and fueling their hatred for more than thirty years.  Whether or not the Mullah’s personally plotted the attack is irrelevant.  At a minimum, they bought and paid for it, and their state sponsorship of terrorism is primarily responsible for the underlying tensions to begin with.  The Palestinian people might well have chosen to make peace with Israel long ago without them.  If the United States and Israel do not confront this reality, nothing at all will change and no matter what happens in the Gaza Strip following Israel’s military response, there will be another atrocity at some point.  It is also worth mentioning that we might have no idea when the point in question is.  The United States and Israel were both caught entirely by surprise, meaning something awful could happen again with little warning.  To put the extent of their surprise in perspective, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was talking up the calm that prevailed in Middle East, presumably thanks to his boss, President Biden, on September 29, just days before the massacre.  “What we said is [we] want to depressurize, de-escalate, and ultimately integrate the Middle East region,” he told The Atlantic Festival.  “”The war in Yemen is in its 19th month of truce, for now the Iranian attacks against U.S. forces have stopped, our presence in Iraq is stable, I emphasize for now because all of that can change and the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

Unfortunately, President Biden appears so committed to the idea that Iran can be reasoned with, his entire administration is refusing to acknowledge the simple fact that offering them $6 billion in exchange for hostages might not have been a good idea.  Instead, they have insisted that the deal was irrelevant because the funds can only be spent for humanitarian purposes and none of them have been spent yet anyway, as if money is not fungible in the first place and knowing $6 billion will be flowing in couldn’t possibly have an impact on their spending if simply to embolden them.  Besides, they say, the money belongs to Iran, the largest state sponsor of terror in the world in the first place.  “The facts are these — no U.S. taxpayer dollars were involved,” Secretary Blinken told CNN in the same interview. “These were Iranian resources that Iran had accumulated from the sale of its oil that were stuck in a bank in South Korea.”  It was only after eight Democrats in the Senate indicated they would support a Republican proposal to have Congress block the funds by law that the Administration finally relented, at least a little.  Rather than scrapping the deal and disavowing it entirely, they have temporarily blocked Iran from accessing any of the funds and they chose to announce this maneuver privately for reasons that are inexplicable.  As NBC News described it, “The U.S. and Qatari governments have agreed to block Iran from accessing any of the $6 billion it gained access to as part of a prisoner swap deal between the Biden administration and Tehran last month, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House Democrats on Thursday, according to three sources familiar with his remarks, two of whom were in the room.  The two sources in the room said Adeyemo did not give any timeframe for how long the U.S. and Qatar agreed to block Iran’s access to the money.”  If nothing else, this was an easy opportunity to send a message, to inform Iran that sponsoring terrorism will no longer be tolerated and taking hostages as Hamas has done in Israel, including American citizens, will result in consequences, but for whatever reason, the Biden Administration refused to take it.  Instead, they are intent on continuing to court Iran in the vain hopes of reaching a largely toothless nuclear deal and softening relations even now as the evil they have cultivated has been exposed.  This is not how you deal with tyrants who are at a minimum cheering on and funding terrorism, and the world is likely to regret it in the near future.