(From The Connecticut Centinal. --Ed.)
BY: DON PESCI
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To celebrate the landing of U.S. forces at Normandy – D-Day, June 4, 1944 – President Joe Biden traveled to France and remarked on the courage of U.S. troops and the resolve of U.S. politicians to take the war to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In the course of his remarks, he mentioned the present war of Russian aggression against Ukraine, but not Israel’s aggressive war against that country’s terrorist Iranian proxies.
The war on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been, during the last two years of the Biden administration, a defensive war. Until recently, the supply of money and weaponry to Ukraine by the United States has been conditioned by an agreed upon pledge that Ukraine would not engage in an offensive campaign upon Putin’s aggressive forces outside the borders of Ukraine. To put it in military terms, only a defensive war would be allowed. Ukraine would be permitted to defend its castle, but any aggression outside the castle walls would be frowned upon by the Biden administration. Putin would be permitted to broaden his war – indeed he has already broadened it to incorporate into Russia Crimea and eastern portions of Ukraine– but Ukraine must not respond by recovering lost territory.
This is, any responsible war historian would agree, a recipe for total defeat. D-Day was an aggressive attack by the forces of light against the forces of darkness, an unmistakable signal that what Victor Davis Hanson calls The World Wars, plural because there was more than one, would no longer be a defensive war.
For various reasons, those in the Biden administration overseeing the war in the Middle East from their safe perches in Washington DC have, since the outbreak of the war -- occasioned by a horrendous attack by Hamas terrorists on innocent Israeli civilians -- supplied Israel with weaponry and assurances of unquestioning support. Early in Israel’s existential struggle, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration of war against Hamas -- both the government of Gaza and an Iranian supported terrorist organization pledged to destroy Israel root and branch -- Biden fulsomely pledged his support for Israel on behalf of his countrymen.
What was Biden supporting, if not the military destruction of Hamas?
The looming presidential election and pro-Hamas supporters on benighted college campuses across the United States caused Biden to alter significantly his pledge of support for Israel. The Biden administration now supports a “pause in the fighting” so that food and medicine supplies may reach Gazan citizens. Such a pause would benefit Hamas – pirates who steal such supplies, diverting them to its own purposes -- satisfy Iran’s anti-democratic Supreme Leader, and put a break on the destruction of Hamas’ remaining battalions located in Rafah.
The campaign for the presidency has softened Biden’s resolve. His refashioned campaign position is that Hamas has been sufficiently rebuked, and the government of Israel, impudently resolved to continue the war to its appointed end, should yield to the United States, the United Nations, and other peace loving groups, in a collective effort to cut short the war and reimpose, as quickly as possible, a so called “two state solution” in the geographic heart of Israel that has for the past few decades been a murderously proven failure.
Commentators in our mainstream left of center media have not yet called attention to the ironic parallels between the D-Day landing at Normandy and Netanyahu’s increasingly lonely war against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemin, all supported by Iran and other anti-democratic regimes that are, in the precise sense of the words, genocidal anti-Semites.
It should be noted in passing that the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The word is a combination of the Greek γένος (genos, "race, people") with a Latin suffix (caedo "act of killing")
In his research of Nazi occupation policies in Europe, Lemkin asserted that Nazi atrocities against Poland consisted of five policies which exposed their "intent to destroy" the Polish nation. These included 1) mass-killings of Poles, 2) the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, 3) the planned deterioration of living conditions calculated to bring about a nation’s destruction, 4) the implementation of various measures intended to prevent births within the group such as the promotion of abortions, the burdening pregnant women, etc., 5) the forced transfer of Polish children to German families. Each of Lemkin’s five markers revealed the Nazi plan to eliminate Polish identity.
If Iran had its way with Israel, it would without hesitation vigorously deploy all five policies listed by Lemkin.
There are profound differences between aggressive wars that set the terms of peace following the war and genocidal attempts to kill a nation, despite all the cries issuing from U.S. university protestors, staff and administrators condemning Israel’s continuing fight for existence as “genocide.” Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book, The End of Everything, describes several instances of genocide or nation killing.
Then too, one cannot help but wonder how a pause in the fighting between the forces of light and darkness would have been received in the United States during and immediately after D-Day. It is certainly significant that the contemporary forces of light in Normandy, 80 years after the D-Day landing, did not prominently mention Israel.
