The Biden Administration Weaponizes the FBI Against Israel
The Biden administration is feeding Israel to the wolves. That is the only reasonable way to understand Channel 14’s bombshell report on Sunday that the FBI has opened an investigation of IDF soldiers in relation to the death of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh.
Abu Akleh died on May 11 in Jenin while she was embedded with Iranian-controlled Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists engaged in a gun battle with IDF soldiers.
The battle took place in the midst of an onslaught of murderous terror attacks carried out by Jenin-based terrorists affiliated with the Iranian-proxy. On May 5, two PIJ terrorists from Jenin hacked three Israelis to death with axes and wounded three more in the haredi city of Elad, just as Israel’s Independence Day celebrations were ending. The soldiers that entered Jenin on May 11 were part of a counter-terror force tasked with breaking up the PIJ infrastructure in the city.
Immediately after Abu Akleh was killed, the Biden administration began demanding that the IDF investigate her death and accept the blame for it.
In the ensuing months, every time senior Israeli officials came to Washington to discuss their concerns over the Biden administration’s peripatetic efforts to empower and enrich Iran while legitimizing its nuclear weapons program in the ill-conceived “nuclear talks,” they found they had no one to talk to.
Everyone from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman rebuffed them. All the administration officials wanted to discuss was Abu Akleh’s death, and how Israel was criminally culpable for it.
From the outset, the administration’s position was unhinged. The IDF’s operation was legitimate and necessary. Any reasonable observer—particularly one from an allied government—could have been expected to recognize this fact.
The P.A. and PIJ jointly scrubbed the battle scene and so blocked any investigation from reaching conclusive findings.
But again, no investigation was necessary. Everyone knew the IDF didn’t target Abu Akleh.
All the same, in the hopes of placating the shockingly hostile Biden administration, the Bennet-Lapid-Gantz government decided to take the administration’s position at face value.
The IDF conducted an investigation. It permitted the administration to see all of its findings. And in September, the IDF announced that it was possible that Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli soldier. The obvious hope was that by saying it was possible our soldiers killed Abu Akleh, the administration would finally lay off.
Unfortunately, the opposite happened. The anti-Israel animus that spawned the call for an investigation didn’t disappear. It got worse.
The State Department responded to Israel’s announcement by demanding a change in the IDF’s rules of engagement, to protect terrorists against the Israeli military. In other words, the administration used Israel’s announcement as a justification to stand all but openly with Palestinian terrorists against Israel’s soldiers— which the administration treated like terrorists.
But now we know that the Biden administration did not abandon its hostile campaign. Instead, it used the FBI as a political weapon against America’s closest Middle East ally.
On Monday, outgoing Defense Minister Benny Gantz rightly rejected the administration’s decision and announced that Israel will not permit FBI investigators to interview Israel’s soldiers. The incoming government can be expected to follow the same policy.
The answer is self-evident. President Biden and his advisers are demonizing America’s most powerful and loyal ally in the Middle East because they don’t see Israel as a foreign policy issue. They see it as a domestic political one. The progressive base of the Democratic Party backs Palestinian terrorists, supports their terror campaigns against Israel and rejects Israel’s right to exist and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. And the Biden administration is captivated by its base. There is no other possible explanation for the FBI’s investigation.
In directing the FBI to open this probe, the Biden administration, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, is engaging in a political campaign to delegitimize Israel by accusing Israeli soldiers of murdering journalists. The administration does this in support for Palestinian terrorists and their war for Israel’s destruction. This action is not only hostile to the Jewish state, but antithetical to U.S. interests. The U.S. interest is undermined, not advanced, by delegitimizing the armed forces of America’s closest Middle East ally.
Hence a large earthquake in Texas
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