Biden - doing 'all I can' to 'significantly get Israel out of Gaza' - with hostages left behind suffering sexual assault
Biden agrees with hecklers about Israeli withdrawal
“If you really care about the lives lost here, you should honor the lives and also call for a ceasefire in Palestine.
“Ceasefire now, ceasefire now”
These shouts and chants from pro-Hamas protestors interrupted President Biden as he spoke, on January 8th, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist shot and killed nine people in 2015.
Biden responded not just by agreeing to call for a ceasefire but calling for Israel to give up territory it already seized and cleared of terrorists, with hundreds of soldiers killed and maimed in the process:
"I understand their passion and I've been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza, using all that I can to do that."
Demands for humanitarian aid bad for Gazans
In addition to demanding a troop withdrawal, Biden has called for Israel to allow water, food, and fuel into Gaza, even as Hamas continues shooting rockets at Israeli children while holding Israeli hostages as sex slaves. However, the administration’s demands for humanitarian aid only serve to prolong the war, a war that could have ended long ago. Hamas would have been forced to surrender, with hostages freed and the war halted with no further Gazan civilian casualties, or the civilian population would have overthrown Hamas to bring an end to the blockade.
Some families of hostages have protested the passage of food and water trucks through Israel, even as those hostages are tortured and rapidly losing weight from malnutrition.
Instead, Hamas hoards the humanitarian aid for itself, as some members of Congress were concerned would happen, leaving the civilians without food and water.
Gazans fear Hamas, want Israel to finish the job
Hamas has, in fact, been hoarding supplies, for many years, such as food, fuel, water, and medicine that were to have been for the civilian population, leaving much of the population suffering. From a series of recorded calls to the IDF from Gazans, it is apparent that the longer Hamas is allowed to survive, the more Gazans will be harmed and killed – by Hamas.
In one recorded call, a Gazan civilian testified that Hamas murdered his cousin because he tried to seek help from UNRWA. In another conversation, a civilian said he does not leave his home because he fears Hamas will seize it and use the property to fire toward Israel and destroy his house.
One civilian is heard on a recording saying, "When will you get rid of [Hamas]? They killed my cousin yesterday because he went to UNRWA."
"They killed him in Rafah," the civilian tells the IDF officer.
A different civilian is recorded telling the IDF how Hamas terrorists steal food from civilians.
What about the hostages?
In response to Biden's calls for withdrawal and his additional demand to move to low-intensity fighting, understood to mean replacing air strikes with urban street battles, at great risk to Israeli soldiers, Israel has executed a pullout from areas of Gaza, to the delight of many in the Biden administration. To the extent that the pullout returns areas of Gaza to Hamas control, it leaves, not just Gazans in the hands of those who readily murder them, but about 130 Israeli hostages in Hamas’s hands, many of them girls and women who they continue to rape and sexually assault.
Continued abuse of hostages
Aviva Seigel, one of the released hostages told this story:
A small sampling of other reports on the gruesome assault and rape of girls and women on October 7 and of the hostages include:
- The horror as Israeli authorities show footage of Hamas atrocities: Reporter's Notebook News
Video was part of Israeli military's effort to document, publicize atrocities. - Israel women’s groups warn of failure to keep evidence of sexual violence in Hamas attacks
Rights groups fear lack of investigative work means gender-based nature of some of violence has been overlooked - Israel investigates sexual violence committed by Hamas as part of October 7 horror
- Hamas planned sexual violence as weapon of war - Israeli campaigner
- Israeli accounts of sexual violence by Hamas rise but justice is remote
- ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel. - Bloodied and scared: families share photos of girls held hostage by Hamas
Parents of Agam Berger, Karina Ariev, Daniela Gilboa and Liri Albag share difficult images with Daily Mail; released hostage says 'some lost limbs' and 'can cope with the disability but not with the manner they were constantly violated'
Rape is a war crime, President Biden.
The Rome Statute of 1998 –founding text of the International Criminal Court that came into force on 1st July 2002– includes wartime sexual violence in the list of crimes against humanity and war crimes, in its articles 7 and 8. Sexual violence as defined in the Rome Statute includes “rape, sexual slavery, prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity. . .
Reminder in order
In early December Biden expressed concern for Hamas's abuse of women:
Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty," he said. "Reports of women raped -- repeatedly raped -- and their bodies being mutilated while still alive -- of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling. . . .
Ending violence against women and sexual assault has been one of the causes of my life. … But the world can't just look away at what's going on. It's on all of us -- government, international organizations, civil society and businesses -- to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation. Without equivocation, without exception.
Biden's demand to essentially abandon those girls to continued abuse by Hamas terrorists puts the sincerity of his expression of concern into question, as does a past accusation against him.
Tara Reade - accused Senator Biden of sexual assault
Lurking in Biden’s background is Tara Reade, who accused then-Senator Joe Biden of sexual assault when she was a staff member in his office.
Tara Reade, the former staffer who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, blasted Biden after giving a speech on “decency.”
Reade alleges that Joe Biden used his resources to silence her and that “there has never been a proper investigation” into what happened.
Despite contemporaneous witnesses, the media had no interest in covering the story during the 2020 election cycle.
And despite contemporaneous witnesses, Biden appears to lack interest in assuring the freedom and safety of Israel’s remaining hostages.
See our additional Middle East coverage:
- Arab kings, Egypt block Iran at summit on Israel
- 'Our revolution is a phase of world revolution: it is not limited to reconquering Palestine'
- Globalists cremate care for Gaza refugees
- How one defector got it right
- 100 years of fake communist collapses
- 'Victory means total destruction, occupation, expulsion, and settlement' - Former Knesset Deputy Speaker
- Israel: Pressure builds for total victory while leaders stall - analysis
- 'Don't starve; you can release kidnapped children and surrender anytime' - former US Naval Officer
- 8 ways Bibi betrayed the Jewish nation - analysis
- State Department pressing allies to concede to Marxist revolutionaries
- Friends of Israel concerned over ruling allowing confessions extracted under torture
- US refuses to support Iranian protestors
- Israel vs Israelis
- Biden sides with socialists; pressures Israel to protect activist judges
- 6 reasons Gaza's 'innocent' citizens may not be so innocent
