Joe Biden Is a Morally Decent President in a Time of Hate

This week, Fox News reported on remarks by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The headline, “Jean-Pierre refuses to call anti-Israel protestors ‘extremists’ despite fear among Jewish students,” circulated the news that the Biden administration was refusing to denounce antisemitic extremists bullying American Jews.

Around the same time, Ryan Grim, bureau chief of the Intercept, circulated a clip of Jean-Pierre, which he summarized, “The White House just compared ‘anti-Israel protesters’ — the phrase used by the Fox News reporter in his question — to the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville.” Grim’s account went viral, attracting more than 3,000 quote tweets, with comments like “a deeply cynical statement that sounds like an administration in over its head” (Carnegie Endowment scholar Zachary Carter) and “The Israeli govt has imposed a siege on every civilian in Gaza, is mercilessly bombing civilian targets, has already forced the displacement of over a million people, has massacred thousands of innocents. To the White House those who oppose these war crimes are akin to nazis.” (Krystal Ball, host of Breaking Points.)

Both these breathless reports, with their contradictory findings, came from the same exchange at the same press briefing. The transcript of the exchange is far more banal. In it, Jean-Pierre announces a series of measures combatting antisemitism. As reporters fling a series of questions at her, Jean-Pierre continually retreats to safe talking points denouncing hatred and bias in all its forms.

When asked, “Does President Biden think the anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremists?,” she replied, “What I can say is what — we’ve been very clear about this: When it comes to antisemitism, there is no place. We have to make sure that we speak against it very loud and be — and be very clear about that.” In a sense, Fox News is right that she declined to answer the question. In another sense, Grim is right that she replied to a question about anti-Israel protesters with an answer about antisemitism, implicitly drawing a link between the two.

Obviously, Fox News and Grim’s mutually exclusive interpretations can’t both be correct. If you read the full transcript in context, neither interpretation is fair. Jean-Pierre clearly decided to stick to narrow talking points about how bigotry and hatred are unacceptable and kept repeating those bromides as reporters try to pull her into some more newsworthy or interesting positions. Her strenuous effort to avoid controversy brought about the very response she set out to avoid, in a kind of Larry David–esque farce.

Perhaps this episode says something about Jean-Pierre’s wobbly communications skills. But it also captures the unfairness of the criticism that has met Biden’s efforts to define a moral center in the conflict. Even his most unobjectionable statements have been met with biting ridicule and anger, with each side accusing the president of endorsing the other.

Despite the vocal and frequently unfair denunciations the Biden administration has received from left and right alike for its response to Hamas’s terror attacks and their aftermath, I believe the policy is broadly correct. The administration’s response to the war in the Middle East has five main components:

1. Publicly embrace Israel in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attack and endorse its right to self-defense.
2. Privately warn Israel’s government not to rush into an expansive military response.
3. Denounce antisemitism.
4. Denounce anti-Muslim bias.
5. Endorse emergency military aid to Israel.

Progressives have greeted this combination of positions with horror, and its backlash has combined public protests by hundreds of Democratic staff, holding demonstrations at congressional hearings, with a level of vitriol that far exceeds anything it has previously raised against Biden.

The left’s dissent grows out of the belief that essentially any military response by Israel is wrong — either due to Israel’s indefensible occupation or because it will inevitably kill innocent Palestinians. I sympathize with both points, even though I am not willing to follow the logic of either one of them fully to the conclusion of ruling out any military response.

In addition to making the moral case, the left has increasingly argued that Biden is putting his own election at risk by alienating young progressives and Arab American voters. It may be true that Biden’s approval rating has dropped, presumably because he has alienated some left-leaning voters. It does not follow, however, that taking a different position would have left him better off.

One recent News Nation poll shows Biden’s approval rating on handling the war between Israel and Hamas (54 percent) is about ten points higher than his overall job approval. Nearly half the public sympathizes with Israel, against just 10 percent sympathizing with the Palestinians, and the rest equally sympathetic to both. Seventy percent of the public approves of sending weapons to Israel.

Another poll, by Slingshot Strategies, finds 44 percent of Americans favor supporting Israel as it tries to eliminate Hamas’s military capabilities, versus 31 percent who support a cease-fire. Just 21 percent of respondents say Biden is too supportive of Israel, against 29 percent who say he hasn’t been supportive enough, and 50 percent saying his level of support has been just right.

Biden’s approval rating may be suffering even as he takes a broadly popular position simply because the issue divides his base, and some of the people who support his Israel stance still don’t approve of his presidency overall. Still, it’s unlikely that adopting an unpopular stance on the Middle East would help his standing. Progressive activists who are threatening Biden’s reelection are engaged in what Matthew Yglesias calls “murder-suicide politics” — threatening to help a worse candidate win unless their preferred candidate adopts a position that will hurt him.

And while the left’s disagreements with Biden’s approach toward Israel are rational enough, it ignores his willingness to affirm the humanity and dignity of Muslims and Arabs.

That distinguishes him from the Republican Party, which is led by a man who routinely excludes Muslims and immigrant communities from moral concern. Donald Trump has mocked the very idea that the descendants of immigrants from Muslim countries have any right to participate in civic life. (“She’s telling us how to run our country,” he once said of Ilhan Omar. “How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing? She’s going to tell us — she’s telling us how to run our country.”) He has more recently promised to exclude immigrants who “don’t like our religion.”

It’s understandable that progressives demand more than denunciations of Islamophobia and hate crimes against Arab Americans. But sadly, the Democrats’ banal affirmation of civic equality for all Americans is not something that can be taken for granted.

However impractical the left’s revolt against Biden may be, it at least has the benefit of genuine conviction. The right’s attacks on Biden’s positions are dishonest and cynical.

The main thrust of right-wing commentary has been to pretend the left is directing the Democratic Party’s policies on Israel and antisemitism rather than denouncing them ineffectually. The conservative Washington Examiner has a cover depicting the Democratic donkey in a casket, carried to its grave by a Hamas terrorists, a member of antifa, a Democratic Socialist, and other radicals. The Free Press has published a series of articles giddily depicting progressive Jews moving rightward in reaction to the left’s defenses of Hamas. National Review is likewise using antisemitism as a recruitment tool for the Republican Party.

It is obviously not only fair but necessary for progressives to confront antisemitism on the left. The comparative state of the Republican Party is no reason to excuse antisemitism — being less racist than the right isn’t a high enough standard.

But when it comes to deciding which party to support, the comparative state of the two parties is precisely the issue. And here the conservatives are asserting that somehow the GOP is more free of antisemitism.

“There’s no doubt that there are neo-Nazis and right-wing Jew-haters, who deserve to be ostracized and are, in some cases, truly dangerous,” argues National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry. “But they are marginalized. They don’t have tenured positions at prestigious universities. They aren’t capable of mustering sizable crowds on campuses and in cities across America. They aren’t organizing morally repugnant statements that engender wide-ranging debate in the political mainstream.”

Marginalized? In Florida, a small cell of neo-Nazis has taken to harassing local Jews. Ron DeSantis’s spokesmen suggested they were actually left-wing crisis actors, and then DeSantis himself refused to join other Republicans in denouncing them. As the New York Times reports, DeSantis has maintained an “adamant, ongoing refusal to condemn the public activities of neo-Nazis.” Why? Because Trump has brought Nazis into the Republican coalition, and DeSantis is afraid that renouncing any of his supporters will make him appear weak. Occupying a position where major party leaders won’t renounce you is a good definition of influence.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote one post accusing the Rothschild family of starting forest fires with a secret space laser for profit, and another claiming “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation, with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands,” before winning election to Congress and becoming a key ally of the Republican leadership. Nick Fuentes, a charismatic neo-Nazi leader, was invited to an intimate dinner with the former president of the United States and leading candidate for the Republican nomination.

Trump himself has a record of antisemitism that Republicans have persistently ignored. An abridged list includes: “complaining privately that Jews ‘are only in it for themselves’ and ‘stick together’ in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties”; repeatedly stating in public that Jews are good with money, naturally loyal to Israel, and own Congress; running national television advertisements blaming “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” juxtaposed with images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein; frequently sharing content generated by white supremacists on his social-media feeds; and of course hosting the notorious antisemites Ye and Fuentes.

Conservatives are arguing that antisemitism on the right is marginal and thus a comparatively minor concern when it has become normalized by the most famous and powerful person in the world.

The Biden administration, supported by the vast majority of elected Democrats, has extended unflinching moral support to Israel and forceful denunciations of antisemitism. That they held to these positions in the face of a revolt on their left flank demonstrates the depth of their commitment.

The right’s response to this is that liberal Jews should defect to the party led by a racist demagogue, whose “America First” movement — the slogan, as well as the ideology, he borrowed from the 1930s movement that openly cozied up to Hitler — has inspired antisemites to join partisan politics after decades of exclusion.

The premise of the right’s conflation between the Democratic Party and its left-wing critics is that the anti-Zionist far left owns the future of liberalism and the party. As Ross Douthat argues, “The leftward ratchet in Democratic politics has been a powerful force, and generational turnover means that progressive activists may get a chance to reshape the party in their own image before long. At which point, where might Zionist Democrats go, if not toward actual conservatism?”

This is a belief both the far left and the right are eager to stoke. It may be true. It may not. The future has yet to be written.

Surely, though, one great determinate of that future is whether voters reward Biden’s support for Jews and Zionism, or whether they punish it. If Biden loses to Trump, the argument from the left that Democrats cannot afford to alienate any element of the progressive base will be vindicated. The reactionaries predicting that the Democratic Party will succumb to illiberalism are seeking to create that very result.

The components of Biden’s response to October 7 and its aftermath may seem banal. It seems almost pathetic to congratulate a president for managing to oppose antisemitism and racism against Muslims. But one of the two party nominees has managed to clear this low bar of basic moral decency, and he is catching hell for doing it.