Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) said, “We fully support Israel and everything and anything they need to do” to respond to today’s Hamas attack. Fully supporting the U.S.? Not so much.
Never mind that the vaunted Israeli military and intelligence were caught by surprise. The Hamas attack is really President Joe Biden’s fault!
Host Neil Cavuto did a good job of promoting truth. Noting at the beginning that Hern blamed U.S. “ransom payments” that freed five American detainees in August, Cavuto said, “We don’t know, sir, whether those payments were behind this attack,” and asked whether Hern knew otherwise.
No, Hern didn’t. But that didn’t stop him from repeatedly suggesting otherwise. “What we do know is that the idea of appeasement with Iran does not work,” Hern said. “They have long caused chaos in the Middle East. They hate Israel, they hate America, and they’re going to do everything to cause overwhelmingly chaos in what’s happening right now. You’re seeing it across the world right now the uprising against Iran.”
Hern went on to blame President Barack Obama, too. “Going back to the JCPOA, under Obama, and now the continuance of some of that," Hern said, when you release six billion dollars in funds, while those specific dollars may not be used for the Israeli attack, we know money is fungible … it’s not coincidental.”
He said House Republicans “put forth a number of bills to combat this, potentially, from happening to Israel, because we saw this happening right now. By releasing funds, you’re going to have really bad things happen,” Hern insisted.
“It’s more important today more than ever that we get the Republican conference back in the leadership role it needs to be and get our country back where it needs to be, and push back on our administration," Hern continued. "We’re not sure where they are, they’re pushing for appeasement in the Middle East and now they’re saying they support Israel. The Republican party has been supportive always of Israel and we’ll continue to be so.”
Cavuto pushed back. “This is around the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur attacks, which if memory serves me right, occurred in the Nixon administration, a Republican administration,” he said. “These type of attacks continued in the Ford administration, Carter administration, Reagan administration, Bush administration. Then, of course, the Clinton administration. I could go through Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden today. This goes beyond the politics or party in the White House, right? I mean, Iran has a long history of being mischievous.”
Hern was intent on blaming only Democrats. “It has, but we also know that any time there’s any show of weakness in support of Israel, there has always been a problem.” Hern. He added that Trump was “certainly right” when he blamed Biden in a “scathing” social media post.
Never mind that Trump was caught on tape blabbing about a top secret document related to Iran to someone without security clearance.
Instead, Hern continued his attacks on Democrats. “We can go all the way back to 1979 and see what happened under the Carter administration and see what Reagan did.” Hern forgot to mention that Reagan struck a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages in order to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s re-election. Nor did Hern mention that in the mid-1980s, Reagan made the infamous arms-to-Iran for hostages swap.
“Ronald Reagan was president when we had the Beirut attacks,” Cavuto said. “I’m not trying to put party blame here but is now the time then to single out Joe Biden for problems or miscues or any of that when it’s happened under a variety of presidents?” Cavuto reiterated that we do not know whether any of the money released to Iran in exchange for freeing Americans went to today’s attack on Israel. He said his point was that Iran “has a history of befuddling administrations no matter the party, right?”
“I think we can both agree that releasing six billion dollars back to Iran is certainly not going to be something that’s going to be a winning case of them being supportive of Israel,” Hern responded. Then he insisted that the six billion must have played a part in the attack because it’s “too big a coincidence” not to be.
Props to Cavuto for challenging Hern’s bias.
You can watch it below, from the October 7, 2023 Cavuto Live.
That said, It seems that the weaponry and strategy deployed by HAMAS are far more advanced than anything they’ve had access to before. So much so that there’s no way (to my mind) that the (in)famous MOSSAD would not have picked up something. It’s awfully hard (for me) to think that such a massive buildup could pass under the radar of an agency reportedly able to detect – say – a buildup of slingshots inside the clubhouse of a local football team. More likely that they knew a lot but were told to hold their fire.
History tells us, in fact, that war has always been an effective way to unite a fractious country and that war is particularly popular among authoritarian leaders who fear that they are losing their grip on the citizenry. For several months now, Israelis with a deep democratic bent have been demonstrating against their government’s efforts to limit (eliminate?) the role of the judiciary in restraining fascistic impulses within the executive branch. Israel’s system of checks and balances is on the line and “a nice little war” will probably help the fascists with their attempts to take over.