Biden Apologizes for Not Believing Hamas Propaganda

As the Israel-Hamas conflict enters a fragile temporary ceasefire, Democrats in the United States appear headed for a full-scale intraparty war over U.S. support for Israel.

Amid these rising tensions, President Joe Biden and his campaign team are reportedly deeply concerned about alienating Muslim and anti-Israel voters ahead of next year’s election. But in Biden’s rush to appease these disaffected Democrats, he may be playing right into Hamas’s hands and alienating the rest of the country in the process.

A prime example of this came late last month when Biden issued an apology to several Muslim-American leaders for having offended them the previous day by questioning the death toll reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health Affairs.

On October 25, Biden had held a press conference where he said, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” The comment outraged the Muslim-American leaders who were set to meet with Biden the next day at a meeting which reportedly lasted more than twice its scheduled half-hour length.

“Biden heard the leaders describe individuals they knew who were personally affected by the conflict,” the New York Post reported. In response, according to the Washington Post, he told the Muslim group, “I’m sorry. I’m disappointed in myself.” He further vowed to “do better” in the future.

Of all the things to apologize for! Biden notably did not cite any new reports supporting the accuracy of Hamas’s claims.

Hamas is widely known for its expertise in propaganda, issuing many false claims about Israeli behavior in the years leading up to the massacre, as well as since it began. Acknowledging the barbarity of Hamas’ attack, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), recently remarked that one challenge facing the world was “stopping the propaganda that is convincing people to engage in murder.”

For instance, Hamas leaders have denied that their forces were responsible for the most extreme atrocities committed on October 7 – decapitating babies, torturing ordinary Israelis, killing children in front of their parents (and vice versa), raping women young and old – attributing the atrocities to angry Gazan civilians. But that denial was immediately refuted by film footage which shows uniformed Hamas fighters engaging in just such behavior.

Another egregious example of phony Hamas propaganda was the claim that Israel had killed hundreds of patients and staff by bombing the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, a claim repeated as fact in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Associated Press.

An immediate investigation by Israel uncovered video footage indicating that the damage to the hospital resulted from a misfired Hamas rocket – and that the rocket landed in a parking lot adjacent to the hospital, not the facility itself. Israel’s findings – backed up by U.S. government investigators – demonstrated that prestigious international news media had been duped by faked photographs issued by Hamas.

An Associated Press analysis further confirmed that a rocket fired from within Palestinian territory that broke up while in the air likely fell onto the hospital, causing the catastrophe. Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council, also backed up the Israeli findings, reporting, “While we continue to collect information, our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza.”

Based on the NSC analysis, President Biden then acknowledged to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it appeared that “the other team [Hamas] did it.”

Even the Times walked back its initial coverage on the explosion a week after its original story, admitting in an editors’ note that the newspaper’s report had “relied too heavily on claims made by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.” As the editors explained, the original account had depended on information supplied by “Palestinian officials,” without acknowledging that the Israeli military “was investigating the blast.”

While the Times does not appear to have devoted any resources to further investigating the causes (or specific location) of the explosion, its original report, the editors conceded, “left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.” But far more people had read the original Times account than would have seen the correction, and the Times staff, in their eagerness to demonstrate their ostensible impartiality in covering the war in Gaza, served as instruments of Hamas propagandists. (Doubtless the Times story was picked up by other media around the world.)

While the Times note admitted that “given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified,” it fell short of an outright apology for the damage that its reporting must have caused.

Indeed, daily readers of the Times will note that its stories on the Gaza situation customarily begin by citing unsubstantiated figures on the supposed death toll from Israeli attacks, typically indicating only a few paragraphs later that the sole source of the figures is Hamas itself. (One has to wonder if the Times would display a similar credulity if it were citing figures issued, say, by American military spokesmen during one of the country’s recent conflicts in the Middle East.)

Needless to say, the Times’s erroneous reportage can only have further inflamed anti-Israel and anti-Semitic passions that continue to grow in the U.S. and abroad.

Of course, the Times is far from alone among American media in gullibly (or worse) repeating Hamas propaganda: in a November 18 report, CNN stated that it was unable to confirm that Hamas has a history of storing weapons in hospitals and schools, even suggesting that the Israeli Defense Forces had rearranged weaponry in the Al-Shifa Hospital prior to allowing international news crews to visit it, just to justify their assault on the facility.

In contrast, even Human Rights Watch, not known for any pro-Israel partisanship, belatedly acknowledged that the hospital bombing was not caused by an Israeli attack, but rather “probably” by the sort of rocket commonly used by Palestinian armed groups. At the same time, the organization criticized the “inflated” death and casualty totals issued by Hamas.

Under these circumstances, and given his own previous acknowledgment of having been deceived by Hamas regarding the hospital bombing, what can possibly justify Joe Biden’s apology for doubting the accuracy of the mortality figures released by the terrorist group?

Under Biden’s leadership, the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with military assistance and expressions of moral support. But in recent days, the administration has been exercising increasing pressure on Israel to continue its temporary ceasefire in Gaza, with Hamas releasing limited numbers of hostages in exchange for Israel’s freeing far more Hamas prisoners jailed for terrorist action, and meantime importing “humanitarian” assistance including fuel that can easily be used to maintain its missiles and terror tunnels.

While the Israeli government’s agreement to the cease-fire results partly from understandable domestic pressure from Israelis longing for the return of their captured relatives, it can hardly afford to continue the armistice for long, given the necessity of wiping out Hamas once and for all – the only way to secure itself against repeated massacres. How long will the Biden administration continue its support?

It is to be feared that Biden’s unwarranted “apology” for not believing Hamas propaganda reflects a weakness of will in the face of demonstrations by pro-Hamas activists, pressure from far-left congressional Democrats (notably the “Squad”), and concern about alienating voters whose support he is counting on (such as the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the key state of Michigan) to win re-election.

But the apology, based on no factual discoveries that belied his statement at the press conference, but only on the sad news that some American Muslims had been “affected” by Israel’s defensive actions, is shameful. It sends a message to the world that American leaders can easily be induced to contradict known facts just to placate assorted activist groups at home and abroad.

Already, the administration has naively been exhorting Israel to assign governance of Gaza, once Hamas has been defeated, to the Palestinian Authority, which governs much of the West Bank under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas’s supposedly more “moderate” Fatah Party.

Biden officials thereby show themselves oblivious to the facts that Fatah shares Hamas’s goals, has applauded its massacre, routinely rewards terrorist “martyrs,” and has boasted of its participation in the attack from Gaza. Biden’s insistence that Israel establish a “sovereign Palestinian state” along its borders, combining the West Bank and Gaza, disregards Hamas’s repeated demand – echoing the Palestinian Authority’s charter – that the Jewish people be entirely exterminated or otherwise removed “from the river to the sea.”

Neither Hamas nor Fatah has any long-term interest in a “two-state solution” – they want it all.

Biden’s unwarranted apology may revive memories of the “apology tour” of the Middle East and Europe that Barack Obama undertook shortly after he entered the White House. It is not known whether Biden hopes, like his mentor, to earn a Nobel Prize as a result.

But if Biden sincerely wants to apologize for real errors he has committed, recent polls suggest that voters could readily supply him with a long list. His latest apology is only the most recent example.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.