BRETT: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, and it’s an incredible thing to watch because one of the first stories I have in front of me is already causing me to question whether or not I ought to even share it because it’s a story written by the Associated Press.

“Israel Strikes Gaza Tunnels as Truce Efforts Remain Elusive — The Israeli military unleashed another heavy wave of airstrikes Monday on the Gaza Strip, saying it destroyed militant tunnels and the homes of nine Hamas commanders. International diplomacy to end the weeklong war that has killed hundreds appeared to make little headway.”

In fact, overnight you had the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, taking out a senior Hamas commander, putting out a video of the strike on his house, and noting on the tweet attached to it that he’s carried out many terrorist attacks; he’s not carrying out any more terrorist attacks. He’s gone, it’s done, it’s over.

Why am I concerned doing this story by Fares Akram and Ravi Nessman? This is the Associated Press. These are the same people that tried to tell you they didn’t know, that they had no idea that Hamas was in the building — in the Gaza media building — over the weekend that was taken down by the IDF. “Why, we’ve been there for 20 years! We had no inkling that Hamas was in there.”

Even though, of course, Israel provided proof to many of the world leaders including the United States government, prompting Tony Blinken (Antony Blinken our secretary of state) to come out and say, “Yeah, yeah, that was a righteous takedown of that building. Hamas was there. We believe Hamas was there. AP didn’t know! Absolutely amazing.

We’ve got great stuff coming throughout the next three hours, hitting on all cylinders as Rush would have us do.

Yesterday on Fox, former deputy national security adviser KT McFarland spoke about the ramifications of the Biden administration reversing Trump policy.

MCFARLAND: What they’re doing is they have to sort of bend to the wishes of these radical leftists, and what do the radical leftists want? They hate Israel, they’re anti-Semitic and so they push the Biden administration to reverse everything Trump did, including in the Middle East. I mean, we understood in the Middle East, you could only get to peace if you cut the funding and the weapons sources from the Palestinian terrorists.

We did that with the Abraham Accords, which got the Arabs to stop funding the Palestinian terrorists and with Iran, with the sanctions, we got Iran so broke — their economy was so broken — they couldn’t afford to send aid to the Palestinian terrorists. So we were on our way to peace. But now it’s all been reversed and now what do you see in the Middle East? Predictably, you have war.

BRETT: When Democrats are in charge, all of your friends become enemies and all of your enemies become friends. You know, you have this weird use of language from people like Jen Psaki who was right there during the failed years of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

She was a spokesperson for the State Department and a senior communications official in the Obama administration. She’s now coming out… Do you remember when Hillary Clinton spoke of “soft diplomacy”? Soft diplomacy. We’re gonna do Soft diplomacy. Yesterday the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, referred to “quiet diplomacy.”

PSAKI: Our calculation at this point is that having those conversations behind the scenes — uh, weighing in with our important strategic partnership we have with Israel, also with other countries in the region — is the most constructive approach we can take. So our approach is through quiet, intensive diplomacy, uh, and that’s, uh, where we feel we can be most effective.

BRETT: Think about people that support you that are your friends that are people who have stood up for you in tough times. Do you want quiet diplomacy in that case? No. You want to have a full-throated support of what you’re doing. You defend your allies. Israel is an ally. “Quiet diplomacy.” I don’t know what that means. You know, soft, quiet diplomacy? Rush spoke of Hillary Clinton’s soft diplomacy and how that approach rarely works.

RUSH: Hillary was the keynote speaker for a Beijing conference put on by Caijing Magazine. She addressed the audience via a video-conference setup. According to Hillary, both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have it all wrong when it comes to North Korea. She says they need to soften their attitude toward North Korea’s little pot-bellied dictator Kim Jong-un. They need to try to stop relying on bluster and personal taunts to motivate him to behave better.

Hillary warned that if Trump and China do not pursue a policy of soft diplomacy, nuclear war might be the result. “Beijing should remember that inaction is a choice,” she said. Ironically, she gave her remarks the same day the little dictator fired off an ICBM that landed in Japanese waters. And yet again, Hillary made it clear that she just can’t get over the election results.

She told her ChiCom audience: “I was the candidate of reality. It just wasn’t as entertaining as the reality-TV candidate.” Well, here’s a dose of reality, Hillary. Your so-called soft diplomacy was tried, and tried again, with North Korea. It didn’t work. It never works. It’s why we’re where we are. And neither does inaction. You tried that in Benghazi, and we all know how that turned out.

BRETT: It’s abundantly clear — and Rush is a hundred percent correct. It’s abundantly clear that a strong America means a more stable world. Hillary Clinton tried to sell herself as some guru, some policy guru when it came to international affairs and things like that. Her high point was giving a speech, if you remember, at the Women’s Conference in Beijing.

That was her high-water mark when she began to run for president in 2008 after being a senator from New York, and when she became the person in charge of international diplomacy, she cratered our position in the world. Benghazi comes to mind, the selling of our strategic assets to Russian concerns with rare earths and those sorts of things.

This is a person who is consistently wrong, only beaten out by Joe Biden whose portfolio for 40 years was, “He’s brilliant on foreign policy. He understands foreign policy!” It was Joe Biden who penned, with Leslie Gelb in the Washington Post in 2003 and 2004, the idea that we should take American troops and partition Iraq into sectarian groups, using American military personnel as essentially bullet stoppers between the sectarian groups.

That’s a terrible idea. Joe Biden has never been right. Bob Gates… I referenced this yesterday. Bob Gates ran the CIA, ran the defense department — he’s a guy who’s been around Washington, D.C., forever — and he said in an interview back in June of 2020 to the Wall Street Journal, that Joe Biden has never been right on foreign policy in 50 years of being involved.

Fifty years! You would think on some level, he’d back into being right. He’s not. He’s absolutely not. So when you have people get into office — and let’s just go with the immediate past, shall we? The immediate past, 25, 30 years. You have Bill Clinton chasing Yasser Arafat all over the compound there in Maryland trying to talk him into cutting a deal with the Israelis.

The Israelis offered him 97% of what he wanted; Yasser Arafat wouldn’t take the deal. And yet, and yet Bill Clinton still was committed to pursuing that failed policy with the PLO. You look at what happened with George W. Bush, who came into office talking about having a “humble foreign policy,” right? He was gonna do a humble foreign policy.

Well, 9/11 changed everything, and the Democrats opposed being aggressive on Al-Qaeda around the world. They opposed it. They didn’t want to see America doing that. They didn’t like that America was defending herself aggressively throughout the world. They were upset by that. Then you get into the years of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

We had a preseason for Joe Biden, and that was when he was the vice president with Barack Obama, for President Obama. And Joe Biden told us where he stood with Barack Obama. “Don’t go kill bin Laden!” He bragged about that. “I told him, ‘Don’t go kill him. Don’t go! Try a couple of other things. Don’t go kill bin Laden.'”

What? Even Republicans, even the most conservative conservatives were happy that bin Laden was killed. Joe Biden was the last guy in the room and said, “Nah, don’t do it. Try something else first. Don’t… Don’t do it yet.” He was wrong. I’m sure he advised Barack Obama to allow the Russians to come in and take up the position in Latakia there in Syria after Barack Obama put his red line in the sand and said, “Don’t you gas your people, Assad!”

And the minute Assad gassed his people, suddenly Barack Obama’s calling on the phone of Vladimir Putin saying (impression), “Vlad, can you help me out here? Can you get me out of a jam, out of a pickle? Can you bring Russians into Syria for the first time in history, give ’em a Mediterranean port, and get me out of the jam of confronting Assad?”

And for good measure, they turned around and sent pallets full of cash to the mullahs in Tehran to pay them for not proliferating, even though they took that cash and spread it throughout the Middle East to groups like Hamas, groups like Hezbollah, groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad to kill Israelis, to kill Jews, to kill Americans, to kill Arabs.

This is a failed foreign policy being rolled out, and they want to call it “quiet diplomacy.” I’d be embarrassed too. I’d be whispering about my quiet diplomacy if it was this bad. They can’t even manage the foreign policy crisis that is the American border! You think they can manage Gaza and Israel?

No way.

No way.

This is a group that is not ready for prime time. They are running a dangerous foreign policy — that doesn’t consider America’s strategic interests nor our allies’ strategic interests — and instead, wants to chase ghosts of international celebration and adoration coming in from places like Tehran and Gaza. No, thank you, President Biden.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Iron Dome. You keep hearing people talk about Iron Dome. For shorthand, it’s the protective missile defense system that Israel uses against the rockets being fired in from Gaza, and it’s got in its deepest roots one of our greatest presidents. The Iron Dome in Israel is one of President Reagan’s lasting legacies, his belief that the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI — “Star Wars,” they used to decry it as.

The partial U.S. funding for this initial technology development helped Israel with this incredibly important defense. In fact, back in 2014, an editorial in the Washington Examiner: “Ronald Reagan’s Missile Defense Vision Is Saving Lives in Israel — Liberals scoffed in 1983 when President Ronald Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense system.

“They called it ‘Star Wars’ and claimed the technology was fictional. Other critics took a different tack, arguing that Star Wars would be harmful if it did work because it would upset the delicate nuclear balance between the United States and Soviet Union.” See, we had to be willing to take a nuclear strike on our soil to prove that we were good guys, as the Soviets were concerned.

“Three decades after Reagan’s landmark proposal, technical issues moved. This week,” it’s 2014, “the world has watched Israel’s Iron Dome system — partially funded by the U.S. and incorporating U.S. technology — perform remarkably well against more than 1,000 Hamas rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.” See, we’ve been down this road before.

Hamas does this every five, six, seven years, when they get a hankering for a conflict. So if not for the Iron Dome protecting Israel from all incoming rocket fire, I shudder to think what the civilian casualties would be right now. In fact, here’s Rush talking about Iron Dome in 2014. He was illustrating absurdity in this clip, but what he actually said became a reality.

RUSH: Folks, just to show you, we just had a caller who wanted to know why was there no coverage on the Iron Dome, the Israeli Iron Dome it’s protecting their children from these attacks by the Hamas. And I said, “One of the reasons why is it’s not fair that Israel is the one who has the Iron Dome; they haven’t shared the Iron Dome with the Palestinians and Hamas.”

Lo and behold, a story from today in the Washington Times! “U.N. Condemns Israel and the United States for Not Sharing Iron Dome with Hamas.” Good… Folks, my instincts some days even amaze me. “Nations slammed Israel for possibly committing war crimes in its fight against Hamas — and then backed that accusation by suggesting the Jewish state ought to be sharing its Iron Dome defensive technology with the very terror group it’s fighting.

“U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said to members of the media at an ’emergency’ meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council that Israel was falling short in its duty to protect citizens in the Gaza Strip from getting killed by its rockets,” by not sharing its technology! Is that not cockeyed? This is a war!

We are in a war, and the Israelis are being condemned for not sharing their protective dome, so that the Palestinians can be protected from Israeli rockets. That’s exactly how this works. If you understand. I don’t mean this to sound condescending. Please, never, I never mean to sound that way. The way to not go insane trying to make sense out of this. You look, how in the world can Israel be the bad guy?”

How in the world can this be? The only democratic country in the Middle East. A U.S. ally ever since its founding, since Israeli’s founding. How can it be? How can Israel end up being the bad guy? Obama makes it look like the bad guy, John Kerry makes ’em look like the bad guy, which makes it look like they agree with Hamas and the Palestinians and everybody, other Arab states that Israel is the bad guy!

How can Israel be the bad guy? They’re the ones under assault and being attacked. Israel doesn’t put kids on its bombs send them into Gaza Strip. Palestinians do that! How in the world is Israel the bad guy?” If you understand that in the leftist perverted worldview, Israel is the bad guy because they’re the more powerful and they are the majority and they’re more advanced.

“It isn’t fair. It just isn’t fair. I mean, if Israel has an Iron Dome they should share that! They should share it! Palestinians are a poor, underdeveloped minority. They’re victims, and the Israelis are the brutes and the bullies.” It’s no more complicated than that. Well, it is, but that’s a simple way of understanding it.

BRETT: Rush is spot on, and one of the most overlooked parts of this conversation is the historical test that proves that Rush was right back in 2014 but also that Israel is a state that practices restraint. Go back to the days of the first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein was routinely firing Scud missiles into Israel in the hopes that things would escalate.

It was George H. W. Bush and that leadership team that got on the phone to the Israeli government and said, “Listen. Listen. We got Patriot missiles. We’re gonna help you out. Don’t escalate this. Hussein is trying to create a regional war. Just be restrained, and we know it’s hard that you’re taking missile strikes on your country.”

Remember Arthur Kent, the Scud Stud, who would report live from Jerusalem? The Israelis showed tremendous restraint ’cause they understood the bigger picture. But more than that, they understood that if they’re taking incoming rocket fire and we’re putting the United States’ good name on the line to defend our ally, they can trust us.

Now what?

When you have people in Obama administration or connected to the Obama administration or the Biden administration talking crazy about diplomacy with the Palestinians and we can work this out, ask yourself this question: If the Iranians really cared about the Palestinians, why would they just send them missiles? Why wouldn’t they advocate on their behalf for some sort of a normalization?

Why wouldn’t Syria do that?

Why wouldn’t Lebanon do that?

Why wouldn’t the Russians do that?

Instead, they watch the carnage in Gaza and in Israel, and as far as they’re concerned, it’s just another day in a rough neighborhood. This is a tragedy for the Palestinians because they’re being played by their alleged allies who are just using them as pawns. They ought to rethink this fight against Israel and rethink the notion of a functioning political system side by side with the other states.

But they won’t, because Iran has radicalized ’em.