WASHINGTON, D.C. – According to reports, former Vice President Mike Pence, in a video statement released Tuesday, was highly critical of the Administration of President Joe Biden’s recent handling of the ongoing violence occurring in the Middle East. Referring to the work that he and former President Donald Trump put into “lasting peace and an end to the decades-old conflict in the region,” Pence said that their efforts were undone by the “weakness and ambivalence” from Biden.
“We witnessed four years of progress toward peace, now shattered by more than a week of unprovoked violence against the people of Israel,” Pence said in a video he released via Advancing American Freedom, his new policy and advocacy organization. “The Trump-Pence administration set the table for lasting peace and an end to the decades-old conflict in the region. President Biden has replaced strength with weakness, moral clarity with confusion, and loyalty with betrayal.”
Pence noted that the commitment of the Trump Administration to Israel was “unrivaled” and that the Biden Administration has failed the region and encouraged new aggression on the part of Hamas against Israel.
“We made that clear to the world through our actions. But from the moment President Biden took office, all that changed, and the results have reignited violence. Weakness arouses evil,” Pence said. “Instead of seeking peace through strength, President Biden has offered weakness and ambivalence and, tragically, our friends in Israel are paying a terrible price.”
Hamas, known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, is a militant group that aims to liberate Palestine from the Israeli occupation, and transform the country into an Islamic state.
Pence accused Biden of portraying Israel and Hamas as equals in their ongoing conflict, which the former Vice President went to great lengths to convey is not the case.
“Every tepid statement uttered by the Biden-Harris administration is built on a false equivalency between Israel and Hamas,” he said. “One is a sovereign nation with a legitimate government, and a trusted ally. The other, an internationally recognized terrorist organization that has now fired more than 3,000 rockets at Jewish families and business in the past week alone. There is no moral equivalency between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.”
The current conflict between Israel and Hamas dates back to 2008 in Gaza, which is a self-governing Palestinian territory with around two million residents that Israel originally captured in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel withdrew its troops and Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005, but when Hamas was elected into power in Gaza in 2007, Israel and Egypt started an economically-damaging blockade that Israel said aimed to keep Hamas from importing arms.
Recent reports indicate that Biden has been slow to act on the escalating violence in Gaza, and that more progressive members of the Democratic party are urging the President to delay the sale of arms to Israel while encouraging the administration to “use every diplomatic tool to de-escalate this conflict and bring about peace.”
To date, 213 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel have been killed by this latest conflict, leading Pence to express his hope that peace will hopefully soon come to the region.
“Let’s pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and if the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: America stands with Israel,” he said.
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