Biden's legalistic response to Hamas murder -- dopey ideology or mere stupidity?

Neither. It's the usual -- deceit to hide cowardice and serve political ends.

Last week it was discovered that Hamas had murdered six more hostages, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The Wall Street Journal observed that President Biden has repeatedly pressured Israel’s Prime Minister to accept one-sided hostage deals only to have Hamas reject them. Many Americans now understandably ask: OK, fine, Biden is good about muscling Israel, but what is he going to do about Goldberg-Polin’s killers?

The Administration was quick to respond. This time, we were going to get tough.

We’re going to send them a subpoena! AG Merrick Garland

…unsealed criminal charges against six Hamas leaders, three of them believed to have been killed already by Israel. The others are Yahya Sinwar, who is probably hiding in a Gaza tunnel; Khaled Meshaal, in a Qatari luxury hotel; and Ali Baraka, a TV regular in Beirut. The seven counts cite the leaders for “planning, supporting the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed.”

To call this excursion into airhead legalism mere foolishness is to strain charity. The Left has already had its scamper into mangling law and the whole idea of law in the Alvin Bragg prosecutions in Manhattan. Last week’s frolic is a different sort of foray into pretend-law to be sure, although in a number of ways more disgusting and dangerous. Why settle for merely putting your political opponents in jail on exotic charges when you can get your mortal enemies to laugh at you by pretending that their war on civilized life is going to be settled in a courtroom? (See also our legal system’s inability to deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed more than twenty years after his capture).

This, however, is exactly the bizarre lens through which the Left views law, and is one more unhappily serious reason that Ms. Harris, who shares these ideas to the extent she shares any, cannot be allowed anywhere near power, even if the alternative is the indigestible and irresponsible Donald Trump.

The U.S. move is minor, and it isn’t even new. The U.S. filed the charges in February, and their unveiling now looks all too much like a political gesture.

Goodness gracious, I’m going to get the vapors!

Mr. Biden says, “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes,” while he pushes Israel for concessions that would let Hamas rearm and give its leaders a good shot at keeping power.

The Justice Department complaint details Hamas crimes from the 1990s on. But the U.S. didn’t seek to charge the Hamas leaders until recently—not even after Oct. 7. The complaint waited until Feb. 1, the same day as Mr. Biden’s executive order creating a sanctions regime targeting Israelis in the West Bank.

As our friends at the New York Sun note, a criminal court is the wrong venue for the likes of Mr. Sinwar. Hamas jihadists aren’t committing street crimes, and Israel isn’t fighting back with police. Israel is fighting a war for survival against illegal enemy combatants. What matters is winning the war, not arresting suspects. The criminal charges risk confusing the stakes.

This is true as far as it goes, but understates the depth and gravity of the Left’s misapprehension of both the power and the limits of law.

Even Barack Obama understood that the thing to do with Osama bin Laden was not serve him with papers but to send in soldiers to kill him, then dump his corpse in the ocean. Is that due process? Nope, but due process is not a deity. Killing bin Laden was what was called for by any even remotely sane response to the war on America he started twenty three years and a day ago. On October 7 of last year, another (but related) bunch of savages continued that war, this time in Israel, by murdering and kidnapping quite a few American citizens as well.

Joe Biden was Obama’s understudy, yet seems incapable of learning his boss’s lesson — a lesson that was literally cheered in the streets when Americans found out that bin Laden had been dispatched. And now the Democrats want America to buy Biden’s understudy, a person known principally, until now, not even for her boss’s “depth of thinking,” such as that might be imagined to be in moments of desperate fancy, but for…………….cackling.

It’s often hard to make Donald Trump look sober by comparison, but this is where we are.

If the Biden Administration had the will, it could follow up these charges with large bounties on Hamas leaders’ heads and a campaign of charges against Hamas’s material supporters in America. But it hasn’t.

In other words, if we’re determined to pretend that law is the answer here, we could at least put some muscle behind it, but we haven’t done that either and aren’t about to. Why? Because the purpose of these indictments is not actually to do anything to bring Hamas to justice, but to pretend to be doing something. As I said, it’s hard to make an increasingly distracted Trump look sober, but………………

Another overdue step is to pressure Qatar and Lebanon to hand over Hamas leaders. Mr. Biden gave Qatar the status of major non-NATO ally. A large U.S. air base sits not far from a Hamas leader’s hotel there. The U.S. has invested more than $3 billion in the Lebanese Armed Forces since 2006. We wouldn’t allow al Qaeda to establish “political offices” in our allies’ capitals.

Hamas’s Mr. Meshaal traveled last week from Qatar to Turkey, a NATO ally, where he called for West Bank suicide bombings. There was no effort to arrest him. If Mr. Biden wants to squeeze Hamas, he has options other than the symbolic gesture of U.S. criminal charges for a trial in an American courtroom that the defendants are never likely to see.

The whole thing is woefully transparent, and transparently weak, and hence rife with danger to Americans anywhere in the world.

We and Israel and — best to realize it, the West — are in a war thrust upon us by Islamic radicals whose ambition and cruelty would make the Nazis blush. As in the 1940’s, the answer is not in the law library. The answer is to kill enough of them to exterminate their hopes of succeeding in their ghastly goals.