In two separate appearances, Tom Cotton has delivered clear, insightful, and completely accurate statements about Israel’s right to defend herself and about Joe Biden’s disastrous policies vis-à-vis Israel and Hamas in the ongoing war between the two. If you’ve been struggling for a way to articulate your feelings about what Biden’s doing in the Middle East, Cotton has you covered.

One of the problems with intellectuals is that, if they lack a moral compass, they can delude themselves into believing that completely unethical things or people are, in fact, good ideas. This is how Peter Singer, the current Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, could be a vegetarian extremist in order to protect animals while simultaneously arguing that parents should have up to a month after a child is born to abort “defective” babies. Being credentialed doesn’t mean being either wise or good.

Normal Americans, however, thankfully unencumbered by academic sophistry and retaining their moral compass, intuitively understand that Israel is the good guy in the current fight and that Hamas is the bad guy. Hamas is a radical Islamist terrorist organization that is dedicated to the extermination of Jews, and that controls its own territory with totalitarian ferocity, using torture and murder to quash anything the Koran doesn’t approve. Israel is a multicultural democratic nation that extends full civil rights to all citizens, and she is in Hamas’s crosshairs, as was brutally demonstrated on October 7. Americans also get that we, too, are in Hamas’s crosshairs.

Still, we ordinary Americans lack a bully pulpit from which to expound our beliefs. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), has that pulpit, though, and he uses it wisely. Last week, he made a statement eviscerating Joe Biden’s pro-Hamas policies:

Sen. Tom Cotton SCORCHES Biden's political move to abandon Israel to appease pro-Hamas leftists: "It would also be grounds for impeachment under the Democrats' "Trump-Ukraine" standard—withholding foreign aid to help one's reelection—only with Joe Biden: it's TRUE! pic.twitter.com/ABLRhqRqSw

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 9, 2024

Now some people say Joe Biden is doing this for his reelection, which would be bad enough. It would also, I have to add, be grounds for impeachment under the Democrats’ Trump, Ukraine standard: Withholding foreign aid to help one’s reelection only with Joe Biden, It’s true.

But I’m afraid it’s also worse than that. Joe Biden and Israel-hating Democrats are using electoral concerns as a pretext to do what they’ve always wanted to do: To cut Israel loose.

Remember, a lot of Barack Obama’s aides, who are now Joe Biden’s aides, disputed that Hamas was even a “real” terrorist group to begin with. For that matter, remember that Joe Biden himself threatened Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin more than 40 years ago with cutting off aid to Israel. Begin humiliated Biden, warning him not to threaten Israel and saying, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees.”

 Israel is fighting a just and necessary war. Their knees are not trembling. As Prime Minister Netanyahu just said, they’ll fight alone if they have to. But let me assure all the Israelis watching. You won’t have to fight alone. You don’t have a problem with America. You have a problem with Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party. And the American people are going to solve that problem for you in six months.

Then, over the weekend, Cotton appeared on Face the Nation and did it all over again:

In the above video, Cotton made mincemeat of the State Department’s dishonest attempt to frame Israel as a war criminal nation, a contention that CBS’s Margaret Brennan really wanted to promote. (Quotations from the official CBS transcript.):

The report that they put out Friday night, after news deadlines passed, was very clear. There is no evidence that Israel is violating international law. All civilian casualties in Gaza are solely the responsibility of Hamas. In fact, Israel’s probably doing more than any military in history to avoid civilian casualties.

[snip]

If Hamas did not hide behind and under civilians, there would no- there would not be civilian casualties. For that matter, if Hamas simply surrendered and turned over all these hostages, there would be no more civilian suffering in Gaza.

When Brennan again tried to make Israel a war criminal by pointing out that civilians were in the line of fire, Cotton scotched her efforts instantly:

It troubles me deeply that Hamas is using those civilians as human shields, because that is their strategy.

He also explained in clear terms why Israel should have the weapons Biden is withholding:

Well, the reason Israel needs these larger bombs is because Hamas has buried tunnels, or they’re holding hostages, and where its leaders are holed up, deeply underground.

Cotton also called out Biden’s conduct for what it is: an arms embargo against Israel, noting correctly that Biden has said he’ll give Israel only defensive, not offensive, weapons.

Most importantly, though, Cotton called out the fact that Biden is doing everything he can to protect Hamas, and that this is a morally bankrupt position:

It- Joe Biden’s position is de facto for Hamas victory at this point. Israel’s goal is to destroy Hamas, which committed the worst atrocity against Jews since World War II. Hamas’s goal is to survive. If they do- if Israel does not go into Rafah and destroy Hamas in Rafah, Hamas will survive.

Cotton also ably blocks Brennan’s effort to claim that pro-Israel people are hypocrites because Ronald Reagan also blocked arms shipments to Israel, and then glides effortlessly to evidence that Biden isn’t just undercutting Israel, but that he’s also underwriting Iran:

Ronald Reagan’s decision to pause the delivery of fighter jets in the 1980s was totally different from what happens here- what has happened here. Israel is fighting a war of survival against a terrorist group that committed the worst atrocity against Jews since World War II. In the 1980s, an Israeli ambassador had been targeted for assassination. Ronald Reagan knew that the pause of fighter jets would not interfere with Israel’s fighting because they had plenty of fighters. He did not pause munitions. Joe Biden is not sending munitions in the middle of a shooting war, that’s a war of survival. And look at the broader context. Israel knew that Ronald Reagan had its back in the region, he sank half of Iran’s navy. Joe Biden has consistently given Iran hundreds of billions of dollars of sanctions relief that exactly funded groups like Hamas and Hezbollah--

Cotton isn’t just intelligent and educated. He’s something more important: He’s ethical and wise. And in a fight between Tom Cotton and Margaret Brennan, she looked like a moral midget, while he was a knight in shining armor.

Image: YouTube screen grab (cropped).