As Jews were beaten and harassed in broad daylight in the United States of America, Biden urged Americans to resist hate in their minds.
Biden Announces Egypt-Brokered Ceasefire.
President Joe Biden announced around 6:00 p.m. ET on Thursday that Israel had agreed to “a mutual, unconditional ceasefire to begin in less than two hours.”
The president said, “In my conversation with President [Prime Minister] Netanyahu, I commended him for the decision to bring the current hostilities to a close within less than 11 days.” The government of Egypt took the leading role in brokering the truce.
He added, “We remain committed to working with the United Nations and other international stakeholders to provide rapid humanitarian assistance and to marshal international support for the people of Gaza and the Gaza reconstruction efforts. We will do this in full partnership with the Palestinian Authority—not Hamas, the Authority—in a manner that does not permit Hamas to simply restock its military arsenal.”
Earlier that day, tensions ran high at the United Nations headquarters as Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan and Palestinian Authority foreign minister Riad al-Maliki each accused the other’s country of “genocide.” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that no country was working more urgently toward peace in the region than the United States.
Biden Signs COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.
Biden held an event at the White House Thursday to sign and observe the passage of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.
“All of this hate hides in plain sight,” the president said. “Too often, it is met with silence: silence by the media, silence by our politics, and silence by our history.” (Indeed, media avoidance of anti-Asian crime was until recently an issue that was even admitted by a CNN technical director.)
Reality check: Biden’s anti-hate crime bill signing event took place amid an onslaught of violent, anti-Semitic hate crimes in major cities—including beatings, throwing explosives, and verbal abuse—and it didn’t even earn a mention in his remarks.
The act, aimed at combating anti-Asian hate crimes, contains an amendment called the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer NO HATE Act, and their families were in attendance at the event. Jabara was a Lebanese Christian killed by his murderous next-door neighbor, and Heyer was a protestor struck by a self-professed neo-Nazi who drove into a crowd. Both were national news, and were met with singular outrage—but Biden described the act being passed Thursday as “maybe the first break—the first significant break on a moment in our history that has to be turned around.”
The president, it seemed, was focused on something far more subtle than spates of actual violence in broad daylight: “[Hate] has a way of seeping, sort of, through cracks in the communities and children who, in fact, wouldn’t have crossed their mind.”
