On Tuesday, President Bush will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Olmert to discuss the next step to further crush Palestinian resistance, possibly through a further three-state division. Luckily, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was on ABC’s “This Week” to voice his disdain for the president’s continued support of human rights violations throughout the Middle East… um, right? No, of course not. Instead Senator Biden echoed the sentiments of anti-Palestinian candidates like Hillary Clinton by saying Bush hadn’t gone far enough to suppress the democratically elected Hamas government.

Speaking about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden criticized President Bush for not giving millions more to the corrupt Fatah party so that it could have swept the 2006 parliamentary election. “He had no political standing,” Biden said. “We virtually did nothing to give him any credibility. We … ended up making Hamas look even stronger.”

Hmmm, Biden’s strong suit is said to be his foreign policy experience, yet the man doesn’t understand why Palestinians didn’t like us plotting a Fatah coup of their country by supplying weapons and money to the group. What Biden is saying is that we didn’t go far enough with the coup effort. Bush even cut off tens of millions of dollars in aid to all Palestinians when the elections did not end the way he wanted, with a Fatah victory. Apparently, Biden doesn’t think this atrocious form of collective punishment goes far enough. Mr. Biden, how about we actually support democracy when it occurs beyond all odds in the Middle East, rather than complain that Bush isn’t doing enough nation-building to stop it? Speaking of which, didn’t this great foreign policy expert also support the invasion of Iraq?

ABC itself, and most other news organizations, have decided to refer to the situation as a “Hamas coup” in Gaza. How a democratically elected government performs a coup in its own territory is beyond me. A more accurate account of the facts would instead call it a “Fatah coup” of the West Bank with US and Israeli support. All food, fuel, and medicine has been cut off to occupied Gaza, home to 1.37 million Palestinians, as Israel has sealed the borders around the territory. The ethnic cleansing of the territory has just taken a devastating turn, and Biden still doesn’t think Bush has gone far enough to overturn the vote of these tortured people.

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