[Order a copy of Robert Spencer’s forthcoming book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, by clicking here.]

The pressure on the Biden regime over its ostensible but hollow (at best) support for Israel has been high for months. The regime’s betrayal of Israel has been widely explained as a capitulation to threats from Muslim leaders that Old Joe would receive no Muslim votes in November unless he stabbed the Jewish state in the back. That consideration likely had a great deal to do with the betrayal, but the pressure also comes from within the regime: his handlers have appointed Muslim Brotherhood-linked haters of Israel to numerous positions of influence, and that influence is being felt.

The pressures from inside and outside the Biden regime ultimately emanate from the same source. Middle East Eye reported in Oct. 2020 that Biden released a video message to Muslim Advocates, the group that was responsible in 2011 for the Obama administration’s removal of all mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror training. Biden vowed: “My administration will look like America, Muslim Americans serving at every level.” Middle East Eye also noted that “while Muslims represent a small minority of the American electorate, their communities are concentrated in key swing states that Trump won by a small margin in 2016, including Michigan.”

Muslim leaders in the U.S. kept that fact firmly in mind. In Nov. 2023, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who infamously said that he was “happy” about Hamas’ Oct. 7 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis, declared at a pro-Hamas rally: “No cease-fire, no votes. No votes in Michigan, no votes in Arizona, no votes in Georgia, no votes in Nevada, no votes in Wisconsin, no votes in Pennsylvania. No votes for you anywhere if you don’t call for a ceasefire now.” A ceasefire, like cutting off Israel’s arms shipment, would allow Hamas to survive. That’s why Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah) agreed with Awad: “The American people won’t forget. Biden, support a ceasefire now. Or don’t count on us in 2024.”

Biden regime apparatchiks have heeded that threat; some were only too happy to do so. One of the Muslims operating inside the regime, in fulfillment of Old Joe’s promise to Muslim Advocates, has been Maher Bitar, who was just appointed Biden’s special counsel. That appointment is in addition to his present duties as director of intelligence and defense programs at the National Security Council.

In his college days, Bitar was president of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at Georgetown University. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, SJP has emerged as the most active, strident, and actively menacing pro-Hamas groups on college and university campuses nationwide. SJP has no national organization, but it does have a national website enunciating its motives and goals. The National Students for Justice in Palestine site states that it is “supporting over two hundred Palestine solidarity organizations across occupied Turtle Island, we aim to develop a student movement that is connected, disciplined, and equipped with the tools necessary achieve Palestinian liberation.”

“Occupied Turtle Island” refers to North America. Turtle Island is a name for the continent taken from Native American folklore, and of course it is “occupied” today by the evil white oppressors who are, in SJP’s view, also responsible for the supposed occupation and oppression of Palestinian territory. As absurd as this locution is, in light of the fact that no one aside from woke millennial Leftists, not even Native Americans themselves, refers to North America as “Turtle Island,” the National SJP website uses the term consistently and without irony. It invites visitors to the site to “learn more about recent victories in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses across Turtle Island, and beyond!”

SJP was founded at the University of California Berkeley in October 2000. It is the brainchild of Hatem Bazian, whom the Berkeley Center for Race and Gender notes that he is a “Continuing Lecturer, Chair and Founder, CRG’s Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.” Bazian has openly called for an intifada, a violent uprising, not in Israel only, but in the United States as well. And regarding supporters of Israel, he has declared: “We need to harass them.”

Now that harassment is happening on campuses all over the nation, and SJP alumnus Maher Bitar is in a position of enormous influence in the Biden regime. No wonder the regime betrayed Israel; the only question is why it didn’t do so even more quickly.