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Biden Inserts Himself Into Israel's Six-Day War with Newest False Claim

  Did President Joe Biden ever tell you about the time he visited Abraham Lincoln at the White House? No lie. He went to the White House and...

 Did President Joe Biden ever tell you about the time he visited Abraham Lincoln at the White House?

No lie. He went to the White House and said, “Listen, Abe, what can I do for you?” And Abe told him he should go pay Confederate President Jefferson Davis a visit and tell him to cut out the slavery malarkey. Well, by golly, he did and — wouldn’t you know it? — the Civil War ended. I’m not saying he stopped it, I’m just saying.

No, the president’s lies haven’t gotten that bad. Yet. However, his latest tall tale regarding former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is another sign he’s tracking in that direction.


On Wednesday, the president gave remarks during a Hanukkah menorah lighting at the White House. During his speech, he managed to insert himself into Israel’s Six-Day War.

“I was saying to a couple younger members of my staff, before I came over, about the many times I’ve been to Israel,” Biden said. “I said — then, all of a sudden, I realized, ‘God, you’re getting old, Biden.’

“I have known every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir. And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.

“I sat in front of her desk,” he continued, addressing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “And she had a guy — her staff member — to my right. His name was Rabin. And she kept flipping those maps up and down. She had that bevy of maps — sort of kept it — and it was — it was so depressing what she was — about what happened. She gave me every detail.

“And we — the photographer, she was taking pictures and the press. And, Chuck, without turning her head, she looked straight ahead but, talking to me, she said, ‘Why’ — she said — ‘Why do you look so sad?’ And I said — and I almost turned. And I said, ‘Well, Madam Prime Minister,’ I said, ‘you’ve painted such a dismal picture.’

She said, ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry. We have a secret weapon in our battle in this area.’ And I almost turned again. I said, ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘We have no place else to go.'”

This is both a) inspiring and b) not factual.

According to The Times of Israel, Biden did meet Meir, but it was in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, not the Six-Day War in 1967. He told the same story during an Israeli Embassy event in 2015, according to the Times.

So, fine, he mixed up his wars. What’s wrong with that? Several things, depending on why he told the story.

The first possibility is that it simply wasn’t important enough to him to get it right. That would obviously be problematic. While the Six-Day War reaffirmed Israel’s military dominance in the Middle East, the Yom Kippur War was much farther-reaching and threatened to pull the U.S. and the Soviet Union into a global conflict.

Making this mistake about Israeli history is a bit like mixing up the first and second world wars. (“Which one had the mustachioed, screaming German guy and the atomic bomb again?”)

I hate playing the role reversal card, but sometimes it’s profitable: Picture Donald Trump or George W. Bush making this mistake. The hounds would have pounced, and not without reason.

The second possibility is that, yet again, Biden is showing signs of diminishing cognitive returns. Here he is telling the same story with much greater precision (and concision) in 2010:




Eleven years later, he seems adrift in the sea of his own memory bank.

Then there’s the third potential reason Biden got this wrong: He loves telling whoppers to ingratiate himself with certain voting blocs. Having taken on a crucial role in the Six-Day War — making him an ally of Israel’s going all the way back to before his time in the Senate — would have looked great for him during his Hanukkah remarks.

In his book “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson mocked former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey — a 1972 presidential candidate who had a history of taking these kinds of liberties — with a photo caption that read, “I was a Jew once myself.” The difference is that, with Biden, there’s always the potential he really utters a lie like that.

The most egregious example of this came as Biden was campaigning in South Carolina in February 2020.

At the time, Biden had just crashed in the Iowa caucuses. He was about to crash in the New Hampshire primary when returns came in later that day, and he would suffer a wipeout in the Nevada caucuses, as well. Anything other than a decisive victory in South Carolina, where black voters make up the backbone of the Democratic Party, would have effectively ended his campaign.

So he decided to paint himself as a victim of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” he told a crowd at a campaign stop. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island.”

According to The New York Times, Biden had told this story before. As you can imagine, it wasn’t true in the slightest.

Not only would it have made the news if a U.S. senator had been arrested by the South African regime while trying to visit Mandela, but Soweto (a township in Johannesburg) is hundreds of miles away from Robben (not Robbens) Island, the prison where Mandela was held off the coast of Cape Town.

Biden would later amend the story: “When I said ‘arrested,’ I meant I was not able, I was not able to move. … I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go,” he told CNN.

There are other examples.

He told an audience in Idaho that his first job offer was in the state. The company he claimed he had applied to said it had “no record of President Biden’s application or of him having worked for the company,” adding that “we checked our system internally and nothing has turned up.”

He said he visited the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the site of a mass shooting in 2018, in remarks right before the Jewish high holy days this year. The synagogue confirmed (of course) that he had never been there.

So is it A, B or C? Are they even mutually exclusive? The only person who knows is Joe Biden — and even that’s debatable.

What we can tell for certain is this: Whatever reasons he may have had for flubbing this story, it shouldn’t be considered trivial. Lest he start blathering on about his stint with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, it’s time to start asking some questions when he gets these details so wrong.

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