In May and June, groups of congressmen and senators wrote letters to the FBI urging it to investigate the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in a gunfight between the IDF and a group of Palestinian terrorists. These legislators did not withdraw their requests when, on July 4, the State Department announced that its own investigation concluded that Abu Akleh’s death was accidental. Matthew Continetti comments:
It’s worth pausing to reflect on the cynical and nakedly political nature of this congressional correspondence. Since the 1980s, Congress has authorized the FBI to investigate the deaths of Americans overseas at the hands of terrorists and other transnational bad guys—not war correspondents caught up in a battle between a military partner and unlawful combatants. Out of a slippery combination of malice and ignorance, these congressmen were asking the U.S. government to treat Israeli soldiers as international terrorists, all while knowing that Israel would never cooperate in such a farce and that the only real consequence of such an investigation would be a rupture in the alliance between our two countries. No wonder Congress has such low approval ratings.
At the time of writing, no one knows the details of the FBI inquiry, or the identity of the official who authorized it, or how long it will go on before the U.S. government realizes its ineffectuality. What is known is that the anti-Israel gang successfully bullied an agency of the United States government into taking the extraordinary step of treating the military of the Jewish state as a criminal enterprise, with no consideration of the potential fallout in the greater Middle East or the precedent that might be set for U.S. soldiers in future actions.
Tyrannical governments in China, Iran, Venezuela, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip murder, unjustly imprison, and violate the dignity and human rights of individuals every day, yet the Biden administration sees fit to crack down on Israel.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/matthew-continetti/fbi-israel-shireen-abu-akleh/