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Biden Op-ed Likening Russia to Hamas is Result of His Dementia — Scott Ritter

© BRENDAN SMIALOWSKIUS President Joe Biden at the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 25, 2023.
US President Joe Biden at the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 25, 2023. - Sputnik International, 1920, 21.11.2023
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US politicians have been quick to make glib comparisons between Russia's de-Nazification operation in Ukraine and Hitler's invasion of Europe or terrorist outrages. Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, said Joe Biden couldn't even string such an argument together.
US President Joe Biden lacks the mental ability to draw parallels between Russia and Hamas, says a former US Marine.
The Washington Post ran an op-ed under Biden's byline at the weekend, likening the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas' breakout from the besieged Gaza Strip on October 7 to Russia's military operation in Ukraine in defence of the Russian-speaking Donbass region — following eight years of Ukrainian shelling of civilians.
Biden "didn't write this" as he "doesn't have the mental capacity," Ritter told Sputnik.
"I'm not picking on him, I'm just being honest," he said. "This was written by his national security staff. It was edited by Jake Sullivan. I believe [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken came in with a lot of stuff that this was a collaborative effort by the people who are managing Joe Biden."

"This is the story, not the content of the op-ed," Ritter stressed. "The story is that Joe Biden, the president of the United States is lacking in such mental capacity that the presidency is being managed by people who weren't elected to do that job. That's what people should be worried about."

But he said the words attributed to Biden no longer carry the same weight as comments by previous presidents, thanks to the proliferation of alternatives to the mainstream media.
"So when Joe Biden or his managers publish an op-ed of this nature, it no longer has the same cachet, the same impact that it would have ten years ago," Ritter argued. "Today, it's immediately cancelled out as ridiculous as absurd."
Ritter wrote for Consortium News last week that Biden and Blinken were being disingenuous in their call for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, given that no Israeli leader in decades has been serious about implementing it.
"Even if such a governing coalition could be crafted together to politically sustain the idea of a two-state solution that fails to resonate with Israelis and Palestinians alike, there remains the ultimate hurdle that needs to be cleared before any notion of a lasting peace between Israeli and Palestinian states premised on the notion of equality — Israel’s nuclear weapons program," Ritter wrote.
The former weapons inspector said Israel's nuclear program had been "shrouded in ambiguity from the moment it was born, back in the 1960s when they actually produced a weapon."
"The United States has been the principal reason why this has happened," Ritter pointed out. "The Nixon administration was confronted with the fact that Israel had nuclear weapons. We knew it. And they were in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, because even if they didn't sign the treaty, we signed the treaty. And the treaty only allows five declared nuclear powers. So we would have to sanction Israel."
US President Joe Biden speaking on November 16, 2023. - Sputnik International, 1920, 21.11.2023
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Expert Slams Biden's Hypocrisy on Gaza & Ukraine
He underscored the aggressive nature of Israel's military doctrine known as the "Samson option" after the biblical hero who collapsed the temple of the Philistines, killing them and himself. That doctrine mandates first use of nuclear weapons against neighboring Middle Eastern states if Israel faces military defeat and a return to Palestinian majority rule.

"That's Israel's nuclear policy, that if Israel goes, everybody goes," Ritter explained. "And we went along with it because we believed that we could secure Israel enough so they would never have to use this weapon."

But Biden's ostensible resurrection of the two-state solution calls that doctrine into question, he said.
"A Palestinian state implies that Israel has normalized relations with their Palestinian neighbors and by extension, their regional neighbors.Therefore, there could be no justification for the continuation of this policy," Ritter said. "Moreover, Palestine could never be considered free and independent so long as it was living next door to a nuclear power, an undeclared nuclear power."
He argued that Israel would have to follow the example of its former ally, apartheid South Africa, which also had a secret nuclear weapons programme.
"South Africa built six nuclear weapons in the 1970s as a deterrent against black nationalist movements that were working with the Soviet Union. They built these as a deterrent, the white apartheid state's weapon of last resort," Ritter noted. "But when the de Klerk became president, he recognized the writing on the wall. Mandela was going to be released and the white apartheid state was going the way of the dinosaur. And these nuclear weapons could not, in his belief, fall in the hands of black nationalists."
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