Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Book on Israel and the Biden Administration

Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the senior diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun. He’s just written a book about how the Biden administration treated Israel, especially about those who wanted to deal harshly with the embattled Jewish state. Ahmed’s book, according to the reviewer Eli Lake, contains every “exaggeration and falsehood” to blacken Israel’s image. The devastating book report from Eli Lake can be found here: “We’re Still Drowning in Myths About the Gaza War,” by Eli Lake, The Free Press, October 6, 2026:

In the weeks following the October 7, 2023 pogrom, President Joe Biden was in full solidarity with the target, Israel. He surged arms shipments and rallied the world against Hamas, the authors of that heinous crime. Among the lower ranks of Biden’s administration, though, an insurrection was brewing. Like the demonstrators on college campuses in the fall of 2023, the anonymous aides, assistants, and bureaucrats inside the federal government wanted the president to restrain the victims of the attack in their defensive war.

In the final year of the Biden presidency, the crowd that wanted Israel cut off from American weapons was largely stymied by the president and his senior staff. Now with the Democrats out of power, the dissidents of 2023 and 2024 are taking their revenge. And their tale is told in the new book Crossing the Red Line, by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun.

Ahmed’s book is not an objective assessment or fair history of the Biden administration’s policy debates. It is rather a prosecutor’s brief against the senior foreign policy officials the American left wants to purge from the Democratic Party. Ahmed does not call Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide,” but his sources clearly believe it was. And for the crime of enabling that genocide, the book blames former secretary of state Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and former Middle East and North Africa coordinator Brett McGurk.

One anonymous former senior official vents: “I don’t know if I’ll ever know if Brett and Tony and Jake were directed by the president to follow his instinct to be deferential toward Israel, and did it for that reason, or believed it themselves, or they spun it to the president. None of the three are good.” Another one tells Ahmed that White House spokesman John Kirby “almost seemed like a Trump spokesperson who’s performing for the boss.” Deputy national security adviser Jon Finer is said by a nameless official to have questioned the partisan loyalties of Democratic critics of U.S. policy toward the Gaza war. And on it goes….

Despite his errors and bias, Ahmed’s book is useful in one respect. It unintentionally exposes a deep rot within the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy. We learn, for example, that a senior official in the State Department’s human rights bureau, Christopher Le Mon, discouraged his colleagues from attending a film composed of footage captured on October 7 (much of it from Hamas GoPro cameras) sponsored by the Israeli embassy in Washington. Le Mon viewed the screening “as likely risking trauma among staff, which State was unprepared to handle, and offering no policy benefit to experts steeped in details of violence in the region.”

Christopher Le Mon tried to prevent his colleagues in the State Department from seeing the videos taken of the atrocities that Hamas carried out on October 7 — they might prove too disturbing, he thought, too likely to increase sympathy for Israel, and for Le Mon, that would never do. That revelation makes one hope that Marco Rubio has fired Le Mon, or will do so shortly.

Ahmed’s book is useful in several ways. Those whom he praises — Chrisopher Le Mon and Josh Paul (who has joined Tariq Habash in a non-profit called A New Policy, which aims to undermine support for Israel on “human rights” grounds) — for their hostility to Israel, have been identified. Those who are still in office can now be sidelined, shifted to a position where they can do little harm, or better still, discharged. And let us praise, instead, Blinken, Sullivan, and especially Brett McGurk, for not abandoning, but sticking by the embattled Jewish state.