In remarks delivered during a menorah lighting ceremony in the East Room of the White House, President Joe Biden appeared to make a demonstrably false claim about his participation in an Israeli war.
“I have known every [Israeli] prime minister well since Golda Meir,” said Biden, “and during the Six-Day War . . . she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez.”
Biden may have been confusing the 1967 Six-Day War with the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
As Brendan Cole explains at Newsweek, however, Biden was 25-years-old during the Six-Day War and “was in his second year of law school at Syracuse University.”
By the time of the second conflict, he already had been elected to the US Senate, making his invitation more plausible.
“Biden was apparently recalling his 1973 meeting with Meir when he made his first trip to Israel as a 30-year-old senator from Delaware,” Cole continued, but even that meeting “took place 40 days before the Yom Kippur War broke out on October 6.”
He’s lying and wrong on the history
Meir wasn’t PM during the Six Day War of ’67.
She became PM in ’69 and led Israel through the Yom Kippur War of ’73.
Biden was in law school in ’67 and a Sen. for only 9 months during the Yom Kippur War. No way she asked him for anything. https://t.co/iZWBzuz8nc
— John – Defund the CIA and FBI – Cardillo (@johncardillo) December 2, 2021
Mark Hemingway, Senior Writer at RealClearInvestigations, also pointed out the error: “During the Six Day War, Biden was a 25 year-old in his second year of law school, where he’d already plagiarized a law review article.”
During the Six Day War, Biden was a 25 year-old in his second year of law school, where he’d already plagiarized a law review article. https://t.co/b7HNqhcYZf
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) December 2, 2021
It is a gaffe reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 claim that she remembered “landing under sniper fire” on a trip to Bosnia in 1996, an imaginative recreation that earned Clinton a “Pants on Fire!” rating from PolitiFact.
While some might chalk up Biden’s confusion to his recent mental deterioration, the pattern of historical revisionism has plagued him throughout his career.
He falsely claimed during his early presidential campaigns to have marched in the civil rights movement, and continues to make the false statement even though it has been debunked.
He also has repeatedly lied about the 2017 clashes in Charlottesville, Va., among other recent historic events.
While on the campaign trail in 2019, he was confronted over having made up a phony war story but shrugged it off, claiming to have gotten the essential details of it correct.
“[H]ere’s the deal: Any gaffe that I have made—and I’ve made gaffes like every politician I know has—have been not about a substantive issue,” Biden told Stephen Colbert.
“… I don’t get wrong things like, you know, there is, uh, we should lock kids up in cages at the border,” he continued. “… The devil lives in the details if the details that you’re talking about would affect the outcome of something that is about to happen or should happen.”
