In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln famously appealed to the “better angels of our nature” as the country descended into civil war. Lincoln’s words expressed a last hope. In the end, it took four bitter years of conflict to create, at Appomattox, the silence in which our better angels could finally be heard. Still, President Lincoln never stopped listening, even in the darkest moments of the conflict, to his own better angels. When it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism, either Joe Biden’s better angels are silent, or he is too deaf to hear them.
