Anti-Israel agitators swarmed Joe Biden's motorcade outside Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday, hurling an object that was blocked by an umbrella near the former president and screaming "Blood, blood, blood on your hands!" as he was rushed into a waiting vehicle, Fox News Politics reported.
Biden, 83, made a surprise appearance at the Dublin campus, where his son, Hunter Biden, accepted the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse, according to The Independent. As Biden exited the building, someone in the crowd threw an object toward him; it was deflected by an umbrella near the former president. Irish police arrested two people at the scene.
Video posted online shows law enforcement officers detaining demonstrators while the crowd chants at them. Biden was escorted into his vehicle and the motorcade drove away quickly. The agitators then turned their heckling on the officers who remained.
The scene is a switch from the reception Biden's team likely expected: a prestigious academic honor for Hunter Biden, a former president on hand, and a campus crowd. Instead, the visit ended with an object in the air and two arrests.
The protesters' slogan — "Blood on your hands" — tracks with the criticism Biden faced throughout his presidency from progressive Democrats, human rights advocates, and anti-Israel activists over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war and his administration's continued military assistance to Israel. Critics dubbed him "Genocide Joe" and argued U.S. defense funding enabled Israeli forces to kill and displace civilians in Gaza.
Military experts have noted that Israel took unprecedented measures to minimize civilian casualties while targeting Hamas terrorists embedded in urban areas — a point the protesters in Dublin showed no interest in engaging as they threw objects at an American motorcade.
The Dublin incident is the latest example of anti-Israel demonstrators taking their message directly to American officials abroad. Two people arrested, one object thrown, and a former president sped away under police escort.
Our Take
Here's what the legacy media will call this: a "protest.
Biden spent his presidency trying to split the difference between his party's radical base and the reality of Israel's war against Hamas. Tuesday showed what that bought him: two arrests, an object thrown at his motorcade, and a crowd chanting at the police who protected him. The same activists who tormented American campuses last year have exported their tactics overseas.
Our police and Secret Service protect these events so that public figures — even ones we criticize — can appear without being pelted with objects. That standard is under attack, and not from the right.
So here's a question for the Democrats who spent years calling half the country a threat to democracy: when a mob throws something at your own former president in a foreign capital, do you still call it "mostly peaceful"?
