NEW YORK — Here is one more reason voters should defeat Joe Biden at the polls today: He is soft on terrorism:

Biden, often in cahoots with Obama, pulled his punches, opposed anti-terror efforts, and even stuffed terrorists’ pockets full of cash.

Most conspicuous is Biden’s hypocrisy regarding Obama’s finest hour: the liquidation of al-Qaeda founder, Osama bin Laden.

“GM is alive, and Bin Laden is dead,” Biden bragged on the campaign trail as he and Obama sought re-election in 2012, largely on the success of that secret mission in May 2011.

But Biden was a flashing red light on the night of the raid that wiped out this butcher in Pakistan.

Biden told a 2012 Democrat retreat that Obama asked his advisors whether or not to proceed. Most offered inconclusive responses. “On the one hand/on the other hand,” Obama heard.

Biden was more assertive. As he told the Democrat pow-wow:

“(When he) got to me, he said, ‘Joe, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table.’ I said, ‘We owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.'”

Those “two more things” remain a mystery.

Biden later changed his story, and claims that he told Obama privately to trust his instincts.

But former defense secretary Robert Gates’ 2014 memoir, Duty, bolsters the story that Biden told Democrat two years earlier.

“Joe Biden and I were the two primary skeptics,” Gates wrote. “Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure.”

So, former secretary Gates, an astonishingly non-partisan figure, and Biden’s original story both contradict Biden’s latter-day assertion that he counseled President Obama in 2011 to heed his inner Obama when deciding what to do about bin Laden. Gates and Biden’s original story also portray the former vice president as hesitant, if not hostile, to the operation that placed a bullet between bin Laden’s eyes.

Two days after this mission, Biden blabbed about it on air and publically identified the specific military unit that executed it. The parents of several members of that detachment recall their sons contacting them with paramount urgency.

Karen Vaughn told Catherine Herridge, then with Fox News Channel, “Aaron called me and said, ‘Mom, you need to wipe your social media clean of any reference to me or any of my buddies,’ and he actually said to me, ‘Mom there’s chatter, and all of our lives could be in danger including yours.’”

Petty officer Aaron Vaughn was a member of the anti-bin Laden unit. He later was killed, along with 16 other special-forces members, when their helicopter was shot down. The Vaughns and other Gold Star families blame Biden’s loose-lipped victory lap for their sons’ violent deaths, presumably in a fiery act of revenge by terrorists who saw the bullseye that Biden witlessly placed on their backs.

“We expect better out of the high-ups in our government,” said Billy Vaughn, Aaron’s grieving father. “I believe what the administration did then — I believe it was criminal.”

Biden and Obama both allowed ISIS to grow from an idea into an organization. Ultimately, it expanded to the size of two New Jerseys, as Obama-Biden’s rules of engagement hindered U.S.-led forces and left ISIS free to resurrect crucifixion (for real) and hurl gay men fatally off of tall buildings, just because they believed Allah told them to.

It took President Donald J. Trump to unshackle U.S. forces, which then turned the evil caliphate from an organization back into an idea — with zero acreage to its name.

Obama-Biden also embarked upon the notorious Iran-nuclear deal. This pact, which made Neville Chamberlain look like George S. Patton, included America’s unfreezing $150 billion in Iranian financial assets and air-freighting some $400 million in freshly printed Swiss francs. These funds were released and delivered, respectively, despite then-secretary of state John Kerry’s admission to CNBC: “I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.” IRGC refers to Iran’s radical Revolutionary Guards.

In a bold operation, President Trump atomized IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani, arguably Earth’s most notorious terrorist. Obama-Biden could have killed him years ago. However, according to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, the former administration warned the Iranian terror master to watch his back, as Israeli agents closed in. This reported heads-up came about when the Iran-nuclear deal was in place.

Haaretz cited Kuwait’s al-Jarida, and explained that it’s “assumed in the Arab world that the paper is used as an Israeli platform for conveying messages to other countries in the Middle East.”

As Haaretz’s January 1, 2018 dispatch continued:

The report says Israel was “on the verge” of assassinating Soleimani three years ago, near Damascus, but the United States warned the Iranian leadership of the plan, revealing that Israel was closely tracking the Iranian general.

The incident, the report said, “sparked a sharp disagreement between the Israeli and American security and intelligence apparatuses regarding the issue.”

Joe Biden is naïve, soft-headed, and dead wrong on terrorism. Voters should strike a blow for national security today and keep him in his basement for four more years.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.