'You Can’t Be Pro-Insurrection And Pro-American,' Says President Of Nation Founded By An Insurrection - The Babylon Bee - Jul 27, 2022
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The president shot back at what he called "Super Duper Ultra MAGA Turbo Titans" Monday as he claimed "you can't be pro-insurrection and pro-American" despite being the commander in chief of a nation founded by an insurrection.
"Can you imagine Thomas Jefferson calling for the blood of tyrants? What if John Adams refused to pledge fealty to King George? England would've nuked us to oblivion. It would've been total malarkey anarchy!" said the unblinking Biden, unflinching in the face of a citizenry increasingly questioning whether he is fit to be president.
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The copycat:
President Biden @POTUS - 0:14 UTC · Jan 6, 2024
You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-America.
Posted by b on January 6, 2024 at 8:01 UTC | Permalink
There’s something about the job of US secretary of state that appears to require a significant level of sociopathy.
Caitlin Johnstone
January 8, 2024
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just referred to the US-sponsored assassination of yet another journalist in Gaza as a “terrible tragedy”, as though the reporter was struck by lightning or died in a car crash or something.
Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Sunday, Blinken was asked to comment on the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, who was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on a car has was traveling in with two other journalists, one of whom also died. Hamza Dahdouh was the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, son, daughter and baby grandson were murdered in another Israeli airstrike in late October.
In response to an Al Jazeera reporter’s question about whether the United States condemns the murder of innocent journalists, Blinken replied as follows:
“I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague Wael al-Dahdouh. I am a parent myself. I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he’s experienced, not once, but now twice. This is an unimaginable tragedy, and that’s also been the case for, as I said, far too many innocent Palestinian men, women, and children — civilians, also journalists, Palestinian and other.”
Blinken went on to acknowledge the scores of journalists who have been killed in Gaza, saying that this shows the need to get humanitarian aid into the enclave and achieve a lasting peace. What Blinken did not do is issue anything resembling a condemnation of Israel and the clear and demonstrable fact that it has been highly focused on the task of murdering journalists in Gaza. He just offered his deepest condolences for Dahdouh’s death, framed it as a passive “tragedy” instead of an active assassination using highly sophisticated military technology under the sponsorship and support of the United States, and moved on.
It’s hard to say who’s worse, the far-right Israelis who openly revel in the butchery they are inflicting in Gaza, or the liberal Americans who directly sponsor that butchery and then look you dead in the eye and tell you how deeply, sincerely sorry they are to hear that another person in Gaza has died in a tragic accident.
Blinken is always doing sociopathic stuff like this. Late last month he tweeted, “This has been an extraordinarily dangerous year for press around the world. Many killed, many more wounded, hundreds detained, attacked, threatened, injured — simply for doing their jobs. I am profoundly grateful to the press for getting accurate, timely information to people.”
I mean, can you believe the gall of this freak? As though his own administration wasn’t responsible for most of those killings. As though Israel has not spent the last three months directing wildly disproportionate firepower at the places it knows journalists are hiding.
He’s standing there on top of a pile of corpses while mournfully shaking his head about their tragic unfortunate deaths.
There’s something about the job of US secretary of state that appears to require a significant level of sociopathy. From war criminal Henry Kissinger to Madeleine “We think the price was worth it” Albright to Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo, the absolute worst person in any given presidential administration is very often the head of the State Department. A severe personality disorder is practically in the job description.
This is because while the secretary of state is officially the head of US diplomacy, “diplomacy” for the US empire looks a whole lot different from what it looks like for normal countries. US “diplomacy”, in practice, typically looks like going from country to country negotiating for international alignment behind wars, starvation sanctions, proxy conflicts and western-backed uprisings. In theory the State Department should be the department of peace, but in practice it’s just a subtler, sneakier military department.
Nothing epitomizes the depraved manipulations of the US empire better than Antony Blinken. There is no better representation of that empire than Tony standing there on his mountain of corpses, covered in blood, telling you how sorry he is to learn of the unfortunate accidental deaths of the people he just murdered, staring at you with his cold dead eyes, playing remarkably soulless blues guitar under the light of a bright red moon.
Gavin Newsom: Zionist in Waiting
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 10 Jan 2024
Gavin Newsom & Isaac Herzog
The Democrats' rising star Gavin Newsom offers more of the same: Zionism and militarism.
Those who want to cast a vote against Israel's war on Gaza in next year's presidential election have no choices except Dr. Jill Stein and Dr. Cornel West . Biden is 1000% behind Israel, as are Trump and all his Republican competitors, and independent RFK Jr. may be the worst pro-Zionist contender among them. Biden’s seeming heir apparent, California Governor Gavin Newsom, had the colors of the Israeli flag projected on the state capitol building on October 9, then flew off to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog and grandstand about how personal Israeli anguish had become to him after meeting with survivors of the October 7 Hamas attack. His official statement said nothing about Gaza or Palestine.
In late November, Newsom chastised the Oakland City Council for passing a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza without condemning Hamas.
Several years back, when the California Department of Education (CDE) released a draft curriculum for high school ethnic studies classes in 2019, it mentioned BDS and activists like Linda Sarsour. Jewish groups then accused the CDE and the governor of anti-Semitism, after which Newsom assured Jewish News of Northern California that the draft “will never see the light of day” and called it “offensive in so many ways.” In the rewrite, there was no exploration of Palestine to be found.
Newsom’s rising star
With Biden’s health and faculties constantly in question, prominent op-eds demanding he step down, and a “Don’t Run, Joe” campaign buying television ads, Governor Newsom’s star is shining as brightly as the blue and white he had projected on the state capitol tower. He even took it upon himself to debate Florida Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis on Fox News. With his good looks, smooth demeanor, and liberal Dem credentials, he’s all but sure to compete for the crown whether in 2024 or 2028. His term as California governor will end in 2027, just in time for him to launch a 2028 campaign.
Newsom’s Zionism goes way back
In March 2008, when he was the mayor of San Francisco, the Jewish Community Federation arranged Newsom’s all-expense paid junket to Israel to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its founding. While there he promised to “continue the narrative for another 600 years.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the mayor’s trip , and to its credit, also ran a guest column by Palestinian refugee Ramiz Rafeedie , who pointed out that 2008 was also the 60th anniversary of al-Nakba, when two out of three Palestinians, nearly 700,000 people, were forced to flee their homes.
The goal of Newsom’s trip was to create connections between Bay Area and Israeli business leaders, and many executives, including Richard Blum, the late husband of the late US Senator Dianne Feinstein, went along.
As governor, Newsom has been even better suited to encourage collaboration between US and Israeli corporations like those promoted by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce. These include those with Lockheed Martin , the US military’s largest defense contractor, as described on the company’s “Lockheed Martin in Israel ” website:
In November 2004, Lockheed Martin completed its undertaking for industrial collaboration with Israeli companies and for offset acquisitions in Israel as part of the Peace Marble V program. Originally planned to deliver over the course of 12 years, the resulting work - at a volume of $1.45 billion - was delivered in less than five. Approximately 40 Israeli companies, mainly in defense, technology, venture capital and research and development, were positively impacted by this collaboration.
A decade later, as part of the F-35 program Lockheed Martin signed Industrial Participation agreements with additional Israeli defense companies. In early November 2014, a new production line for F-35 wing boxes was inaugurated at Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI). As part of the contract [with] Lockheed Martin, IAI will manufacture over 800 pairs of wing skins over the course of 15 years, at a total financial volume of approximately $2.5 billion. In addition, several agreements of industrial participation are already being conducted with additional Israeli companies, including Elbit Systems, Cyclone, Tadiran and others. The collaboration between Lockheed Martin and Israeli industries is expected to exceed $4 billion. According to the Ministry of Defense, by the end of 2016, US $933 million worth of agreements were signed.
Like most defense contractors, Lockheed Martin is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, but Lockheed Martin Aeronautics manufactures in Marietta, Georgia and Palmdale, California.
Zionist Militarist
“Zionist militarist” may seem like a redundant term, but Newsom’s militarism apart from his commitment to Israel is worth noting. In 2007, when I was living in San Francisco and Gavin Newsom was mayor, there was an ill-fated activist rebellion against the Blue Angels Air Show which comes to town every year with Fleet Week. San Francisco, like any other city in the US, can decide not to host Fleet Week or the Blue Angels—or the Air Force Thunderbirds, but despite multiple activist campaigns, none have ever martialled the will.
The Navy’s Blue Angels website says that a city must actually “request” an air show every year but without specifying a process, so I called then Senator Barbara Boxer to ask who’d requested that year’s air show, and within five minutes received a return call to say that Mayor Newsom had. I then submitted an FOIA to the mayor’s office requesting a copy of the request and was instead sent copies of Newsom’s correspondence with then Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter. Newsom said nothing about a request, so that had apparently been assumed, but he did reassure the secretary that he would “take care of Chris Daly,” the left-leaning supervisor who had agreed to bring the issue to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (the equivalent of a city council since San Francisco is both a city and a county.)
In 2005, during the Iraq War, the Board passed a resolution to fly the flag over City Hall at half-mast on a Saturday to commemorate all the Iraq War dead, including Iraqis, but Mayor Newsom overruled them , ordering that it not be lowered.
Last year, on 9/11/2023, he issued a proclamation that 9/11 would from then on be Patriot Day in California, with flags flown at half-mast for all those who died on 9/11 and the 7000 US soldiers who have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader War on Terror. He didn’t mention the other losses tallied by Brown University’s Costs of War Project —the $8 trillion cost, the 900,000 dead by bombs, bullets, or fire, the millions more killed by disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water, or the tens of millions of refugees.
Biden has turned out to be everything we were warned Trump would be: a genocidal monster fueling racist violence and crimes against humanity while imperiling the world with insanely reckless foreign policy decisions.
Caitlin Johnstone
January 11, 2024
In an article titled “Joe Biden Risks A Major Middle East War If He Makes The Wrong Choices,” The Huffington Post cites anonymous US officials who fear the careless and chaotic behavior of their commander-in-chief is going to embroil the US in a hot war between Israel and Lebanon.
HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed writes the following:
“American officials say the Biden administration is not doing all it can to reduce tensions, despite public commitments from senior officials to avoid a regional blow-up.
“ ‘I’ve been trying to keep an avalanche from falling on Lebanon and so have a lot of people,’ one official told HuffPost, saying many national security personnel fear unchecked U.S. support for Israel will make it overly confident about expanding operations into Lebanon. ‘The problem is no one can rein in Biden, and if Biden has a policy, he’s the commander-in-chief ― we have to carry it out. That’s what it comes down to, very, very, very unfortunately.’ ”
Listening to the way people on the inside have been talking about Biden’s bull-in-a-China-shop behavior regarding middle east policy lately, one can’t help being reminded of the way the liberal press used to talk about the erratic and irresponsible behavior of Donald Trump when he was in office. The mood and tone feels like when Trump was exchanging verbal hostilities with North Korea in the first year of his term, which comedian John Mulaney famously likened to the disorder and discomfort of having a horse loose in the hospital.
We’re all just standing here praying that this lunatic doesn’t ignite yet another horrific war in the middle east while watching him unapologetically sponsor a genocide in Gaza, and we’re still a ways off from emerging safely from the world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship his administration dragged everyone into with Russia in Ukraine. And it’s hard not to notice that this all sure looks an awful lot like what liberals were terrified would happen when Trump got into office.
The lead-up to Trump winning the 2016 election and taking office was rife with some of the most vitriolic and emotionally intense rhetoric in the history of American politics, featuring frequent fears that Trump would start a nuclear war, that minorities would be fleeing in terror from violent persecution, that he’d be another Hitler and launch another holocaust, that he’d facilitate ethnic persecution and racist attacks.
In the end Trump turned out to be a fairly standard evil Republican president. He sanctioned Venezuelans into starvation, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from the US-backed atrocities of Saudi Arabia, assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, imprisoned Julian Assange, and, despite the incredibly virulent mass delusion that he was a secret agent of Moscow, spent his entire term ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia with extreme aggression.
All of which were monstrous. But none of those crimes rise to the level of single-handedly facilitating a genocide in Gaza or taking the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis with his peace-killing efforts in Ukraine.
Biden has turned out to be everything we were warned Trump would be: a genocidal monster fueling racist violence and crimes against humanity while imperiling the world with insanely reckless foreign policy decisions.
None of this is to suggest that Trump would have handled Gaza any differently than Biden, or even that he’d have handled Ukraine any differently. It’s likely that the main reason Biden’s administration has been more warlike than Trump’s is by sheer timing and coincidence; the US empire tends to trudge onward in more or less the same direction regardless of who’s in office, with wars occurring not because of who happens to be president in any given instance but because of whatever the empire’s needs happen to be at that time.
The lesson of Joe Biden’s depravity is not that it would be better to have Donald Trump in the White House, it’s that it doesn’t matter which one gets in, because only murderous monsters are allowed to play that role in the management of the US-centralized empire. The globe-spanning power structure which loosely revolves around Washington is held together by nonstop violence and abuse, and nobody who isn’t willing to inflict copious amounts of violence and abuse on human beings around the world will ever make it past the gatekeeping measures that have been placed between that office and the illusion of democracy that the American people have been deceived into believing is real.
The atrocities will continue for as long as that empire exists. Humanity won’t ever have a chance at a healthy and peaceful world until that world is freed from the tyranny of a planet-dominating power structure that is fueled by human blood.
Trump is an ignorant racist solipsistic beast who follows set imperial policy reluctantly and chaotically. Biden is a cynical senile monster who plays the imperial tune as directed. I will be very surprised if the powers that be allow that loose cannon into their shop again. Should it look like he will be re-elected(should he get that far...) he will be derailed like that phony Al Gore was in 2000, perhaps more dramatically. If not Trump the "choice" presented by the ruling class will be the more efficient evil in the pointy high heels('good for kicking union organizers out of South Carolina'), Little Nikki.
We are so fucked until we organize.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
400,000 marched in Washington DC against Biden’s complicity in Israel’s genocide
Hundreds of thousands marched in Washington, DC to demand an immediate ceasefire and protest Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza
January 15, 2024 by Natalia Marques
Hundreds of thousands marched in Washington DC to protest Israel's genocidal war on Gaza. Photo: Adrian Antonioli / ANSWER Coalition
On January 13, a crowd of 400,000 gathered in Washington, DC’s Freedom Plaza to take the Palestine solidarity movement straight to Biden’s doorstep. Hundreds of thousands then marched, holding Palestinian, Yemeni, South African, and Puerto Rican flags, through DC and straight to the gates of the White House.
The mobilization was organized by the American Muslim Task Force on Palestine, which includes American Muslims for Palestine, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim American Society, Muslim Student Association-National, Muslim Legal Fund of America, Muslim Ummah of North America, and Young Muslims, and the ANSWER Coalition.
Frustrated with Biden’s support and bankrolling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, protesters surrounded the President’s residence and chanted “Hands off Yemen!” and “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn this invasion around!” in reference to the US-UK bombing campaign against Yemen in response to the country’s blockade of Israel-bound ships. Protesters also left bloody baby dolls at the gates of the White House to condemn the genocide in Gaza and the over 10,000 children that have been killed to date. As the crowd demonstrated, several snipers were seen on the roof of the White House.
The hundreds of thousands who showed up in DC were joined by millions across the world who participated in a global day of action in solidarity with Palestine to mark nearly 100 days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Rallies, strikes, and mass mobilizations were held in major cities of South Africa, Japan, Turkey, the UK, South Korea, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Ivory Coast, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Austria, Australia, Finland, as well as throughout the United States. Thousands shut down the Port of Oakland in California at 5 am on Saturday morning.
Before marching, the crowd of hundreds of thousands in Freedom Plaza heard from a diverse array of speakers from the US Muslim community and anti-imperialist organizations. “So long as the genocide in Gaza is being funded by this administration,” said Ismahan Abdullahi of the Muslim American Society, “we will not relent in our efforts to demand justice and the liberation of the Palestinian people.”
“Just as South Africa courageously rose to rightfully charge Israel with genocide, we the people of the United States of America will rise and continue these efforts,” she continued.
“You Genocide Joe, you Blinken the butcher, and your Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. You will be haunted by the screams of the children in Gaza,” said Taher Herzallah of American Muslims for Palestine, who, like many other speakers, placed the blame for the ongoing Gaza genocide directly onto the United States government. “You will be haunted by the prayers, the agonizing prayers of the elderly and the women of Gaza. And we, this new generation, will be the answer to their prayers.”
Protesters demanded an end to all US funding of Israel. Photo: Wyatt Souers / ANSWER Coalition
2024 is an election year, and Biden, who is running for reelection, has been hounded by Pro-Palestine demonstrators at several campaign events already. Mainstream media outlets openly worry about Biden’s chances in 2024, with the aging President losing key demographics of Democratic Party support such as young people and Arab-Americans.
“Instead of focusing on the American people, our tax money is being used to spread hatred, to spread warfare, to support criminal activity, frankly speaking, to support a genocide,” Mohamed Sabri, who traveled from Chicago to attend the march in DC, told Peoples Dispatch about why he will not be voting for Biden.
As a result of Biden’s unpopularity, third party candidates running for president in 2024 have gained new prominence. Both Jill Stein and Cornel West, running platforms to the left of the ruling Democratic Party, spoke at the March for Gaza.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to presidential and vice presidential candidates Claudia De La Cruz and Karina Garcia, who were on the ground, marching among the crowd of hundreds of thousands, and are running jointly on an explicitly socialist platform. “We know it’s significantly important for any presidential candidate running for the 2024 election to prioritize the freedom, liberation of Palestine. Anyone who does not do that is standing in support of genocide,” said De La Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
“Democratic politicians, they like to pay a lot of lip service during the year, especially around domestic issues, and they never want to talk about imperialism, which is at the center, it’s the core of all of the problems faced by the entire world,” added Garcia.
The PSL presidential ticket of Claudia de la Cruz and Karina Garcia participating in the March for Gaza in Washington DC. Photo: Craig Birchfield / ANSWER Coalition
Chris Hedges: Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse
January 22, 2024
Joe Biden relies on advisors who believe in the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.
Blood Brothers — Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements.
They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will.
They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.
In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.
Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s.
He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions.
He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole.
He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.
“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C.
During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”
The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s.
He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”
While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran.
He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul.
He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.
As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.”
He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack.
He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza.
Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing.
The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N.
A man carrying the body of a Palestinian child killed during the Israeli shelling of Gaza on Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.
And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate.
“The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq.
When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.
“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.
When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state, but also as a Jew.”
He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.
Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.
Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.
While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.
In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”
Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:
“At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.”
Brett McGurk in 2017. (Munich Security Conference/Wikipedia)
McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.
He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009.
In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.
An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:
“A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. ‘He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.’ One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. ‘It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.’
[….]
A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. ‘Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?’
Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.
[….]
McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.
Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the ’80 Percent Solution’ for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population.
The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.”
In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”
McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it.
McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed.
Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan aboard Air Force One with President Joe Biden on March 13, 2023, en route to North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego, California. (White House/ Adam Schultz)
They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the Biden White House by Netanyahu.
The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought.
It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported.
It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah.
These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.
The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends, a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability, is stupefying.
Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.
The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up.
Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state.
Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.
Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.
That ain't no lesser evil, and neither is Trump. They're all evil, what can we expect from the ruling class but evil? Sure, not each and every one is unmitigated evil, but the scum will rise to the top...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
A decisive American president can do anything he wants, whether or not a powerful lobby opposes him
PATRICK THEROS
JAN 12, 2024
After his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, Bill Clinton vented his fury before his staff about his visitor’s apparent presumptions about the balance of power in the bilateral relationship. “Who the f**k does he think he is?,” Clinton reportedly bellowed. “Who’s the f**king superpower here?” Twenty-seven years later, another American president should be asking himself the same question about the very same Bibi Netanyahu and the country he leads.
Forgive me for not taking seriously the repetitio ad nauseam statement that "the Biden administration has been working hard to change Israeli policy." Too many defenders of our policy towards the tragedy of Gaza usually add the comment that it is not "politically feasible" to issue a demand and then crack down on the Netanyahu government if it does not comply for fear of the backlash from the powerful so-called Israel lobby.
Are Biden’s apologists telling us that the United States, and by extension its president, is a powerless weakling reduced to begging the leader of a small country that owes the U.S. for its very existence to do far more to protect the lives and welfare of the inhabitants of Gaza, who have suffered three months of —in Biden’s own words — ‘indiscriminate bombing’? The situation in Gaza is now so bad that the UN’s humanitarian chief declared the Gaza Strip “uninhabitable” as of last Saturday.
Biden is president of the United States, still the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and a country without whose support Israel has no future. A firm public demand to cease and desist immediately would have enormous domestic political repercussions in Israel — far less in the United States. Biden would not have to publicly threaten to cut off weapons deliveries; a few words delivered in private to Netanyahu and a few members of his war cabinet would probably suffice.
Most of Netanyahu's government would desert him. Even the most hawkish of the Israel Defense Forces’ leadership would not want to test an American president’s resolve. Netanyahu's refusal would accelerate the departure of secular Israelis from the country — alongside many Haredim, especially those who hold U.S. passports.
A decisive American president can do anything he wants, whether or not a powerful lobby opposes him. Eisenhower did it, forcing David Ben Gurion to withdraw from Sinai in 1956. Carter did it, in his “walk in the woods” at Camp David in 1978, forcing Menachem Begin to abandon Sinai settlements and agree to a peace treaty with Egypt. Reagan did it in June 1982, forcing Begin to order a ceasefire in Beirut. George H. W. Bush did it in 1991, withholding $10 billion in aid after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refused to stop settlement construction. Israel caved in each case. No one believes Netanyahu is made of the same stuff as Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin nor Yitzhak Shamir.
Biden seems not to understand that his stance supports Netanyahu’s political survival, not the long-term interests of Israel. Bibi does not care how much damage he does to Israel as long as he stays out of jail. He has sacrificed the Jewish homeland to his personal interests. He and his government have presided over a slaughter of innocent civilians unprecedented in any of Israel’s previous wars. Their rhetoric reinforces the view gaining currency across the globe that Israel has decided to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland; South Africa has brought a case of genocide before the International Court of Justice which is scheduled to take it up later this week.
Israel’s war against the Palestinians has reignited the perception among the vast majority of countries in the so-called Global South that the Palestinians are the new manifestation of the conflict against colonialism and imperialism. UN votes demanding a cease-fire have grown increasingly one-sided against Israel, further isolating the U.S. in the process. If Israel’s bloody campaign against Gaza does not end soon, the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab countries may survive in name only; popular revulsion against Israel in those countries will rob them of any value. Biden owes it to Israel, a country long dear to his heart, to stop Netanyahu’s recklessness and that of his nationalist-religious extremist allies.
Netanyahu has no plan for the post war. Instead, it appears that he has a plan to keep the war going as long as he can, possibly by attacking Lebanon (which Biden "firmly" opposes), not to mention depopulating Gaza by forcing its now-homeless inhabitants into Sinai or deporting them elsewhere (which Biden also “firmly” opposes). Left unchecked, Netanyahu’s intransigence will drag the United States into military actions we do not need; American hawks are now demanding we bomb the Houthis. Tomorrow, it might well be hostilities with Iran.
Biden’s continued, full-throated support for Netanyahu mystifies. His initial embrace of Israel and unconditional material and moral support were to be expected. It was an emotional reaction to the horrors of October 7. While Biden has earned a great deal of praise for his handling of the Ukraine war, Israel’s war in Gaza has shifted American attention from Ukraine. In effect, the American president has become bogged down dealing with a war marginal to American interests and diverting attention and resources from a conflict whose outcome is a vital interest to the United States. Biden’s policies have caused others to see America as either weak or complicit. He has allowed Netanyahu to get away with “flipping the finger” to the United States, a serious blow to the prestige of the superpower.
The Gaza war has also dealt a serious, if not mortal, blow to Biden's reelection. Given its large Arab-American population, Michigan is lost. Ohio, Minnesota, and Wisconsin also have significant Muslim and Arab populations. He is about to lose the Armenian vote unless someone cracks down on the hoodlums who have viciously attacked Armenian clergy in Jerusalem. As a politician rooted firmly in the 1990s — especially the 1992 Clinton-Bush face-off — Biden may fear the loss of Jewish support in the coming election.
That fear looks misplaced. A recent survey indicates that nearly half of young Jewish-Americans do not support his current policies towards Israel, while Christian Zionists, who form a significant part of the Republican base, are unlikely to vote for Biden in any event. One also wonders why Biden, if politics are indeed the driver of a misguided policy, would support a foreign politician who has demonstrated his hostility towards every Democratic president since 1993.
Biden has a very short window within which he can cut off Netanyahu before he can carry out his apparent war aim to depopulate Gaza and carry the conflict to Lebanon and possibly beyond — a conflict, in other words that could very well drag American forces into another endless Middle Eastern war. A quick and decisive decision, combined with real diplomacy to exploit the crisis and craft a workable solution to 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, would recover America's reputation.
Now is the time, in other words, for the superpower in this relationship to assert its own interests.
Patrick Theros served as the United States Ambassador to Qatar from 1995 to 1998.
Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds They Are
The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire.
Caitlin Johnstone
January 25, 2024
The entire western liberal worldview is currently balanced on the ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the mass atrocities in Gaza and what western governments are doing to perpetuate them.
Everything that mainstream liberals claim to oppose is on full display in Israel’s actions in Gaza. Racism. Fascism. Tyranny. Injustice. Genocide. Yet they must necessarily avoid throwing themselves into opposing these things there at all cost, because it would mean acknowledging that their own political allegiances are inseparably interwoven with them.
@zei_squirrel
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protesters: "Genocide Joe, how many kids in Gaza have to be killed?!"
Democrats in the background: "FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"
It would mean turning against Biden during an election year. It would mean admitting that their entire political posture against Trump all these years has been a phony performance, because they’re tacitly endorsing all the things they claimed to hate about him. It would mean admitting their entire worldview is a lie, and that all their critics to their left have been correct.
The western liberal is therefore in the year 2024 engaged in an exhausting regimen of nonstop mental gymnastics to avoid having an authentic relationship with the reality of what’s happening Gaza. They squirm this way and that, twisting their gaze toward empty nonsense like Barbie movie Oscar snubs and Trump’s latest instance of verbal diarrhea to avoid looking at what’s happening. On those odd occasions when they are forced to confront the reality of Gaza they start spouting gibberish about how “complicated” and “heartbreaking” it is and how they hope there can be peace as soon as possible, while frenetically avoiding saying precisely how that “peace” should be brought about.
Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.
The one faint glimmer of brightness in this profoundly dark chapter in human history is that it might start opening some eyes to the fraudulence of the mainstream fake-left political faction that has been marketed to the western public as an alternative to far right depravity. That westerners might start awakening to the reality that everything they’ve been trained to believe about politics, their government and their world is a lie. Such an awakening would be the first step toward a mass-scale movement into health.
Muslim and Arab-American Voters Show Black People How to Exercise Political Power
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 24 Jan 2024
Jaylani Hussein of CAIR Minnesota leads Abandon Biden protest (Image: Screenshot from WCCO)
Black voters feel trapped in the duopoly but other groups are giving a master class in political courage. The Abandon Biden campaign shows the way.
Face the Nation Host Margaret Brennan: Thasin, you did change your mind on the president. Why?
Thasin: I was a champion for Joe Biden until October 7. I feel he disowned us, disenfranchised us, with his stance on Gaza.
Brennan: What do you mean by that?
Thasin: He’s not listening to us. We’re asking for a cease fire at this time. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Too many lives have been lost at this time. I was never a single issue voter and in fact I used to argue with people not to be single issue voters but for me this is a deal breaker. Way too many lives have been lost.
Brennan: When you say “us” you’re Muslim, is that what you mean? You think the Muslim community here feels as you do?
Thasin: Yes. I think the vast majority of Muslims, Arab-Americans, progressives, I identify myself as a progressive, and many people I talk to in my circles are not going to be voting for Joe Biden.
- Michigan Voter Focus Group on CBS news program, Face the Nation
Historically, Black people in this country have allowed themselves to feel trapped by the racialized political duopoly. A feature of U.S. politics is to allow only two parties to play a decisive role in elections and for one of them to be designated as the white people’s party and the other as the Black party.
Beginning after the civil war and until the 1960s, the democrats were the party of the segregated south, and thus the party for white people generally. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, became the de facto preference for Black people despite their willingness to shove Black interests under the bus when they felt the need to placate white voters.
In 1872 Frederick Douglass spoke at the National Convention of the Colored People and famously spoke these words. “For colored men the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea.” Douglass and other Black people counseled continued support for the republicans, even when they made deals to withdraw federal troops from the south, or refused to codify the Civil Rights Act of 1875 into law after the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional.
Democrats were the party of the confederacy and thus could not be countenanced under any circumstance, even republican betrayals.
This dynamic played out for the next 100 years when the two teams made a switch which lasts until today. The last time a majority of white people supported a democrat in a presidential election was 1964. Ever since that time they have given a majority of their votes to republicans and Black people have done likewise with the democrats.
Unfortunately the role that Black political action played in forcing democrat Lyndon Johnson to advocate for and sign the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Right Act of 1964 into law have been forgotten. Black people won legislative victory through their own efforts in creating a mass movement and a political crisis that brought about change. This era has been fetishized, without any understanding of its real importance and meaning. The truth has been turned on its head, and we are taught that Black people owe loyalty to democrats, when that party should reward loyalty with policies that Black people want to see enacted.
But every group in the country has not been cowed. Voters who identify as Muslims or who have Middle Eastern ancestry have put Joe Biden on notice that his aiding and abetting of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza will cost him politically. Michigan has the largest Arab-American community of any state and plays a pivotal role in presidential elections. Democrats take great care to mobilize voters in this key “swing” state. Hillary Clinton’s failure to do so in 2016 resulted in Donald Trump’s victory there by a small margin of 13,000 votes and he prevailed in the Electoral College when Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were also neglected by the democrats and flipped to the republican column.
Joe Biden won in Michigan in 2020 by a 154,000 vote margin in a state where 200,000 registered voters identify as Muslim and 300,000 claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa. Michigan is not the only state Biden won by a small margin thanks to Arab and Muslim voters. In Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, and Wisconsin he also owed his victory in part to members of this community.
A group of Muslim leaders in swing states are rightly using their electoral power with the #AbandonBiden campaign. They are not so frightened of a Trump presidency that they have allowed themselves to vote for the man who through his proxy Israel has killed some 24,000 people in Gaza and despite phony claims of “working behind the scenes” shows no inclination to change policy and save lives.
It is true that these communities do not share Black people’s history of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation. As such they have a greater willingness to show independence but there are lessons here for Black people in how to exercise their power.
Joe Biden and every democrat elected in the last 60 years owes his presidency to Black voters. The same is true of politicians in city halls, state legislatures, and in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Black people have political muscle but through a combination of misleadership chicanery and ignorance of the right lessons of history, act as supplicants instead of as political players.
Arab-Americans have not forgotten Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, when citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen were barred from entering the country. Yet they do not act fearfully despite the fact that Trump is again a candidate for the office he once held and pledges to bring back the ban and even to deport people who protest U.S. policy towards Palestine.
Fortunately the #AbandonBiden campaign has shown no signs of letting up because its leadership knows how to get results and because they refuse to disrespect themselves and their people by rewarding a genocidaire with another term in the white house. How much could Black people achieve with similar determination?
In 2024 and beyond, the words “but Trump” should lose their power. How much has Biden done for Black people in the last three years? The covid era programs of small stimulus payments and the Child Tax Credit are over. Millions of people eligible for Medicaid and SNAP food benefits have been kicked off the rolls in many states with no intervention from the federal government. The pardon for federal marijuana convictions freed no one from jail. Police continue their killing spree with more than 1,300 victims in 2023. Mass incarceration continues as 1 million Black people are locked up, more than anywhere else in the world with the help of the most draconian sentences in the world. Of course Senator Joe Biden bragged about his role in the Clinton era Crime Bill which put so many Black people behind bars. There was good reason not to vote for him in 2020.
As it seems Black people have forgotten how to demonstrate political power, perhaps lessons from other groups are a means of regaining what has been lost. Black people can abandon Biden too, along with all of the democrats who owe their elected office to a group of people they routinely ignore or use for “dog whistle” politics appealing to white voters.
Donald Trump is not the biggest enemy, he is just the loudest and the least refined. Abandoning Biden and his minions can be a reality which may produce some worthy result. Feeling trapped by the duopoly has been and continues to be a losing proposition.
Everywhere he goes, Biden is haunted by the martyrs of Gaza
The Palestine solidarity movement in the United States is determined not to let the president have a moment of peace
January 26, 2024 by Natalia Marques
Biden, dubbed "Genocide Joe" by the Palestine solidarity movement, continues to be hounded everywhere he goes (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Biden is disrupted on the campaign trail at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina by protesters shouting “ceasefire now!” and later gets on a flight to the Dallas airport, where more protesters are waiting for him. Biden’s speech at a Virginia campaign event is interrupted thirteen separate times, and as he leaves his motorcade is met with more protests. Biden, who brands himself as the “most pro-union president” is called out by union workers for his support for the genocide in Gaza as he is receiving the endorsement of one of the largest unions in the country. Biden’s staff attempt to hold a “morale-boosting party” as their boss’s approval rating tanks and more and more men, women, and children in Gaza die from US-made bombs, only to be yelled at by protesters shouting “quit your job!”
Wherever Biden or his allies go, they are given no quarter by the Palestine solidarity movement. Biden and his administration continue to actively fund the onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza. The same day that the International Court of Justice finds merit to South Africa’s claims that Israel is committing genocide, the State Department cut off funding to the main UN relief agency in Gaza, UNRWA, based on allegations that 12 of the agency’s employees were involved in the October 7 operation. Biden has bypassed Congress several times to provide weapons to Israel, even while those US-made weapons are being used against the civilian population of Gaza including women and children. Biden refuses to call for a ceasefire, and the White House has even gone so far as to call the progressive push for a ceasefire within Congress “repugnant.”
This is despite the fact that Israel, using US-made bombs and weapons, has killed over 26,000 Palestinians, 10,000 of them being children, with many more thousands trapped under the rubble. People around the world have been moved to action by the horrific images documented by journalists in Gaza, recounting the atrocities committed against civilians such as the systematic targeting of hospitals and the wiping out of entire families.
While the President shows no sign of letting up on his unconditional support of Israel, protesters show no sign of halting disruptions. The January 8 disruption at the Mother Emanuel AME Church drew controversy with some who believed that it was offensive to stage a disruptive protest at the same church where white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Black churchgoers in a brutal hate crime in 2015.
Some were just as offended by Biden’s presence at the church, which has a deep history in the struggle for Black liberation.
“Considering the rich history of struggle at the foundation of the AME Church, for years many church members, leaders, and elders have been involved in liberation struggles for years, particularly during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 60s and 70s,” writes Jacqueline Luqman in Black Agenda Report. “So how did church leaders today see a campaign speech by Joe Biden as beneficial in any way to their church’s legacy and to the oppressed people within the church’s community?”
“To be clear, this was not a church service; it was a political campaign event,” read a statement by Free Palestine Charleston. The organization claims that several of its members were singled out and denied entry prior to the event, including Charleston Black Lives Matter organizer Marcus McDonald.
As political commentator Marc Lamont Hill said of Biden’s visit, speaking at St. Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago, “I was struck last week when I saw that they opened the pulpit up for Genocide Joe.”
“The moral atrocity that took place wasn’t some disruptive protesters, it was the fact that you allowed the leader of the most violent and bloody empire in modern history to stand in this place and represent a tradition that [Biden] ain’t got nothing to do with,” he continued.
After Biden left the church, he flew to Dallas, where more protesters were waiting for him at the airport. Demonstrators temporarily blocked the entrance to Love Field airport, and thirteen were arrested.
As Biden courts the approval of labor unions, which typically are more than happy to endorse establishment Democratic Party candidates, workers at UAW are organizing against their union’s endorsement of Biden. At the UAW CAP Conference in DC this week, UAW President Shawn Fain formally endorsed the current President, after which Biden himself was invited to speak. As Biden was speaking, however, several UAW workers staged a disruption with shouts of “ceasefire now!” and at least one worker was physically dragged out of the room.
“As organized labor, we see the potential to make it untenable for the US to support the genocide of the Palestinian people,” UAW Local 2110 worker Jay Pabarue told Peoples Dispatch. Pabarue, alongside 527 other UAW workers, signed a petition calling on the the UAW CAP (Community Action Program) to “only endorse and allocate our dues and V-CAP contributions to candidates who publicly call for a ceasefire and vote accordingly on any relevant bills (e.g. Cori Bush’s resolution 786).”
“Us members feel it’s our duty to actively use our power, as UAW has in the past, to popularize the urgent demand for a ceasefire via our endorsements in the US political sphere, and to give real teeth to the ceasefire call our membership issued,” Pabarue added.
Gaza Genocide Lawsuit Against Biden Has Its Day in Court
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 26, 2024
Protesters displayed the message, “Biden complicit in genocide” outside a courtroom in Oakland, California on January 26, 2024. (Photo: @ashoswai/Twitter)
Today’s historic International Court of Justice ruling against Israel comes out hours before federal case is heard
Palestinians, Genocide Expert Provide Historic Testimony in U.S. Case
January 26, 2024, Oakland, CA – A federal court heard arguments in the case Defense for Children International – Palestine v. Biden today, including extensive live testimony from Palestinian plaintiffs and a scholar of genocide and the Holocaust. Attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights, together with co-counsel from Van Der Hout LLP, asked the court to immediately order the United States to cease military support for Israel’s unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and opposed the government’s efforts to have the case dismissed. Earlier today, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued provisional measures, finding that South Africa has made a plausible case that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
One plaintiff testified from Gaza, one from Ramallah, and five plaintiffs provided live testimony in court, of the death, displacement, and destruction their families and communities have faced since Israel began its campaign of retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attacks – in just one example, approximately 60 members of Ahmed Abofoul’s extended family have been killed since the complaint was filed on November 13, underscoring the need for the court to issue an immediate injunction.
“The images of our families and communities, Palestinian babies, children, women, and men from Gaza, are shaking us to our core,” said Ayman Nijim, a plaintiff in the case. “These are times of genocide, and we desperately need a U.S. court to intervene. So much hangs in the balance. Today, Palestinians spoke out in court and made a powerful case for why a preliminary injunction is necessary: we are hopeful the judge will agree with us and issue an order soon.”
The case charges President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin with failing in their legal responsibility to prevent – and their complicity in – Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It seeks an emergency court order to halt U.S. support for Israel’s assault, including by enjoining the transfer of more weapons and unconditional support to the Israeli government.
“Our plaintiffs’ testimonies today demonstrate just how urgent it is for the Biden administration to finally do what they and the vast majority of the people of the world have demanded: stop sending weapons to enable Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in besieged Gaza and instead uphold its clear legal duty to end, not further, genocide,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who argued in court today. “These are clear legal duties under U.S. and international law, and we call on the court to uphold its Constitutional role to hold President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin to legal obligations and issue a preliminary injunction to stop the flow of weapons for Israel’s genocide.”
Additional experts submitted declarations and amicus briefs in the U.S. case, including Josh Paul, the former high-ranking State Department official who resigned to protest the U.S.’s continued transfer of arms to Israel that would be used to commit human rights abuses; the world’s leading legal expert in genocide, William Schabas; 77 human rights organizations from around the world; Arab-American organizations documenting the harm to their communities; Jewish Voice for Peace; Palestinian journalists; and medical professionals.
Dr. Barry Trachtenberg, a genocide and Holocaust scholar who submitted a declaration with other historians and also testified today, said, “Israel’s assault on Gaza has been funded by the American people, fought with U.S.-supplied weapons, and encouraged by a complicit White House,” he said. “Unlike past genocides, which were adjudicated long after they had concluded, we have an opportunity to halt this one in its tracks. Palestinians have suffered far too much and for far too long.”
Notably, in its responses, the U.S. government has not challenged the facts that Israel is committing genocide or responded to the facts setting out the way that U.S.-munitions and other forms of U.S. support have furthered the genocide, but has rather focused on technical jurisdictional issues, arguing that the court cannot review its policy choices and that it is Israel, an “independent actor,” causing the injuries, despite the U.S.’s considerable influence over Israel.
Center for Constitutional Rights attorneys argued today that the court has a constitutional duty to enforce the government’s legal obligations to prevent and not be complicit in genocide, and that it is clear, as both Israel and the U.S. have acknowledged, that Israel’s unfolding genocide could not happen without U.S. weapons and diplomatic cover.
Since the complaint was filed, Israel’s siege and assault has killed over 14,700 more Palestinians, for a total of 25,700 people, and injured over 36,250 more, for a total of 63,740. The U.S. has continued to transfer millions of dollars worth of weapons and ammunition. A previous filing in the case cites reports from early December that the United States had transferred to Israel at least 15,000 bombs, and more than 50,000 155mm artillery shells, which are inherently indiscriminate.
Co-counsel Marc Van Der Hout of Van Der Hout, LLP in San Francisco said after court, “The testimony of our clients today and that of Dr. Trachtenberg was both heart-wrenching and compelling. Defendants merely argued in response that whether or not there is an unfolding genocide by Israel in Gaza that the U.S. is assisting, no court has jurisdiction to tell the president what he can and cannot do. But as this administration itself has argued countless times, no president is above the law, and it is up to the courts to make sure the executive branch follows the law. That is what we are asking Judge White to do.”
The complaint was brought by the Palestinian human rights groups Al-Haq and Defense for Children International – Palestine; Palestinians who live in Gaza – Dr. Omar Al-Najjar, Ahmed Abu Artema, and Mohammed Abu Rokbeh; and Palestinians in the U.S. with family members who live in Gaza – Mohammad Monadel Herzallah, Laila Elhaddad, Waeil Elbhassi, Bassim Elkarra, and “A.N.” They are seeking an emergency court order to halt U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal assault.
A recording of the arguments and testimony will be available on the court’s website.
Stupid Macho U.S. Electioneering Will Push Biden Into Doomed War
Finian Cunningham
January 30, 2024
The stupid American politicians are digging a hole for themselves and have no awareness of how to reverse it, Finian Cunningham writes.
Predictably, Joe Biden is being flayed by the Republicans over the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan by Iraqi militants.
The Democrat president is slammed for being weak and a coward by his political opponents.
Donald Trump, his main Republican rival, mocked Biden as a “loser” and said the attacks on U.S. troops were because of the president’s “weakness and surrender”.
Nikki Haley, the other Republican vying for the presidential election this year, also taunted Biden for showing spinelessness toward Iran. She called for direct retaliation on the Islamic Republic “with the full force of American strength”. Logically, that could imply the use of nuclear weapons.
Unanimously across the mainstream U.S. political spectrum, it was assumed that Iran was ultimately responsible for the deadly attack on the U.S. military base on Sunday in Jordan where three military servicemen were killed and 34 were reportedly wounded, according to early reports.
The attack was claimed by Iraqi militants, the Kata’ib Hezbollah, as part of an umbrella group known as the Islamic Resistance. The militants are believed to be an alliance of militias based in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen. The latter two include Hezbollah and the Ansar Allah movement also known as the Houthis. All are allied with Iran. But each is understood to have its own agency in directing and executing operations.
These groups have carried out hundreds of attacks on U.S. and Israeli bases since October 7 when Israel launched its offensive on Gaza following the deadly raid on Israel by Hamas. The Yemenis bring a maritime dimension to the region-wide resistance with the ongoing targeting of U.S. and other ships in the Red Sea area.
Iran has denied that it was involved in the latest attack on the U.S. base in Jordan. Tehran also denies it is behind the Yemeni operations in the Red Sea.
Iran and the resistance groups say they are an anti-imperialist alliance that is united by opposition to the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza. These groups are not “Islamist” in the mold of Islamic State and its hardline Sunni (Wahhabi or Takfiri) offshoots. Far from it. The resistance groups were galvanized to defeat the Islamists which have been fomented and supported covertly by the United States for its regime change war in Syria. That proxy war was defeated after Russia intervened in 2015 in support of Syria.
The Americans are locked into a downward spiral created by their own flawed logic and cumulative imperialist occupation in the region.
Even President Biden has accused Iran of being responsible for the killing of the three U.S. military personnel. Biden vowed to respond at a time of “our choosing”.
So, Washington unquestioningly determines that Iran is the master culprit. That means the U.S. has committed itself to going after Tehran without any evidence or realistic understanding of where such a direction is leading. That is, how bad it could get for the Americans.
In a U.S. election year shaping up to be more fraught than ever, and with Biden facing dwindling poll numbers, the White House incumbent is highly susceptible to being goaded by Republican adversaries.
Trump has already been hammering Biden for being weak and frail. With the Middle East turning into a cauldron over the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, the Commander-in-Chief is cornered to show mettle. Biden is a hostage of stupid macho politics and bankrupt American imperialism. Diplomacy is simply not an option for the empire, according to its own logic and delusions.
After the deadly drone strike on the U.S. base in Jordan, Republican Senator Tom Cotton dialed up the revenge with the usual warmongering ranting and raving: “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating retaliation against Iran’s terrorist force… Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Biden’s inaction was the problem because it was emboldening enemies in the Middle East, saying: “The time to start taking this aggression seriously was long before more brave Americans lost their lives.”
How hilarious that Biden is scoffed at for being dovish. During his long career, he has been one of the most warmongering politicians in Washington. He backed the U.S.-led NATO wars in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and presently in Ukraine. The only thing cowardly about Biden is that he is a craven tool of the military-industrial complex and a pathetic psychopath.
Biden is also known for his bad temper and macho knee-jerk character. We can be quite certain that the Republican taunts about his supposed pusillanimous policy in the Middle East will get his hackles up. Biden has already taken a reckless militarist position over supporting Israeli aggression. The shocking mass killing of over 26,000 Palestinian civilians under a brutal blockade of starvation has shocked the world and in particular Arab and Muslim people. And yet Biden has not paused in his “unwavering support” for Israel.
Biden has led U.S. imperialism out of the quagmire of Afghanistan into an even bigger quagmire in the Middle East. With the goading by his equally brainless political rivals, the Americans are plowing further into disaster.
With over 50 military bases strung across the Middle East in 10 countries and with over 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in the region, the Americans are sitting ducks for the resistance. The advent of drones and newer missile technology is a new realm of warfare the Americans have not adapted to with their land garrisons in remote deserts and gaudy warships.
The death of three U.S. troops has long been on the cards. The stupid American politicians think they are going to get revenge. They have no idea what is coming to them given the long history of U.S. aggression, provocation, and illegal occupation in the region. The support of Israel’s genocide, the heartrending scenes of children being torn apart by American bombs, the bombing of Yemen – the poorest Arab country – the crazed threats to Iran, the insufferable American arrogance, and decades of impunity are all now welling up in the Middle East.
The stupid American politicians are digging a hole for themselves and have no awareness of how to reverse it. Democrats, Republicans, Biden, Trump, and so on, they are all a ship of fools.
A Democratic president engaging in genocide during a re-election year is highlighting the depravity of this warmongering capitalist party more starkly than anything else I can remember.
Caitlin Johnstone
February 2, 2024
President Biden is reportedly preparing to begin a new weeks-long bombing campaign in the middle east in retaliation for a drone attack which killed three US troops this past weekend. These strikes are expected to include Iranian targets, tempting the nightmare scenario of a full-blown war with Iran, despite the public acknowledgement that there’s no evidence Iran was behind the drone strike.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:
“US officials told NBC News that the US is planning to launch a weeks-long bombing campaign in the Middle East in retaliation for the drone attack in northeast Jordan that killed three American soldiers.
“The officials said that the targets are expected to include Iranian targets outside of Iran, and the campaign will involve strikes and cyber operations. Other reports have said the US is considering targeting Iranians in Iraq and Syria or the Iranian navy.
“While the potential targets are not inside Iran, direct attacks on the Iranian military could provoke a full-blown war between the US and Iran. The US is considering taking this course of action even though the Pentagon admitted it has no evidence Iran was directly involved in the drone attack in Jordan.”
Iran threatened to “decisively respond” to any US attack, either upon the Islamic Republic itself or upon the nation’s “interests and nationals under any pretexts.”
So this looks to be yet another dramatic escalation in the middle east by the warmongering policies of the sitting US president, who has also been waging a new bombing campaign in Yemen and backing a genocide in Gaza of unbelievable savagery where starving Palestinians are now eating grass and drinking polluted water in a desperate attempt to survive. According to a memo obtained by The Intercept, US troops have been put on standby for possible involvement in Israel’s assault on Gaza as well.
In the midst of all that murderousness the Twitter account from this bloodthirsty ghoul of a president is posting cutesey tweets at Elmo from Sesame Street about the importance of emotional wellbeing, which is about the most dystopian thing you can possibly imagine.
“Our friend Elmo is right: We have to be there for each other, offer our help to a neighbor in need, and above all else, ask for help when we need it,” Biden tweeted during an active US-backed genocide.
Longtime Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi has been behaving even more freakishly. The former House Speaker said this past Sunday that people advocating a ceasefire in Gaza are promoting “Mr. Putin’s message,” claiming on no basis whatsoever that some pro-Palestine demonstrations are backed by Russia and should be investigated by the FBI.
In a video posted the very next day by antiwar activist group Code Pink, Pelosi is seen admonishing protesters against Biden’s Gaza genocide to “Go back to China where your headquarters is.” Pelosi’s demented accusation is presumably a reference to a New York Times smear piece which used sleazy insinuations to falsely imply a connection between Code Pink and the Chinese government without ever actually showing one to exist, and not even that smear piece ever claimed that Code Pink had a headquarters in China.
The “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party isn’t much better, with political pop stars like Bernie Sanders flailing all over the place to avoid advocating a ceasefire and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she fully supports Biden despite his actions in Gaza and adamantly refusing to say if the president is backing a genocide.
A Democratic president engaging in genocide during a re-election year is highlighting the depravity of this warmongering capitalist party more starkly than anything else I can remember. Democrats frame themselves as responsible humanitarians who stand in opposition to the reckless murderousness and fascism of the Republican Party’s worst impulses, yet here they are openly falling all over themselves to justify mass atrocities driven by the racist feeding frenzy of a tyrannical far-right regime.
In reality the Democratic Party exists to promote the interests of the murderous US empire just as much as the Republican Party does. They might sometimes promote imperial interests in different ways, in the same way the left jab and the right cross are used differently in boxing. But just as a boxer uses jabs and crosses together to score a knockout blow, the empire uses the Democratic and Republican parties in conjunction to keep the imperial war machine trudging forward over human bodies, year after year and administration after administration.
